A Fistful of Yens: Yojimbo

An outlaw wanders through a desolate area and enters a town divided by a gang war. He walks slowly and gracefully, ignoring the world around him, even in the midst of a fight. You can almost see the tumbleweed and hear Morricone‘s music in the background. But what you see before you is a rōnin: a samurai without a master. Made by Akira Kurosawa, Yojimbo, or “Bodyguard” is a 1961 samurai film, which was unofficially remade by Sergio Leone as A Fistful of Dollars (1964). That, of course, led to a lawsuit but also acquainted the world with the magnificence of Japanese cinema.

The story is the same, often copied by Leone scene for scene. A samurai wanders around an abandoned dirt road. He stops at a farm for a drink and overhears a conversation about a nearby town with an ongoing gang dispute. It is not long before our rōnin enters a town where two main clans are led by Ushitora and Seibei. We see a dog carrying a rotten dead man’s hand. When asked for his name, our hero sees a mulberry field and says he is called Kuwabatake Sanjuro, literally “Mulberry-Field Thirty-Years-Old”. His name is not important, similar to the (anti-)hero Clint Eastwood played, often known as the Man With No Name.

He first kills three men of the opposing clan to persuade the weaker Seibei to hire him as a swordsman. After a series of double-crossings, you can see Sanjuro watching the two clans fight from above. Kurosawa’s cinema is a heroic cinema, portraying the vanishing ideal of a noble hero. Sanjuro soon decides that neither side is worth fighting for, so he plays them both off against each other.

Hansuke: What happened? Why so glum? Your business should be booming.

The Cooper: No. When the fighting gets this bad, they don’t bother with coffins.

Played by the one and only Toshiro Mifune, who rages like an animal when needed and sometimes sways slowly like a mulberry field, Sanjuro is one of the first examples in the cinema of a nameless hero. Only his actions are important, and every man has his own version of the story, much like the fight between different clans, each claiming greater rights than the other. Kurosawa, like Billy Wilder, emphasized the importance of a good story and had a rotating group of five screenwriters who would often work at a hot-springs resort. It’s no wonder that Yojimbo‘s story spawned remakes and adaptations, such as Django (1966) and the unofficial remake A Fistful of Dollars (1964). Kurosawa stated that Leone made “a fine movie, but it was my movie”.

Sanjuro: I’m not dying yet. I have to kill quite a few men first.

Of course, a great story has to go hand in hand with a great soundtrack. Kurosawa considered music as a counterpoint to what was shown on the screen. But the sound itself is important as well. The sound engineer, after a lot of research, found that the perfect sample for the sound of a sword cutting through something or someone was to put two chopsticks into a raw chicken and then hack it with a sword.

From Seven Samurai (1954) onward, Kurosawa used multiple cameras and long lenses, filming his characters from a distance, which allowed them to act more naturally. The movement is the key point here. You can tell a story with movement, either by using different lenses or by different cuts. He’s also often known for using axial cuts, where a scene is split into multiple jump cuts, with no camera movement to create an uninterrupted shot. For example, Sanjuro is caught, beaten, and locked. We see a close-up of his face, and then we cut to an open padlock where Sanjuro hides. One other example is when Sanjuro chooses his name and the camera cuts to a nearby mulberry field. Kurosawa had other tricks up his sleeve as well. In one scene, we see the samurai’s skill as he impales a blowing leaf against a wooden floor, which was accomplished by running the shot backwards.

Kurosawa both directed and edited most of his films, working bit by bit every day, which allowed for a very brief post-production period. For example, the shooting of Yojimbo concluded on April 16, 1961, and the film premiered in Japan on April 20. The most frequent observation about Yojimbo is that we see a parody of the American Western, like the classic example of Zinnemann‘s High Noon. But Kurosawa preserved a touch of comedy throughout the film, and he ends it with almost a mythological fight.

This is a film in which the hero kills dozens of people with his sword in an epic fight full of dust and intrigue. But this is also a story in which he is hiding and ends up being carried in a coffin. Who would better show the clash between a hero and an anti-hero than Akira Kurosawa? In the end, death is everywhere, but it doesn’t matter. As Orin, Seibei’s wife, put it:

Kill one or a hundred. You only hang once.

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References

• Barr, Alan (1975). Exquisite Comedy and the Dimensions of Heroism: Akira Kurosawa’s “Yojimbo”. The Massachusetts Review 16(1):158–168.
• Feld, Rob (2006). Darren Aronofsky: Sword of Doom. Directors Guild of America.
• Galbraith, Stuart, IV (2002). The Emperor and the Wolf: The Lives and Films of Akira Kurosawa and Toshiro Mifune. Faber and Faber.
• Prince, Stephen (1999). The Warrior’s Camera: The Cinema of Akira Kurosawa. Princeton University Press.
• Richie, Donald (1999). The Films of Akira Kurosawa. University of California Press.