Wild Japan Day 3 - Sword of Doom

With Sword of Doom Kihachi Okamoto has crafted an intensely beautiful and chaotic samurai film (chanbara) infused with a stoic sense of destiny and a complex study of morality. It opens with former swordsman of the Kogen school, Ryunosuke Tsukue, casually cutting down an elderly pilgrim whilst out for a morning stroll in a lonely mountain pass. A menacing and mysterious appearance, his face completely covered by a large wicker hat, Ryunosuke seems to answer the pilgrims prayer for the Buddha to remove him from the secular world so that his grandaughter may escape the hard life of the pilgrim. Leaving the scene Ryunosuke passes a merchant and continues back to town where his ailing father tries to persuade him to lose a fencing match organised for the next day in order to preserve the honour and status of his opponent, Bunnojo Utsuki. He refuses and, after killing Bunnojo, leaves town with the man’s wife, who has already slept with him in a futile attempt to save her husband. As he leaves through a misty forest path, a setting that shows off the film’s remarkable lighting and use of locations to the fullest, he knowingly walks into an ambush and unflinchingly dispatches a dozen more men who attempt to avenge Bunnojo’s death; their corpses left scattered about the forest floor behind him, lying in limpid pools of light. Meanwhile the merchant comes across the pilgrim’s traumatised grandaughter sobbing over his body on the mountain pass and adopts her. The arbitrary death of the pilgrim and Bunnojo at the hands of the feckless Ryunosuke, sets in motion the film’s parralel narratives, which gradually converge throughout the film thanks to destiny, in the form of a number of plot contrivances, connected by the vengeful brother of the murdered man, Hyoma Utsuki.

After Ryunosuke strikes the old man dead with merciless efficiency he lifts his head sufficiently for the camera to get a glimpse of this manifestation of evil; his gaunt face set with cruel staring eyes, and the twitch of a manic grin on his lip. This is Tatsuya Nakadai. His character, thus established, Ryunosake continues in a similarly callous vein until the combined weight of his evil deeds leads to his decent into insanity, which seems etched on his face from the very beginning. Despite the film’s confusing story, partly due to its parallel narrative but also because it chronicles the chaotic political intrigues and divided loyalties that marked the end of the Edo period, firmly at its centre is the stony heart of Nakadai’s callous samurai, whose stoic performance binds the film’s fragmented elements with all the strength and compassion of concrete. Nakadai appears regularly throughout the sixties in some of the finest jidai-geki (period films) of the decade including Kurosawa’s Yojimbo and Sanjuro, but especially those of Masaki Kobayashi (Hara Kiri, Kwaidan and Samurai Rebellion). Nakadai is also the star of Kobayashi’s nine-hour anti-war epic The Human Condition, in which he plays a soldier who experiences the hell of war in Manchuria in excruciating detail. It is in the light of this performance that his role in Sword of Doom as an utterly emotionless killing machine can best be comprehended; a product of a dehumanising society whether it be the brutal civil war brought about by the fragmentation of the rigid samurai code in the Edo period, or the unchecked militarism of world war II. It is no surprise that Okamoto, unlike the new wave director's that made their debuts at a similar time, was a disgruntled veteran of the Pacific war. In an excellent survey of Nakadai’s career Chuck Stephens charts the ascendancy of this ‘eighth samurai’ (one of his first appearances is as an extra in Seven Samurai, a potential sword for hire passed over by the desperate peasants) within the jidai-geki, alongside that of the some-what better known Toshiro Mifune, and perfectly describes him thus: “Nakadai displayed an unadorned exterior that tended less toward suave than somehow slightly embalmed. The qualities that truly define him are those that seem sprung from electrifying forces deep within—a stentorian baritone that might belong to the devil's own ventriloquist dummy, and a pair of orb-wide eyes as alabaster as snake's eggs so eerily inner-illuminated they threaten to rupture into liquid light.”

Thoroughly amoral, Ryunosuke’s only loyalty is to his sword and he is notorious for fighting dirty, encouraging his assailant to attack by feigning weakness only to lunge at the opportune moment. However he begins to doubt even his skills as a swordsman on encountering Shimada Takahashi, head of a rival school of fencing, appropriately played by Toshiro Mifune, Nakadai’s regular rival for the title of number one samurai. The pair have been in showdowns before Sword of Doom, most notably in Kurosawa’s films, and will be again after this, in Kobayashi’s Samurai Rebellion for instance, but here the volatile dual billing remains curiously unconsumated by violence. Instead, the scene in which Nakadai, after botching an assassination attempt, watches powerlessly as his small army of assassins is decimated by Takahashi’s sword is nothing short of brilliant. Over-awed by the sudden and unexpected violence of Takahashi, who leaps from his palanquin like a jack-in-the-box just as one of the men plunges the sword into the side of the box, Ryunosuke can only look on in disbelief as Mifune demonstrates the kind of controled explosion of swordplay he has mastered in films such as Seven Samurai and Sanjuro; the would be assassin almost ceasing to exist as he is completely ignored by Takahashi, who moves with astonishing agility under the falling snow. This scene is the only moment in the film where Nakadai fails to hold frame and it provides a neat commentary on the status of the two actors whose careers, due to their similar trajectory through the jidai-geki, were destined to be reflections of one another.

