The Twilight Samurai

One of the Japanese film’s most popular and enduring genres has been the chanbara or samurai film. The finer examples of the genre have always transcended it through individual artistry, and I have always insisted that the grandeur to be found in them far outdistances any of the Westerns produced since The Great Train Robbery in 1903. 

Decades after Kurosawa’s celebration of the samurai as hero, Kobayashi’s severe attacks on the samurai code, and at a time when live action films in Japan were being outnumbered by animated films, few observers were quite prepared for the understated and profoundly humane contribution to the genre known as The Twilight Samurai, made by Yoji Yamada in 2002.

Yamada, still living and working at age 89, is one of those filmmakers whose work was considered too Japanese for export. He wrote and directed 46 out of the 48 films in the series It’s Tough Being a Man (Otoko wa tsurai yo), popularly known as the Tora-san series, after its hero, a hapless but “lovable” n’er-do-well played by Kiyoshi Atsumi. The films indulged in a kind of sentimentality that can be found in many Japanese films, but were unknown outside Japan until recently to anyone except Japanese film enthusiasts. 

Donald Richie once defined sentimentality as “unearned emotion." The Twilight Samurai is remarkably free of sentimentality, but quite rich in delicate emotion. Yamada is not a stylist like his great predecessors Naruse or Ozu, but he is an expert at observing subtle character delineation. Like Ozu, he forces the viewer to make adjustments in pacing and concentration. You have to look patiently to catch the care and clarity with which Yamada shows us Seibei’s - the hero of The Twilight Samurai - home life. The story is set in the great transitional period just prior to Japan’s historic reopening to the West. The very old traditions of feudalism are still in practice, but their usefulness is being questioned. For instance, after the film’s lead character, Seibei Iguchi, causes his clan some embarrassment because of his shabby appearance and strong odor (he is a poor samurai whose wife has died of tuberculosis, leaving him alone go care for two small daughters and an old mother), his uncle tells him such an offense would once have required him to commit seppuku, but times have changed. 

Without a wife, Seibei’s traditional shaved head (known as "chonmage") is sprouting hair and he is also growing his beard. The funeral he had arranged for his deceased wife was so expensive that Seibei has sold his long sword and has only a bamboo replacement in his scabbard. For a Japanese film lover like myself, this detail is a reminder of the Masaki Kobayashi film Seppuku, in which a young samurai, whose infant son is ill with fever, sells his own swords and carries bamboo replacemens in his scabbards. Another reminder of that film is the presence of the once formidable Tetsuro Tamba in the role of Seibei’s uncle. 

Seibei comes across as a dignified, humble, if rather stolid, man. But at about midway in the film, when a fellow samurai tries to persuade Seibei to marry his sister, Tomoe, who is not only a childhood friend, but who cares about him and his children, his humility becomes an obstacle and he declines the offer. Seibei explains that his wife married beneath her and endured hardship because of his lowly position. What he doesn’t address is his lack of ambition and his very un-samurai-like self-effacement. 

But there is one aspect of his position at which Seibei excels – his skill with a short sword. (He has developed such skill only because his long sword is made of bamboo.) He reveals his skill when he intervenes in a duel between Tomoe’s brother and Kouda, Tomoe’s ex-husband, and he trounces him, not with the short sword itself (which would be potentially deadly), but with a short stick. With it, he knocks Kouda out cold. 

A friend of Kouda’s named Zenemon Yogo, who is also the master of the guards, congratulates Seibei at the success of his short sword style and expresses his intention to spar with him some day. That day arrives unexpectedly and it provides the film with a superb climax. There is a power struggle in the clan leadership and the samurai Yogo is dismissed from his position. This requires him to commit seppuku, but Yogo refuses. The clan leadership dispatch one of their best samurai to kill him, but Yogo kills him instead. Having heard of Seibei’s unusual mastery of the short sword, the clan offer him a promotion and a raise in pay if he can kill Yogo. He asks for two weeks to practice, but they order him to fulfil their order immediately. 

Having no one to help him to dress for combat, Seibei turns to Tomoe. In a touching scene she helps Seibei prepare for battle. She gently combs his unkempt hair. He then entreats her to look after his two daughters if he should fail to return, and expresses his regret that he didn’t marry her when he had the chance. 

The scene of Seibei’s confrontation with a drunken, clearly deranged Yogo is streaked with tension and bizarre behavior on the part of Yogo. He tells Seibei that, he, too, had been poor and that his daughter has died. (He even eats some of her cremated remains.) He tells Seibei that he will spare him if he lets him run away. But when Seibei, who is wearing only his short sword, tells Yogo how he sold his long sword and replaced it with bamboo, Yogo flies into a rage and the two men fight. Yoji Yamada expressed his scepticism of movie swordfights in which men are killed with one cut. Seibei kills Yogo, but is himself seriously wounded. He hobbles home to find Tomoe still there, since she was convinced that she would never see him alive again. Their reunion is touching, if typically restrained. 

An epilogue involving Seibei’s elder daughter Ito, who is now an old woman, relates the rest of the story, which has an ironic turn. She is played by Keiko Kishi, still strikingly beautiful. I remember first seeing her in Ozu's Early Spring (1956). Hiroyuki Sanada plays Seibei with great sensitivity. His stoicism may be typically Japanese, but he makes it seem exceptional in his historical surroundings. The divine Rie Miyazawa, whom I have admired since I lived in Japan in the early 1990s when she was dating a young sumo wrestler, gives Tomoe her consummate beauty and grace, but with the additional attractiveness of experience. And Min Tanaka, a famous dancer and choreographer, appears in his first film role as Yogo. His performance is powerful and physically compelling. In the fight scene with Seibei, his face is a ghastly grey in the dim light of an abandoned temple. 

The Twilight Samurai is a solid and subtle character study that entices the viewer to follow the story deeper, and deftly rewards one’s expectations for scenes of action. The age has shifted away from the prominence of the samurai class. Seibei’s ultimate fate, as related by his daughter/narrator, is to die in the last great – and magnificently futile – samurai rebellion. Based on a historical novel by Shuhei Fujisawa, Yoji Yamada created a noble tribute to his fictional life.