#14: Samurai I: Musashi Miyamoto
Hey y’all,
Missed you last week! I had to take a week off to catch up on watching as my life outside this little project got a little hectic. But I’m back!
9/8 FUND RACIAL JUSTICE/ACTION ITEM:
I missed Black Bodyfeeding Week (8/25-8/31), which is in its 8th year, but it is never a bad time to 1) learn about why this even needs to exist and 2) support Black birth workers, birthing people, and lactation consultants! I also learned that the term bodyfeeding is more inclusive because it includes trans men, nonbinary people (who may not use the term “breasts”) and those who pump and feed with bottles. Some places to donate include:
Southern Birth Justice Network (donation info under FAQ page)
9/8 MOVIE BY A BLACK FILMMAKER REC:
After the tragic loss of Chadwick Boseman, there’s no better time to watch or re-watch Black Panther, directed by Ryan Coogler. Even if you generally don’t like superhero/comic book movies, I highly recommend it; it’s a beautiful, powerful, and super entertaining film. It was an incredibly important piece of cinematic representation for many Black people in this country, especially kids. Available to buy or rent on YouTube.
#14: Samurai I: Musashi Miyamoto
Director: Hiroshi Inagaki
Country: Japan
Year: 1954
Runtime: 93 minutes
Language: Japanese
**As always, this post contains spoilers**
Y’all, I might be *really* into samurai movies!! After seeing the first of this trilogy, I was ready to finish the whole thing! Alas, I am real with myself about my ability to stay awake during a movie past 11 PM so it’s one at a time. Let’s get into it!
It’s 1600 AD in Japan. A subtitle lets us know that the East and West are fighting for supremacy. Much like Seven Samurai, this means lots of budding samurais, struggling villages, and bad boys aka bandits.
We see a scene of a vague battle and in case you forgot I was watching all of these movies with Josh, he says, “You know why this movie is famous? The horses. The budget for horse movies is off the charts.”
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“horse movies”
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Okay! So I hate to break the news but the bald caps are back and they might be even worse because these add roughly 5-10 inches of forehead. Way up in a tree are best friends Matahachi (Rentarō Mikuni) and Takezo (Toshiro Mifune). Y’alllll Toshiro Mifune is the #smokeshow from Seven Samurai and let’s just say the fog machine is turned up to 11 in this one. They are talking about how they want to go off and fight in the war, but Matahachi is wary because he’s newly engaged to Otsu (Kaoru Yachigusa). He decides he has to go.
Matahachi asks Otsu if she will wait for him and she says yes, that she’d wait for him for 10 years if she had to. So, pro tip: you don’t ever have to do this. Someone asks you for $10 you don’t have to say “$10?! I’d give you $1,000!!!” Be cool.
Matahachi and Takezo fight in the battle of Sekighara. There were a lot of horses in this scene (#horsemovie) and after the battle is over (which again, included guns, which again is a shocking bit of medieval fact), there are a ton of dead bodies.
Matahachi is wounded and Takezo carries him until they find a house where there are two ladies spinning silk and cooking: teen Akemi (Mariko Okada) and her young mother, Oko (Mitsuko Mito). These ladies could not be more thrilled that these two dime pieces showed up at their door hungry and injured.
A month passes and Matahachi is still waiting to heal. He and Akemi look on at Takezo, who is doing all sort of crazy horse tricks in the field. Matahachi says that Takezo will ride the horse until it’s exhausted and calls him ruthless. Akemi gazes on and says, “I like that type of man.” 😬😬😬
She tends to Matahachi’s wounded knee and he grabs her, kissing her. She is NOT into it and runs away. As you will see, there’s…a lot of running away in this movie.
Matahachi
Akemi takes a horse ride with Takezo, wherein she is riding side saddle basically just in his lap, until it gets wild and they fall off. In the wide shots of this scene where the horse is really tearin’ it up, you can see that Akemi is actually just a mannequin because I’m ASSUMING they didn’t have stuntwomen in Japan in the 50s?
Akemi is INTO Takezo. In a truly confusing interaction, she asks him why he doesn’t hold her, he throws her off him and says “Women!” and then she rolls around laughing.
Takezo and Akemi
A group of bandits (also known as a brigand!) shows up and tells them they better watch out. Vague.
We find out that although Oko, the mom, pretends to be an herb farmer, she actually makes most of her money stealing gold and armor from dead samurai. “They don’t need it,” she says, which…is a point. Turns out the leader of this specific brigand is the one who killed her husband.