Takahashi has the uncanny ability of understanding Ryunosuke from the word go, telling him when he comes to the school to challenge its champion, that ‘the sword is the soul. To under stand the sword you must study the soul. Evil soul, evil sword.’ To say that Ryunosuke lives by the sword would be an understatement, it represents for him his entire philosophy, and so before the opening match that starts the characters off on their road to misery, he makes it clear that when he is fighting ‘his family cease to exist'. This statement is born out in the many domestic scenes of Ryunosuke knocking back sake as his new wife complains and his baby screams, all framed over the shaft of his sword standing menacingly in the foreground.

The ending of Sword of Doom must rank amongst the most impressive and baffling ever committed to film. Set at a party in a Kyoto brothel the Shinsin group, one of the splinter groups loyal to the shogun that Ryunosuke serves for money rather than ideals, has developed a split in its leadership and our cruel hearted anti-hero is poised to gain a position of power if only the evening goes as planned. Meanwhile outside Hyoma Utsuki, the vengeful brother, has finally tracked down his quarry with the help of the old merchant and the granddaughter, who is a courtesan entertaining Ryunosuke within. Before all hell breaks loose the young girl informs Ryunosuke that the private room in which they are seated is haunted and tells the story of a courtesan’s suicide. The film’s brief dip into the supernatural, not such a large jump in terms of genre in Japanese cinema as one might expect given the strong tradition of ghost stories embedded in period dramas (Mizoguchi’s Ugetsu Monigatari being the obvious example), perfectly coinsides with Ryunosuke’s enevitable and long-awaited mental breakdown. After learning the identity of the girl as the grandaughter of the pilgrim he had slain at the start of the film he drops his sake cup in shock and begins to see distorted shadows and hear the voices of all those that he has encountered or killed on his road to evil. Unable to bear this onslaught of ghastly shadows thrown upon the walls, as though he were trapped within a Banruki shadow play, he begins to slice up the room with his sword, prompting an all out battle with his fellow Shinsin members that rivals the crazy 88 scene in Kill Bill for sheer intensity, only here Ryunosuke is driven by a profound madness that makes the scene an utterly devastating depiction of flawed humanity rather than simply an exercise in stylised violence (although viewers are certainly not short-changed on this front either).

After several minutes of increasingly brutal hacking and slashing, building into a cacophonic crescendo of violence, the dynamic camera rests on a close up of Ryunosuke’s face and the image freezes in a manic blur of disrupted action. Slowly the words ‘the end’ form upon the frozen image, removing all doubt that the projector has broken down or that the projectionist has forgotten to load the last reel, and the lights were raised upon a packed out auditorium of sweating and confused people. It was a moment that prompted my cinema-going buddy to loudly exclaim ‘what the fuck!’ Not an unjustified reaction given that the film’s climactic fight, still apparently in process, completely fails to resolve the narrative’s many loose ends, like the small matter of Ryunosuke squaring up to his antagonists the sword master Shimada Takahashi (Toshiro Mifune) or even his sworn enemy Hyoma Utsuki. The effect is not unlike that produced by the ending of the American release of Shogun Assassin, an abridged version of the first two parts of the six-part Lone Wolf and Cub serial adaptation, when it seems as though its protagonist, hell bent on revenge, has suddenly and unexpectedly had second thoughts. The main difference being that here Ryunosuke doesn’t seem to have the benefit of a choice in the matter, cut off as he is by the editor in mid sword stroke, bleeding profusely and still surrounded by a plethora of assailants. The abrupt ending is perhaps due to the film being an adaptation of only a small part of a long serialised novel by Kaizan Nakazato, making it intended as a rather dramatic cliffhanger. But given that no sequel was forthcoming this final freeze-frame image carries an undeniable charge. Left in a limbo of pain and madness, from which we are uncertain whether he escapes, Ryunosuke’s freedom is removed and his driving ambitions left unfulfilled. The punishment for his evil deeds: to be left forever in suspended animation, trapped beneath the celluloid of a film print in the Japan Foundation Film Library. Although available on Criterion DVD, isn’t it about time Tatsuyo Nakadai was released in the UK?