• 暗殺 (Assassination)

1/1/23 (Sun)

The Edo government, aiming to make peace with rival forces in Kyoto, hires a local ronin (unemployed samurai) for protection as its representatives travel to forge an agreement. The ronin agrees to help but turns on the government once in Kyoto. He is subsequently assassinated for his betrayal.

That’s the simple version of the story underlying Shinoda Masahiro’s ever-shifting 1964 kaleidoscope of a biography of Kiyokawa Hachiro, the two-timing ronin who played a minor role in Japanese history. Foreign viewers needn’t bother with more than this given the dizzying complexity of the film. (For those interested: The uninvited arrival of American battleships on Japanese shores in the mid-19th century spurred widespread anti-foreigner sentiment, which led to growing dissatisfaction with the long-ruling shogunate system (military regime) for its perceived weakness in the face of foreign pressure. The shogunate in Edo was realistic about the greater power of the foreigners, while the imperial household in Kyoto wanted more idealistically to keep Japan free from impure external elements as it had managed for the past 250 years. The two sides tried to smooth things over by engineering an alliance, symbolized by a marriage between the shogun and the emperor’s half-sister. Kiyokawa, who led a group of 234 anti-foreigner ronin, somehow convinced the shogunate to allow him to protect its troops on the journey to Kyoto, which would be the first such visit in two hundred years. However, Kiyokawa, showing his true colors, turned on the shogunate once they arrived in Kyoto and pledged loyalty to the emperor. Unfortunately for him, the emperor refused to go along with that subterfuge, and the disgraced Kiyokawa and his men returned to Edo. A group of 19 stayed behind to defend the regime, forming what became the famed Shinsengumi. Kiyokawa was later assassinated by a group of pro-shogunate samurai in what is today Tokyo’s high-end Azabu district, ironically an area heavily populated by foreigners.)

All that is background for this exceedingly complicated film, which is less about history than about the shifty Kiyokawa himself. The director explores Kiyokawa’s presumed mindset from the viewpoints of a variety of people who knew him, including random flashbacks in no particular order. It’s a fractured Citizen Kane, a cubist portrait with head-spinning shifts in time and point of view. It is not always clear which of the changing narrators is speaking, and the facts come together like a jigsaw puzzle. The movie opens with a dense history lesson spelled out in text lasting fully two minutes, suggesting that the director doesn’t know how to make his point dramatically and that even Japanese find this baffling. Some well-known characters pop up from time to time, most notably Sakamoto Ryoma (in a very different manner than the historic records would indicate), who is shown at the inn where he was later attacked and nearly murdered, as well as brief mentions of Kondo Isami, Hijikata Toshizo and others intricately involved in the Meiji revolution that overthrew the government, and the shogun’s minister Ii Naosuke, whose assassination just outside Edo Castle deeply affected the shogunate’s thinking.

In the film, the shogunate offers Kiyokawa amnesty from a murder charge if he will lead his Roshigumi (literally, ronin gang) to protect the shogun in Kyoto. At the same time, not entirely trusting Kiyokawa, it assigned a shogunate-friendly samurai, Sasaki Tadasaburo, to keep an eye on things and kill the leader if needed. Sasaki accepts eagerly after losing a kendo match to Kiyokawa in humiliating fashion in front of his own students, which has him burning for revenge.

Kiyokawa is a shady figure both literally – we never see his face until well into the film – and figuratively, as the contradictions in his personality and among the various stories themselves make it impossible to truly know him. Is he working for his pro-imperialist, anti-foreign ideals, for example, or only for the power it brings him? He cries at one point at the thought of killing someone, but then brutally beheads a policemen to the horror of the crowds (who almost lynch him). He saves the life of one loyal follower only to slaughter him later in a shocking fit of spite. What are those incidents all about? No way of knowing from the splintered portrait here. I’m sure critics will say that this is the entire point of the film, and maybe it requires a second or third viewing to figure it out. I couldn’t tell if the director was being deliberately obscure or couldn’t bother to put the pieces together. The dramatic lighting effects could be off-putting, and the stop-motion moments (such as a head caught in mid-air after a brutal beheading) were just silly. Those touches were probably seen as avant-garde at the time, but they haven’t aged well.

The moody cinematography is superb, especially in the numerous fight scenes, and the understated music by Takemitsu Toru is perfect. Tamba Tetsuro (Kiyokawa), Iwashita Shima (Kiyokawa’s kept woman) and Kimura Isao (Sasaki) lead an all-around strong cast, including appearances by familiar names like Okada Eiji and Sada Keiji. I also noticed the name of Ninagawa Yukio, later an internationally known theater director. Critics and hard-core film aficionados seem to love this film, but the complex historical background and difficult structure make it a tough sell for casual audiences.