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When asked about the uneven ratio of men to women in his films, renowned Japanese director Akira Kurosawa responded that he is not biased against women but merely understands men better. This statement may be simple at face value, but it takes on another meaning in the context of Kurosawa’s work. Many of his characters attempt to portray themselves to others falsely. Since so many of them are male, Kurosawa forces the viewer to analyze each character’s actions in regard to the conventions of masculine expectations. Because these characters often fail to meet these assumptions, Kurosawa suggests that the male facade is predominantly false.
Some of Kurosawa’s most masculine characters come from environments that contribute heavily to their nature. Though these communities often exist in the jidaigeki era (spanning the Edo period of pre-modern Japan), one of his earliest came in the then more contemporary world of his 1948 crime picture Drunken Angel. The film explores the trials of Matsunaga, a young and hot-tempered gangster of the local Yakuza diagnosed with severe tuberculosis by Sanada, a doctor whose reputation for drunkenness precedes him. Though it takes some time before Matsunaga faces the truth of the drunken doctor’s diagnosis, Sanada informs Matsunaga that he must not drink or smoke if he wants any chance at survival. A battle of will ensues for Matsunaga, who must either drink and smoke himself to death at the influence of the surrounding male Yakuza or heed the doctor’s orders to escape the gangster’s life in pursuit of a healthier existence.
While Matsunaga’s illness is undoubtedly physical, the threat it poses to his life metaphorically symbolizes the danger the lifestyle of a Yakuza poses to his morality. Though he appears to many a hardened criminal, there is no doubt that a redeemable version of Matsunaga exists somewhere within himself. No scene portrays this better than when Matsunaga’s ruminations on his corrupted reality give way to a nightmarish premonition of his demise. Kurosawa manipulates visual techniques to suggest that the tough gangster persona Matsunaga is dying to convey is crumbling with his growing illness. Immediately evident is Kurosawa’s spatial positioning of the characters. Matsunaga is composed crookedly in the foreground, unable to stand straight in his identity, unlike Sanada, who composes himself with a stable posture in the background. Matsunaga’s costume similarly shows his fatigue in the maintenance of his facade. His expensive clothing (which he donned proudly as a Yakuza earlier) is crumpled, only outmatched in disarray by Matsunaga’s hair, which throughout most of the film, is presented in a slicked-back, uniform manner. The first cut of the scene places Sanada above Matsunaga in the frame, connoting his power over the youth in terms of self-understanding. From here, Kurosawa directs the viewer’s attention to a doll lying face down in the mud that Matsunaga fixates on. With a shot-reverse-shot between Matsunaga and the figurine, Kurosawa confirms that the doll lying face-down in the mud symbolizes the Yakuza’s corruptive power on Matsunaga’s potential moral redemption. Kurosawa continues to represent this conflicting duality visually with a proceeding nightmare in which he discovers another version of himself buried in a coffin on a beach that escapes and nearly catches Matsunaga before he jolts awake. In the nightmare, Matsunaga’s black suit juxtaposes his other self’s white shirt, an intentional aesthetic choice made by Kurosawa suggesting that the other self attempting to catch him is his latent inner, morally redeemable self. Though Matsunaga’s nightmare ends before his fate is revealed, this dream clearly represents his tumultuous internal struggle to embrace either his demise or his new life outside of the Yakuza.
The ferocity of the war between Matsunaga’s two wills is a testament to the strength of the notion of masculinity in society. If Matsunaga were to leave the gang, he would have to deal with the blows to his reputation, which the size of his community would exaggerate, and the loss of his girlfriend and emotional support. Because these are foundational qualities that measure a man’s character in the public eye, the challenge of leaving becomes exponentially more significant, as does the stress of living up to the self-sacrificial expectations of the Yakuza. The severity of Matsunaga’s difficulty with this struggle points to his internal separation from the strong masculine character he is trying to play. This, combined with the timid nature of the climactic battle-to-the-death between Matsunaga and his gang’s boss Okada, who also builds his status upon the perception of his intimidating masculinity, suggests this appearance is a front and nothing more.
Kurosawa continued to include this false perception of hypermasculinity in his later jidaigeki works, one of the best of which is his 1957 war drama Throne of Blood. Although this film is arguably less about the pressures of upholding a socially masculine image, it is still relevant to Drunken Angel in the sense that judgment of a man’s character is based on the women he surrounds himself with and the lands and titles he holds. In the mind of an ambitiously greedy soldier, these things are essential in terms of reputation and the self-perception of power as a leader and man in general. This power struggle corrupts the mind of Toshiro Mifune’s Taketoki Washizu, the former leader-turned-lord of the north garrison army. The trouble for him is that his wife, who has persuaded him to murder his great lord so he may take the throne for himself, only amplifies these thoughts. Not long after he does so, his greed turns to paranoia.
