Every Little Thing I Adore About 'Harakiri'

I first saw Harakiri in the early hours of the morning on YouTube, during my first term of college. A little like another contemporary Japanese classic, ‘Woman in the Dunes’, I fell under the spell of its meticulous direction but kept getting dragged out by the glacial grind of its pace.

It’s taken a few years to fall head over heels for this justly adored marvel- and I hope anyone seeing it for the first time can take some confidence in knowing the wait is worth it.

 

The way Kobayashi begins the film with a tiny, utterly vital atmospheric prelude: Fog and shadows wash over an empty suit of armour- as if its empty core has been lost to the mists of time. It’s a brilliant way of baring the film’s bleeding soul right there on the screen.

The lack of diegetic sound under said narration as our ‘hero’ Hanshiro sweeps into the frame.

The mesmeric march of images, music and scattered narration throughout the intro. All of these elements lock step and almost make a point of leaving the audience in the dust- choking on the mystery to try and catch up. The cold, symmetrical compositions are imbued with such a haunted, spiderweb spirit by Toru Takemitsu’s prickly score.

Kobayashi’s staggered staging and framing further infest the film’s every frame with a tangible sense of theming: It goes beyond making the castle feel like a set and more like a real, historical place briefly inhabited by actors- unable to hit the marks of romantic paintings of the time. There’s a patient, delicate staginess that pushes that idea of fools perpetuating a terminally archaic code of honour ever-closer to the breathing edge of the frame.

The tepid, eerie tension of this simple insert tracking shot.

The simmering patience of each little scene: There’s little camera or character movement to motivate superficial interest- and Kobayashi just abandons us to stew in these compositions and tangled conversations. It’s like he’s pinning this grand old panting of honour up on the wall and simulating time itself tearing it apart.

It’s a small thing but I’ve always loved the way Kobayashi breaks up his visual style, be it with massive wides or macro focus. He’s a particular fan of using feet to motivate a shot- and in a film so rigidly rooted in place a tiny moment like this can add so much.

How frequently the film decapitates and shows the backs of its main players. In this particular scene, where a young man’s bluff to commit hara-kiri is devastatingly called, the framing almost gives his mental state a piece of life outside the film’s otherwise glacial, sterile canvas. Up there in the dark he’s got endless space to be scared out of his mind.

I’ve always found black and white films referencing colours particularly interesting as a dramatic device- as if to further hit home the way this place has faded.

These sweaty, intimate chokers as the boy waits for his fate- almost like he’s trapped in a horror film.

The samurai scoffing at his cheap bamboo blades. There’s something about the turgid unease of the blocking and performance that just makes me think all these fleshy statues are scared shitless too.

How hard the distance, composition and particularly lighting makes me feel this desperate shot.

I once read an excellent description of Harakiri that touched on “how much Kobayashi hates death” and that’s really what makes the film so gut-wrenching for me. There’s a real, rare empathy burning beneath the dead skin of an old ceremony that has choked the soul out of this space for centuries. It almost plucks all of these now-dead men out of time and makes them feel as modern as any of us- aware of how unconscionable their actions are but unable to escape their inevitable fate. It’s a great way of using the locked-in march of history to tragicize the unstoppable path of story.

As I mentioned in my Texas Chain Saw Massacre post there’s a real freeze to this tiny, unforgettable moment of pure cinema where he frantically tears his clothes and tosses the little stool aside in one last moment of rebellion. It’s such a sudden explosion of movement in an otherwise static film that makes the whole scene just feel so terribly real.

How unapologetically Kobayashi captures the disembowelling. There is no escaping this.

The way that, after its 30-minute opening act, the film allows what is ostensibly its main villain, Kageyu, to show remorse for the actions we just saw- and even take steps to stop them being repeated. The quiet humanity of this moment, and the way it is placed right at the tip of the iceberg we are about to unearth, adds a piercing complexity to the rest of the story. This could have very easily been a grim struggle between absolute evil and righteous good but the compassion and time Kobayashi affords the ‘villains’ gifts the film with an immortal spirit in which both sides are implicated in a never-ending cycle of violence and revenge. The wellspring of their pain is the dry grey blood that paints every inch of the world around them.

The tender intimacy of this shot, with its cherry blossoms waltzing in the breeze, and how the context of the film alone gives it a sinister edge. That’s theming.

These creeping push-ins as Hanshiro tells his tale almost serve to give the audience a subtle agency: Everyone on screen is still as stone but we, as the camera, can lean in to listen a little closer.

There’s those superb foot cut-ins again!

The ludicrousness of this philosophy in a modern context.

The disturbed grace of Hanshiro’s master. It always makes me wonder how long each director takes coaxing out the smaller performances in their films. My favourite will always remain a certain little chef in Martin Scorsese’s ‘Casino’- but to capture so much in just one brief close up… You know you’ve done something right when there could be a whole movie about every character in your film.

Hanshiro cackling away to himself, revelling in his revenge. Again, his catharsis is clouded by the humanity of his victims.

The pitch darkness punctuated by a tiny little eye light in this shot. Perfect cinematography.

And again- how still the world around these people is: These vast little stacked squares with no clear sense of architecture or a route to escape. I have a sneaking suspicion the crew took queues from ‘Last Year at Marienbad’, a festival hit just a year earlier, while crafting their own limbo.

How sparingly Toru Takemitsu’s score is used after the opening credits- and yet because of the ominous strength of that cold open it always brings the mind right back to that same ghoulish ambience. A little punch of percussion is all it needs.