Her and Takezo are alone, talking, him telling her that he has to become famous before he goes home, when the bandits show up demanding treasure. Takezo, wearing NO armor and using one sword kicks all their asses, killing the bandit who widowed Oko.
So like everybody else, Oko is now into him and tells him she loves him. He rejects her and runs out of the house.
Okay *deep breath*: in a move that is not cool and very rarely happens IRL and doesn’t really even need to be talked about, especially when you’re swooping in with it straight into a convo about #metoo and believing women, Oko tells Akemi and Matahachi that Takezo tried to rape her. He did not.
She tells Matahachi she wants to be with him instead. Akemi runs out of the house crying, *fingers crossed* because she thinks her crush is an attempted rapist and not for any other problematic reason (it’s the 1600s…it’s a problematic reason).
Takezo returns and finds the three of them gone, cursing Matahachi and calling him a fool, which he might be. On the road, the three of them are immediately confronted by bandits and Matahachi BARELY fights them off and then collapses, weeping. Takezo fights his fair share of bandits on the road alone, too.
Back at the village, Matahachi’s abandoned fiancé, Otsu, flirts with a mostly nude Buddhist priest, Takuan.
For some reason, inside a temple, a bunch of Takezo’s relatives kneel in front of a guy who seems to be in charge. They bow and tell him that they disown Takezo and they will help him be found. I’m telling you right now this is a part of the film that Josh and I never deciphered. Why is everyone mad at Takezo? Sound off in the comments lol
To be fair, while this meeting is taking place, Takezo arrives back at the village and kills a guard real quick and runs away, but this was AFTER they decided to hunt him down, so the question remains: what’s your damage, Heather?
The guy in the temple tells them two people from each family have to help in the hunt and that all of his family members will be arrested and used as bait. This means they have a bunch of old people tied up marching through these big ass fields. I dunno y’all, I might be on Takezo’s side.
Of course he’s watching all of them from a mountain, looking totally cool.
While Matahachi’s mom (Eiko Miyoshi) and Otsu are walking and talking outside her house, Takezo appears out of nowhere and very furiously drinks a LOT of water out of a bucket and tells them Matahachi is not dead. He starts to run away again but Matahachi’s mom convinces him to stay and eat and take a bath because he’s hungry and smells like shit.
He is CHILLIN in a giant pot of steamy water while Otsu roasts him for not bringing Matahachi back to her, killing the entire mood. He doesn’t want to tell her that her man is frolicking somewhere with two biddies.
Of course this Medieval hot tub was a trap set by Matahachi’s mom, so a bunch of samurai show up while he’s soaking. He jumps out and unfortunately, folks, he’s wearing a cloth bottom of some kind. Obviously, again, unarmed except for a stick, he gets away.
The village gathers AGAIN to talk about how they’re going to capture Takezo and it’s like who cares because no one has properly advertised why we should be supporting this cause. If there were a vote I would vote an ENTHUSIASTIC NAY.
The priest delivers Otsu a letter that makes her...this is going to be shocking, but... run away. Y’all are not ready for this spicy plot development though: IT’S FROM MATAHACHI’S UNNAMED NEW WIFE. She tells him they’ve been married since the battle and she mustn’t wait for him. This is the moment where the Venn diagram of how I feel when I watch 16 and Pregnant and how I (apparently) feel when I watch Samurai I: Musashi Miyamoto intersect. Drama, honey.
Meanwhile, Takezo beats up a random guy carrying a bunch of sticks, accusing him of hunting him, which is a little out of line, I’ll admit.
The priest and Otsu head to the mountains to camp out and try to capture Tanezo. Sitting at a fire, he burns the letter and says “girl, forget him!” She plays a bamboo flute to heal her sorrow. Because Tanezo is basically omnipresent, he hears and sees them. But the priest sees him, too, and asks him to come over for food and warmth. He tells Tanezo they’re not his enemies.
Ugh, Tanezo is disappointingly gullible because HE GOES. Again. I guess if you’re hungry enough your internal compass starts to really suck?
Josh says, watching Tanezo eat: “I bet that’s good ramen.” And then we debated for a disappointingly short amount of time about if it was noodles or rice (it was rice).
As he’s eating, Tanezo asks why they’re there. The priest tells him, “to capture you.” He is told that his relatives have been captured and Tanezo says to just…kill them all. He starts crying wildly and the priest smacks him a bunch and calls him a fool. So overall, very stressful.
