My Review of The Inheritance (1962) directed by Masaki Kobayashi

 A year after completing one of the great epic achievements of epic cinema and Masaki Kobayashi was not done even a little at showing the dark side of Japanese society. The Japanese Economic Miracle had now officially begun in earnest and everybody was trying to get rich after thirteen years as a war-ravaged third world country. Though the war was over for most of Japanese society and its economy, one man was not through with showing his society how sick it was. This movie would be the last contemporary film or "Shomin-geki" by Kobayashi for 6 years. He would follow this film-up with one of his greatest–Harakiri–later that year. This a film that would set the tone of the more darker tone that emerged over the course of The Human Condition.

This story is as hardcore an allegory as Kobayashi could offer. A terrible industrialist is dying and decides to leave his fortune to his illegitimate offspring. His young wife and all his cronies decide to scheme him for as much they can. That is the movie in a nutshell. The point of the film is to show how each person sets about doing it and to analogize it for Japan at-large. This film maybe smaller in scope that The Human Condition, but it is as anti "feel good" as that film saga. There are no good people or heroic folks in this movie. It is a game of thrones of greed. Also, it is interesting to hear Toru Takemitsu doing a jazz score as oppose to a Western or Japanese classical score.

My Review of Harakiri (1962) directed by Masaki Kobayashi

 You take an artsy idealist leftist that wants to make movies and you force him to fight for a fascist military dictatorship and you get a guy who has an axe to grind with the society that made him suffer. Masaki Kobayashi's ordeal in WWII made him the Japanese film-maker with the most cynical view of Japanese history, culture, and society. Coming off his contemporary social films and his magnum opus The Human Condition (1959-1961), he decided to do a brutal interrogation of the samurai ideology of Bushido and ask the question: "What do you think really happened during the Edo Period, given what we know about human nature?" He attempts to answer that question with one of the bleakest and existential samurai films of all time. Donald Richie calls this the "anti-samurai" film.

We start with a ronin named Tsugumo Hanshirō showing up at the doorstep of the Iyi clan House in Edo (aka Tokyo).asking if he can commit harakiri–ritual suicide–in their courthouse and the clan is baffled that another samurai from Hiroshima would come to them with this request. As this ronin–played by Tatsuya Nakadai–begins to speak, we learn that something is very off about what is going on here. The film shows how absurd the logic of Bushido is in peacetime and how the hardcore, selective application of it leads to disaster. While a few samurai clans at the top had a clean transition to the Edo Period, for many the end of the Sengoku period was more tumultuous than the strife of the warring states period they had just emerged out of. The moodiness of Toru Takemitsu's music score and the cinematography by Yoshio Miyajima makes the film feel to us the audience the doomed atmosphere of the protagonists being toyed with by the system.

Kobayashi was on a hot-streak during this time with all of his films engaging in social realism and holding institutions accountable for the mistreatment of people during the way years and the modern day. This was his first venture into period films, but he manages to interrogate recent Japanese history and contemporary society all the same. Nakadai may not have been as highly celebrated at this time as Toshiro Mifune, but he was just as commanding in his star roles―and his star never shined brighter than with Masaki Kobayashi. Kobayashi is the anti-weebo of of cinema, he uses his knowledge of Japanese art and culture against all who would try to romanticize Japan without taking into account its dark side. Every inconsistency of the code of Bushido is when presented against practical reality is presented here, but the hypocrisy and ruthlessness of the state is shown in full display at the end when it is able to brush-off all this by virtue of being able to write the history books.

My Review of Kwaidan (1965) directed by Masaki Kobayashi

 After the success of such a gritty masterpiece like Harakiri (1962), Masaki Kobayashi  got the greenlight to make one of the most ambitious movies in Japanese history. He took his clear-eyed revolutionary critique of power, Japanese national mythology and history and applies it to the horror genre. The anthology-format and the stunning set-design and cinematography make Kobayashi's first color film a resounding success. This also sees him go from his social realism style of his previous films to a surrealism influenced by traditional Japanese art-aesthetic (something had only previously done in Thick-Walled Room (1956)). 

The film adopts four stories from Lufcadio Hearn's horror anthology collection Kwaidan. Kobayashi takes these stories and adds his own social commentary to them. Story one centers on greed. Story two centers on betrayal and the surveillance-state of wartime Japan. Story four deals with arrogance and Japanese culture. But for this review I want to talk about story 3 "Hoichi the Earless." This story is about a blind biwa player that lives in a Buddhist temple and gained renown for his performances of passages from The Tale of the Heike. Hoichi starts being forcibly-summoned to play for a mysterious aristocratic clan. It turns out that the dead Heike clan has been forcing him to play manically in a cemetery for them about there past glories despite it undermining his health. This keeps going on until the Buddhist priest figure out what's going on and intervene. This is the longest of the episodes in this movie and was Kobayashi's commentary on how the nationalist glorification of figures of like the Heike was so twisted and helped lead to the destruction of a generation during WWII. Kobayashi's interpretation of the Battle of Dan-no-Ura  and the story overall was meant to make folks question the glorification of these suicidal-militaristic values in the Heike story. Kobayashi certainly did not believe in honoring any aspect of the past that senselessly harmed people in the present. Anything dealing with the military and rigid duty was the enemy of Masaki Kobayashi.

Though I am not a big fan of horror movies, I do appreciate horror films with a message or a point (though I have my exceptions like Zombie comedies or John Carptenter's Halloween) like this one or the Jordan Peele movies for example. This movie is showing you the uncanny, but also making you think of some real-world scary things like militarism, fascism, and nationalism–very 2020 type of horror.