Directed by Masaki Kobayashi. Written by Shinobu Hashimoto
The Japanese ritual of harakiri, whereby a samurai can restore their lost honor by cutting their own stomach open, has no equal in Western culture, but the politics and deception surrounding it should be a familiar sight, as Masaki Kobayashi’s Harakiri tells the story of fallen samurai who shows up on the doorstep of a rival clan to ask their permission to perform the ritual in their courtyard, only to then question their behaviour in how they dealt with the last person to make this same request.
The samurai code of honor is suffocatingly strict. To propose harakiri insincerely is a no-no and to refuse to accommodate likewise. That’s the situation when Hanshiro Tsugumo (Tsatsuo Nakadai) arrives at the home of the Iyi clan and makes the request to senior counselor Mazakazu (Kei Satô) only to be met by hesitation.
Mazakazu explains there has been a rise in masterless samurais asking to kill themselves at the houses of rival clans hoping these clans will pay them off instead of deal with their bloody business, and gives the example of one from Tsugumo’s own clan, someone he claims not to know.
Both men are not being forthcoming with the facts and the poker game that follows is an exhilarating one. Behind the request there’s great tragedy, great sacrifice, but also great betrayal of the code whereby their kind lives. And there’s hell to pay for violations.
Harakiri is defined by a blistering tension and the pull-and-push of power between the parties is incessant. Words are few and delivered with certainty, carefully weighed, and the silence hangs thick with the hidden meanings behind all of it. If the samurai ostensibly believe in the honor of their word, Harakiri certainly does, affording each pride of place.
So does the script by Shinobu Hashimoto. Masterfully arranged, its time-jumping narrative offers the same cerebral pleasure of movies like Rashomon where events in the past are revisited to shed new light on the present, ratcheting up a different mood and transforming the film as you go along.
A movie about an ugly premise, Harakiri is beautiful to behold, an austere black-and-white work of art where the long open rooms, prominent beams, mats and sparse furnishing provide neat frames wherein Kobayashi arranges his subjects. In doing so, his group shots, wherein the central contested ritual is watched by many, almost feel like the historical view of these events, cold and observational. Once he pulls in, however, his actors shine.
Out in front is Nakadai’s despairing ronin. He looks awful. His beard unkempt, face smudged with dirt, only his eyes shine out from the dark pits. Nakadai makes his voice a snarling rumble, sounding like a ghost remonstrating from the afterlife. Satô, as the steward of established power, undergoes a transformation. From a place of calm reservation, his eyes get antsy as Tsugumo strikes a different figure than previously thought.
Harakiri is a steady, measured descent to a thrilling finale, both in front and behind the camera, the careful arrangement of picture and letter a technical mirror of the tightrope confrontation between these men. Featuring fraught silences and agonized violence, it has a rebellious but righteous anger to it as an attack upon established power structures and how they bend reality to their view of things.
This abusive power imbalance was true in 17th century Japan, it was true in Kobayashi’s post-war Japan, and it’s true today, making Harakiri every bit as powerful now as it was then, cutting a straight line across time and space to show us how some truths are written in blood and won’t be erased.
Mikkel Frederiksen 