Washizu’s paranoia teeters over the edge of insanity after sacrificing his friend Miki’s life for his longevity as ruler. Few scenes articulate Washizu’s growing insanity better than his celebratory dinner, where he sees Miki’s ghost. The performance of a nightmarish story that echoes his betrayal emphasizes Miki’s absence at the dinner. Kurosawa confirms this by cutting to a shot foregrounding Miki’s empty placemat while visually minimizing Washizu. A methodically slow zoom brings the viewer closer to the mind of Washizu, then back out again to reveal Miki’s apparition to be visible from Washizu’s perspective. Kurosawa contrasts this stillness with the sudden movement of the camera that follows Washizu as he orders Miki’s ghost to leave, conveying Washizu’s progressing lack of control. Washizu’s wife plays this outburst off as drunkenness, but even when the Lord returns to his seat, something is clearly wrong. The emphasized white horizontal lines on the wall behind Washizu visually cut into him, as if the kingly throne he stole is an enemy of his sanity, accentuating his mental instability. It’s also worth noting that Kurosawa contrasts the white hue Miki’s connoting Miki’s ghost (similar to the horizontal lines) with the charcoal black hat Washizu wears like a false crown. Whatever order Washizu’s wife restored with her words is lost when Washizu sees Miki’s ghost again. After backing up into the wall with white horizontal lines out of fear, he tries to kill the spirit with his sword, to the disbelief of his followers. After Washizu’s wife dismisses the guests from the feast, a samurai enters bearing Miki’s lopped-off head. Washizu then kills the Samurai, whose uniform is black like the Lord’s hat, and again backs away into the wall. Though he attempts to distance himself from this treachery in every way, Washizu will always be trapped by it.
Though Washizu achieved all the material titles he desired, they were ultimately futile because they cost him his sanity. By assassinating his lord, Washizu believed he could live with the guilt of his betrayal because the power and respect his gained position would outweigh these feelings. However, since he couldn’t do so, Kurosawa suggests that the pursuit of material titles so highly valued in overt masculine culture may not be worth what it seems. Regardless, Washizu’s character supports that Kurosawa believes the facade of comfort in material success doesn’t outweigh emotional stability, contrary to what hypermasculinity would suggest.
But out of each of these films, none is more telling of the facade of hypermasculinity than Rashomon. It outweighs each of the two in this category because what better way to expose this masquerade than in a story exploring the nature of lying? The lie, in this case, revolves around the murder of a samurai, which authorities are left to deconstruct based on the differing accounts of witnesses at the scene. No character depicts the act of hypermasculinity better than the bandit Tajomaru, delivered to us by Toshiro Mifune in one of his best performances for Kurosawa. Tajomaru goes into the interrogation with a notorious reputation that seems backed up by a fitting demeanor. Shirtlessly flaunting his machismo, the visceral melodramatic reactions exaggerate the bandit's wild movements. These traits combine with an expressional face to create the persona of an emasculated killer and thief in the public eye. But as we see, Kurosawa plays around with this act by forcing the character into scenarios where he must prove this perception.
No scene from the movie serves as a better example of this moment than when the samurai’s wife stakes Tajomaru’s reputation as a man on his ability to fight her husband in a nearby woodcutter’s recounting of the story. Immediately, Tajomaru begs the bride’s forgiveness for raping her, much unlike the version of himself he portrayed in his story where she yearns for him, a common fantasy of male masculinity. Fast forward to the beginning of the fight, and the samurai, his wife, and Tajomaru are depicted minimally in the frame angled down on them. The shadows of the trees, which Kurosawa has used throughout the film to invoke underlying emotional turmoil, now cover each character to suggest the prospect of an actual battle to death unearths their true identities. A “battle” almost completely opposite of the valiant display Tajomaru described earlier in the movie ensues. Kurosawa shoots the action with a combination of close-ups and wide shots. He employs the former when displaying the personal fear of the samurai and Tajomaru and uses the latter to emphasize the awkwardness of the fight. These techniques exaggeratedly expose the true character of each fighter in real-life-and-death situations that contrast what the fearless warriors’ hypermasculinity expected them to be. The protracted battle length, which ultimately concludes with the samurai’s death, furthers this concept. By framing Tajomaru and the wife through the shadow of the trees, Kurosawa confirms that their true character does not match the perceptions they attempted to create of themselves. The bride made herself out to be different to save the dignity of her reputation, and Tajomaru did so to conform to the standard notion of overt masculinity while simultaneously confirming the falsity of this convention.
Drunken Angel. Directed by Akira Kurosawa. Toho Co., Ltd.
Jenkins, Mark. “‘Mifune’ Can’t Quite Capture a Screen Legend”, NPR, https://www.npr.org/2016/11/24/503045057/mifune-cant-quite-capture-a-screen-legend, Accessed December 10, 2019.
Rashomon. Directed by Akira Kurosawa. Daiei Film, 1950.
Throne of Blood. Directed by Akira Kurosawa. Toho Co., Ltd.