Because the priest might actually be his enemy, Tanezo is tied up and paraded into town on a rope held by the priest, and then he pulls him up into a tree! Like really high into the tree, bound up around his arms and torso.
The priest, in another confusing move, tells that guy in the temple who was in charge earlier that he will set Takezo free if they even THINK of trying to take him away from him. He thinks he can whip this kid into shape. Meanwhile, Takezo is up in the tree, super pissed. He yells down at the priest telling him, basically, how dare you. Which is a great point. And then he calls him trash!
Otsu tells Matahachi’s mom that she’d rather die than live without Matahachi, to which his mom basically says get OVER IT. In the rain that night, Otsu cries to the priest that he needs to cut Takezo down because he will die. He is a total dick about it and says no.
From the tree that night, Takezo begs to be beheaded. The priest, not reading the room at alllll lectures Takezo about wisdom and virtues and how Takezo has not been virtuous or wise and has wanted too much and lacked humility and is not a man and blah blah blah. He asks him to think it over until dawn. Takezo begs him to spare his life. In a moving scene, he tells him how much he wants to live.
Then, in a move that someone should have done hours ago, Otsu loosens the rope from down below and Takezo slowly lowers down. She cuts him free and they stumble away into the dawn together. Her hands are fuuuucked from letting that rope loose, though. I’m not a doctor, but I don’t know why this makes her unable to walk, so Takezo has carried her the whole way. Takezo cries and apologizes to her.
(He’s wild AND sensitive, ladies.)
She shares her realization: she, too, was bound by an unseen rope. She can never go back to the village and she asks him to take her with him. Ope! It’s getting romantic in heeeerrreee. She lays it out for him. Her argument: we are both lonely.
Takezo and Otsu
He bites into a rice cake and considers it before a group of samurai head their way yelling “Capture them!”
Because she has rope burn on her hands and can’t walk (???), Takezo drags her up a hill with the samurai on their heels. This time he has no armor and NO weapon so he picks up a giant log and a stick and again fights off dozens of these guys! Unfortunately, Otsu is captured.
The freaky priest catches up with Takezo who is…..again tricked into going back with him to Himeji Castle, where Otsu is. The priest tells him that she is safe. He tricks Tanezo into going into an attic full of books and closes the door behind him. The priest tells him he will be in that room for a long time and he will need to read all the books and become a master. Don’t you just hate when people think they know what’s best for you without even asking you first?
The priest asks Otsu if she will wait faithfully for Takezo for years. She’s the ultimate ride or die so of course she says yes.
Akemi and her mother, Oko, are sitting with two men, neither of whom are Matahachi. One of the men tells Oko that he will buy Akemi for a lot of money. Matahachi is drinking tea and painting in another room when Oko enters. It’s quickly clear that they are married and haaaate each other. He chastises her for trying to sell her daughter. Her counterpoint: you’re an idiot and I should have never spurned Takezo’s advances 5 years ago (a lie).
Takezo completes his moral training in the attic and is granted his new samurai name: Musashi Miyamoto. To complete his training on his own, the priest orders him to set off on a solo journey to gain enlightenment. Before he leaves, he asks the priest if he can say goodbye to Otsu. The priest says hmmm….no. And also you’ve been reborn. The past is the past. Live laugh love.
Takezo is a SWEETIE though so he can’t help himself and goes to Otsu’s job to say goodbye. She apologizes and he tells her to let him go. She has receipts, though, telling him he promised her they’d start a new life and so why did she even wait and then begs him to let her join him.
He tells her he loves her and eventually caves and says she can come with.
Takezo and Otsu
She says, wait a sec I have to get my bag. He nods. After checking back SEVERAL times to confirm, he nods back SEVERAL times. And of course, this dude is long gone once she gets her bag and her hat, leaving her a note carved into the bridge that says “Soon I will be back. Forgive me.”
In a dusty field, he walks into the sunset.
I have mixed feelings about every single one of these characters (mostly the weird priest) which makes for a very fun watch. It also has many elements that I enjoy in my reality television, but packaged in an epic with gorgeous kimonos.
I AM READY FOR PART TWO, which will be next week’s dispatch: Samurai II: Duel at Ichijoji Temple. Will it be a #horsemovie? If a movie simply has a lot of horses in it, is it a #horsemovie? Do #horsemovies exist? Stay tuned.
XOXO,
Steph
Takezo’s relatives are mad at him because he took the good horses.