The Last Samurai

4 farmers go in search of samurai: Rikichi of burning eyes, Yohei (can’t), Manzo (impossible) and no name.

I think spring is here.

The farmers see a crowd of people. A samurai has gone to the river’s edge to be shaved by a monk.

A man with a moustache and a sword pushes his way through the crowd and squats scratching his chin. (It’s Toshiro Mifune)

This is really shocking. I fell asleep 10 minutes into a masterpiece of modern cinema, and when I woke up the whole recruitment section was over.

STOP. REWIND.

Signs of life in the next room.

STOP. PLAY.

The master swordsman has changed his mind, you don’t know why. 6 samurai get ready to leave for the hills in the morning.

In comes a gambler, who says they’ve found a really tough samurai.

Katsushiro picks up a stick and strides to the door: one last test.

Gambler: That’s unfair

Kambei: If he’s as good as you say he’ll parry the blow

Gambler: But he’s drunk

Kambei: A good samurai would never get so drunk

A man runs through the door; Katsushiro brings down the stick hard on his head. It’s Toshiro Mifune, who falls to the ground.

Mifune looks at the samurai. He recognises Kambei.

You had the nerve to ask whether I was a samurai

I’m a samurai all right

Don’t go away. I’ll show you something [takes out scroll]

Look at this

Handed down in my family for generations

Mifune is making strange faces and noises now replicated in miniature by my side. Kurosawa is right, he can turn on a dime & watching quicksilver Mifune stern Shimura ardent Kimura I suddenly realise that everything is going to be all right, I am providing my fatherless uncleless boy not with 8 male role models (6 samurai 1 gatecrashing farmer’s son 1 fearless farmer) but 16 (8 characters 8 actors) 17 including Kurosawa who does not appear. Only one of the characters is a perfectionist in the practice of his art but all 8 actors & the director who does not appear show this terrible perfectionism making a total of 17 male role models (not including the extras).

[Kambei, reading] You’re this Kikuchiyo?

Born in the Second Year of Tensho … [bursts out laughing]

You look remarkably old for your age

Looking at you I can hardly believe that you are 13

[All the samurai burst out laughing]

L: Where did you steal this?

L: Who do you think you are, calling me a thief?

Now we are six.

iii

After this superb battle … one might expect the picture to end with some kind of statement that he has at last grown-up, that he has arrived, that he has become something—the great judo champion.

Donald Richie, “Sugata Sanshiro,”

The Films of Akira Kurosawa

1

1, 2, 3

20 March, 1993

Today is my sixth birthday.

I got an Oxford-Duden Japanese Pictorial Dictionary and a little book about a cat in Japanese that was all in kana and a book which I couldn’t tell what it was because it was all in Japanese, but Sibylla said it was Sugata Sanshiro by Tomita Tsuneo. She said I would have to share her kanji dictionary and her Kodansha romanised dictionary and her grammar and she said unfortunately Sugata Sanshiro was not available in English so I might find it rather hard going, but that it seemed to be a marvellous story going by what Mr. Richie says about the film and she got out a book by Mr. Richie and said look at this, can you read this? I asked if it was in English and she said yes so of course I could read it. Apparently there is quite a dramatic scene in the book when Sugata’s judo teacher tells him to kill himself. This is what Mr. Richie says about my book: