Juusan-Nin No Shikaku (1963) Thirteen Assassins

The first part of director Eiichi Kudo's Samurai Revolution Trilogy, Thirteen Assassins opens with a voice-over narration, setting the time (1844, late in the Tokugawa Shogunate), place (Edo, the future Tokyo), and cause of the action. The younger half-brother of the shogun, Sir Naritsugu (Kantaro Suga), who has been “adopted” into the wealthy and lordly Matsudaira clan for the sake of propriety, has been running amok, raping and murdering vassals, including samurai. In a final, desperate effort to force the shogunate to bring the rogue noble to heel, the Matsudaira chamberlain has committed seppuku (ritual self-disembowelment) on the doorstep of Edo Castle.


Cornered into doing something about Naritsugu, but unable to do anything openly lest the ruling house’s own reputation fall into disrepute, the government’s chief minister convinces hatamoto (high-level) samurai Shinzaemon Shimada (Chiezo Kataoka, a star of period samurai films since the 1920s) to gather a band of fellow warriors and murder Naritsugu when he makes his annual journey from Edo to his domain, a journey which should take at least a week. (The shoguns forced Japan’s nobles to spend one half the year in Edo, and one half in their home territories. The sumptuousness of their Edo residences and the size and make-up of their entourages were matters of official fiat, all the better to keep potentially restive lords spending money and time on their obligations.)


Shinzo, as he’s called, gathers together a band culled from trustworthy hatamoto, as well as his cynical young nephew Shinrokuro (Kotaro Satomi), and an acquaintance he’d been sheltering for several years, Kujuro Hirayama (Kô Nishimura). Kujuro is a masterless samurai, or ronin, but he’s taken advantage of his duty-free status to develop his skills as a swordsman, a compensation in an age when far more samurai are bureaucrats, mere retainers, or starving bumpkins than they are fighters.


Arrayed against them on the other side are over a hundred infantry and horsemen under Naritsugu’s control. The lord is impetuous and foolish, unaware even that his life is in jeopardy. Luckily for him, his new chamberlain is Hanbei Onigashira (Ryohei Uchida), a politically savvy samurai who not only understands tactics, but recognizes when they’re being used against him, even secretly.


Hanbei is intensely loyal to his lord, not because Naritsugu is personally worthy of it, but because the samurai code demands unquestioning fealty to the clan leader. This is a commonly celebrated virtue in samurai films, as you can see in any of the versions of The 47 Ronin. Kudo doesn’t reject this commonly-held regard, but he does undermine it. When a furious Naritsugu murders his former chamberlain’s widow and children (a chilling scene, no less so for occurring mostly off-screen) and Hanbei can’t get to the scene of the crime in time to stop it, he can only say, “How cruel” and steel himself to perform his more routine duties. The fact that he’s clearly disgusted, though, doesn’t enhance, as it often did, his character’s sense of honor.


Many post-war samurai films examined the plight of loyal, honorable samurai caught up in the contradictions of a corrupt political system. No matter how heroically or practically the samurai responded to circumstances, they were depicted with a substantial amount of sympathy. So, ultimately, is Hanbei, but with clear reservation.
Most of Kudo’s characters live out a moral quandary, unable to conceive an ethical system that doesn’t reflect the cynicism of the shogunate. The typical alternatives offered by supporting characters – either to live for pleasure or for a chance to kill as many officials as possible – always risk tipping over into nihilism.


The whole of Kudo’s depictions reflects this sense of moral imprisonment, no less in Thirteen Assasins than anywhere else. Its opening scene of seppuku is framed in perfect symmetry, starting with two rectangles. The lower and larger shape is the ground in front of the castle, which holds the lonely figure of the suicidal official; the second is the sky, which is blotted out by the castle itself, which stretches nearly from screen’s edge to screen’s edge. The composition is perfectly balanced, but defiantly out of proportion, the squeezed castle visually bearing down on the isolated human being who, despite occupying the larger spatial field, has nowhere to go.


When the action moves inside to the plotting of the government ministers, who are already assembling their band of killers (in such as way as to disavow them when necessary), Kudo replaces the larger geometric compositional blocks with strong, bold vertical lines. Everything and everyone is compartmentalized, stuck in a space that is also a role.


Kudo changes his compositional focus twice more; one of those times, only the accompanying emotional devastations of the sequence in question keeps the sheer technical brilliance from being. Shinzo listens to a vassal samurai describe the rape and murder of his son-in-law and murder of his son during a visit from Naritsugu. Shown in flashback, the movie alternates the prevailing visual realism with an encompassing blackness that, at moments of high intensity, leave the characters marooned in a nightmarish darkness that comes right up to the edge of their silhouettes. Remarkable, Kudo effects some of the dramatic lighting changes within a single shot or during camera movements.


The biggest change, though, maintains the sense of realism while altering the dominant design of the images. Simply, when the action moves from Edo Palace to the outdoors as Shinzo and his men race to get ahead of Hinbei and Naritsugu and set an ambush, the vertical and looming compositions give way to wide open exteriors that are dramatically horizontal. So that this change won’t be overlooked, Kudo sets an early part of the movie at a river ford where Shinzo had hoped to catch Hinbei napping. But his opponent has marshaled his caravan to cross the river earlier. Using the passing river as the key element in the frame, the director cuts quickly between shots of galloping riders, skulking warriors, and other types of motion that expand the visual field both side-to-side and deeper into the image itself. It’s absolutely astonishing work.


Thirteen Assassin’s climax occurs in a tiny village which Shinzo and his men turn into a maze of deadly traps that should let them overpower that larger force and murder Naritsugu. It’s here that Kudo can pull one more amazing feat – or series of feats – as the shape and geography of narrow lanes and alleyways dictate the very form of the screen. Lastly, when Shinzo meets Hinbei mano a mano, Kudo uses exactly one shot to invoke the repressive vertical lines of the early sequences, actually incorporating Shinzo’s very body into the composition by shooting it with perfect exactness through wooden slats. It’s a devastating irony, capturing the movie’s hero at his greatest moment of triumph, but undercutting it so that his slashing swordsmanship, while it may kill an enemy almost arbitrarily set against him, cannot free him himself from lethal manipulations from the palace.


This is also where we should pay attention to the time period: 1844. That was two years after the western naval powers had imposed their combined will on China, effectively wresting control away from the imperial government. Now, the Dutch (who had once held and then lost trading concessions in Japan) had sent a fleet across the sea to try and pry open their former trading partner’s ports. They’d fail for the moment, but just the attempt showed that the shogunate, which expended so much military power against suspected domestic opponents, would ultimately have no answer to western guns. So all the backstabbing and plotting – as in murdering a member of the royal family only because his sins might breed a scandal – would be for naught.
Henry Sheehan, August, 2008, www.henrysheehan.com