While its clear Akira Kurosawa’s ‘Yojimbo’ was the key point of inspiration Sergio Leone rode into his Dollars trilogy, I think Harakiri’s freeform stylistic abandon also had a profound effect on the way the Italian maestro staged his own scenes.

While everyone quite rightly adores Tatsuya Nakadai’s war between the wolves of pathos and passionate revenge raging at the heart of his career-best performance, the lesser-known Rentaro Miknui presents my favourite work in the film. Hanshiro’s fate is set from the second he sits down but Kagegyu’s ever-wavering control, his quiet respect and thousand-yard glaze form the film’s most fascinating, doomed pawn.

This sublime framing.

The serene silence of Hanshiro going about his work, and his grin as he hears the children being taught nextdoor. Even in desolate poverty the man finds a smile in the smallest things.

The tender horror of Hanshiro’s daughter spluttering dark blood onto bleached white fabric.

The fact that over an hour into its story, Harakiri doesn’t think twice about derailing itself into a half-hour flashback. And in that unshakable confidence- it works.

The way the crew always set those little lamps just out of focus.

This extreme lighting change. Again, if you can present a strong enough reality for your audience I think reality-bending moments like this can almost bring us closer to the characters.

This horrifying image.

The emptiness behind Shima Iwashita’s tears. There’s an unbearably empathetic understanding of pain to this film that shows Kenji Mizoguchi’s spirit still breathing life into Japanese cinema- six years after he passed on.

This is the shot that seals Hanshiro’s plot for revenge: Nakadai buries his face out of frame, his hands limply grasp his sword, it sits there lifeless. There’s no glory, or justice, here.

This push in-to-pan finally uniting Hanshiro and Kayegu in the same shot, and the way the latter instinctively turns away as he feels himself agreeing.

Hanshiro keeping the severed topknots of the castle’s top swordsmen in the exact spot his son had to spill his guts.

The way the sudden re-introduction of Takemitsu’s score and that silent, marching process of editing brings this sequence right in-line with the film’s cold open. It all clicks into place.

This is my favourite part of Harakiri in part because it quietly weaponizes the symmetry of its photography to close the trap on these swordsmen. The off-centre framing the whole film has established finally snaps down on each of these duels.

This impatient shift of stance- and the prevalence of both their shadows.

Kobayashi jarringly cutting away from each moment of violence. It’s like he’s trying his absolute hardest to bottle away the brutal horror of the story until the final, awful scene, where the dam breaks and nothing can stop it.

This Noir-esque lighting…

…And this shot sitting on the other side of it.

The spring beside Hanshiro’s workshop playfully reflecting through the window.

The aperture shifting down as we sit next to Hanshiro while his target’s attention flickers elsewhere, as if he’s embracing the possible dark of death while he weighs up drawing his sword.

The unique power of these morbidly gorgeous images that precede their duel.

Another moment Leone might’ve taken in.

Kobayashi cutting on the cue of Takemitsu’s nervy score to the grass around this confrontation. I can’t work out if the natural world is used here in its usual role- sorrowfully helpless to stop the violence around it; or if Kobayashi is implying the soil here is so soaked in generations of aggression that this shot is almost a sign of its anticipation of another feast- like the ground beneath our feet has developed a taste for blood.

The unmotivated spotlight on these topknots, and the way they also flutter around in a fake wind. It works so well- who gives a shit if it breaks the rules?

As Hanshiro is finally condemned, many of the retainers get up and leave- where before they ALL took up arms and turned on him. There’s a grim depth to this action, as if they’ve done it a thousand times and have a strategy to position themselves around the castle depending on how far their prey gets.

As Hanshiro is finally condemned, many of the retainers get up and leave- where before they ALL took up arms and turned on him. There’s a grim depth to this action, as if they’ve done it a thousand times and have a strategy to position themselves around the castle depending on how far their prey gets.

The first spearman slowly approaching Hanshiro. In any other film a moment where a nameless lackey gets butchered first is often played for laughs- but here the fear in every man in this shot is palpable.

Kobayashi allowing himself one more cut away before the carnage takes hold.

…And the fact he settles here, on Kayegu, entombed in a murky room. Somehow there’s just no question that he’s going to survive and that’s what gives our continual observation of him painstakingly listening to the conflict outside such a venomous bite.

The first man to be mortally wounded trying to meet Hanshiro’s eyes.

These tracking shots of Hanshiro controlling his attackers’ movements, and the fact that this scene is so believable precisely because it takes so long for so many trained killers to get just one man- because of how terrified they all are of meeting the same end at his hand. It’s a shared feeling that makes everyone here more individual.

Kobayashi lingering longer and longer on the people being slashed to pieces.

The irony of this chilling final swordfight so clearly influencing the pulpy brilliance of ‘The Sword of Doom’.

The lights fading out around our hero as he turns the sword on himself.

Kayegu reacting to the gunfire, only to settle back down soon after. He’s in a room alone- nobody there to pick up on his break of the traditional calm- but he falls back into the shackles anyway.

Finally, the lifeless, blood-stained shots of the aftermath that fall into the same marching time as the film’s intro- and alongside an over-head track across the scene prove clear inspiration for the shootout from ‘Taxi Driver’. Harakiri similarly observes men trapped in the bleeding corners of their faraway worlds- chained to an ancient way Kageyu is more than ready to erase all trace of, even in the knowledge that his scrubbing of history will simply tear it off and fix it in time and run the same old dress rehearsal for doom time and again.