Dan and I rented and watched a Japanese movie called Bushi no Ichibun (the American title is Love and Honor) last night. I’d been wanting to watch it since 2007 when it was being aired in the States, but missed it while it was in theaters. We found a video rental place in Berkeley that carries an impressive number of Japanese movies recently and so when I found this movie there, I had to rent it.
Takuya Kimura plays Shinnojo Mimura, a lower-ranked samurai whose duty in his clan is to act as a poison taster to the shogun. He lives a humble but happy life with his wife Kayo and their elderly servant Tokuhei. Life as he knows it changes drastically when one day the meal he taste-tests contains toxic food poisoning which leaves him blind. The movie follows him as he comes to terms with his blindness and the fact that he can no longer serve as a samurai, as well as a shocking secret he discovers about his dutiful wife that he cannot bring himself to forgive.
I thought this was pretty well executed as a period piece film. It differs from the traditional samurai film in that the drama is confined within the domestic space, and the struggles are more internal rather than external — there is only one sword fight throughout the whole film, which just happens during the climatic scene. It’s understated for a samurai movie, but still keeps the viewer engaged and illustrates well the code of honor and rigidness that was so characteristic of Japanese feudal society. As a critic pointed out, it shows that “the deepest wound a samurai may suffer does not come from any blade.”
Although Takuya Kimura (or Kimutaku, as he is popularly known in Japan) is a compelling and talented actor, his own real life persona is so strong and well-known that, from my perspective, he seems to always somehow infuse too much of himself into the character, instead of the other way around where he really morphs into the role that he is playing. Or maybe it’s that he is always given the same type of protagonist-hero roles that it comes across that way. I felt like there was a little less of the overpowering Kimutaku-ness this time, though, with his character being an unusually vulnerable and thus more believable hero.