Masaki Kobayashi's Harakiri｜Movement Within Stillness, and Time

For a long time, the most popular films in Japan were mostly those that took the virtues of the samurai as their theme, or that stood for the discipline of the soldier.

In fact, the earliest period of Japanese film history is quite unusual by world standards. Japanese cinema grew out of a current that took half a step away from the world of kabuki. Afterward, the traditional performing arts, kabuki first among them, came to form kyugeki (旧劇), the old drama, while those who took in modern Western theater formed the new drama, shinpa (新派劇), and Japanese film took shape where these two great currents met.

Even within those currents, though, it is a fact that the image symbolized by the virtues of the samurai and the soldier was adorned and glorified by filmmakers. Indeed, the image of the samurai we carry comes almost without exception from the movies, so that even people today who have never once seen a real samurai can say, more or less, what a samurai was like. Considered calmly, this is a curious thing.

In that situation, the one who stood at the head of those cutting a new path was Akira Kurosawa. Amid a shifting social sensibility, the samurai films he made with Toshiro Mifune crossed borders to move Western filmmakers, and they still influence a great many filmmakers today. Even so, when the generation changes, so does the expression. Seen in this light, there is one film that sent a great shock through films about the samurai. It is Harakiri (1962), directed by Masaki Kobayashi.

Two works are usually named alongside Kobayashi. One is Harakiri, his masterpiece. The other is The Human Condition (1959–1961), an epic whose total running time comes to about nine and a half hours. But unless you knew, you would probably never connect the two as the work of the same filmmaker. Both are of such high quality, and so completely different, that it is hard to believe one person made them. Even so, I feel a single theme running beneath them. That theme is time.

To me, Kobayashi was a rare talent who held no hard boundaries, or who softened them, and went on brilliantly creating an expression all his own. For one thing, the lead in both The Human Condition and Harakiri was played by the same man, the great actor Tatsuya Nakadai, who died last year.

In Harakiri especially, Nakadai’s narration goes on and on, as though we were watching a stage play through the screen, and the remembered images rise up with tension. That stretch takes up most of the film. The whole runs just under two hours, but most of it rests on a single device, Nakadai seated, resolved, telling his story.

For all that it is a masterpiece, its setting barely moves. There is no film the phrase “movement within stillness” fits better.

Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai, by contrast, is an epic for which he spent a year searching for locations all over the country, shooting at several sites and bringing the footage together into one. The setting of Harakiri, though, is mostly the courtyard of the Ii residence. Apart from the flashbacks to a ronin’s family struggling in desperate poverty, almost nothing else appears.

In other words, under the strict spatial constraint of a “closed room,” Kobayashi criticized the closed, merciless world of the samurai, and by placing Hanshiro Tsugumo (Tatsuya Nakadai) at the center and surrounding him with superb actors, he made a film you cannot stop watching to the end. This shows in the words Tsugumo speaks when he tells the clan’s elder, Kageyu Saito (Rentaro Mikuni), that he has cut off the topknot of Hikokuro Omodaka (Tetsuro Tamba), the foremost of the Ii retainers: “A sword that has never known real combat is, in the end, nothing but swimming practice on the tatami.”

The image is that swordsmanship which has never crossed blades on a real battlefield or come through carnage is no better than practicing to swim on tatami mats. But savor these words and it is self-evident that they criticize not the closed world of the samurai but the world of 1962.

Before a lavish cast, Rentaro Mikuni as the Ii elder and Tetsuro Tamba as the merciless samurai, and more than that, before the Ii family crest, the symbol of absolute power in its day, Nakadai sits resolved on a tatami mat draped in white cloth, laid on the white sand of the courtyard. The figure he cuts goes beyond acting and becomes an expression that strikes powerfully into our own guts.

The true pleasure of this film lies less in the final swordfight than in the tense time that leads up to it. That long tension, rising inch by inch, holds a spirit of living for a single instant, yet that time is different from the time of The Human Condition. Seen this way, Kobayashi may have been the director who, more than anyone, faced up to time in the expression of film.