Harakiri is a 1962 Japanese film directed by Masaki Kobayashi. The story takes place between 1619 and 1630 during the Edo period and the reign of the Tokugawa shogunate. It tells of a ronin, Hanshiro Tsugumo, who instead of committing seppuku (ritual suicide by disembowelment) after his lord was deposed, was ordered to stay alive in order to care for his daughter and grandson as well as his son-in-law, the son of another samurai who had committed the ritual suicide.
At the start of the film, Hanshiro Tsugumo shows up at the house of a feudal lord, Kageyu Saito, looking for a suitable place to commit seppuku. At the time, it is told, it was fairly common for disgraced samurai to make the same request, or threat, in the hope of receiving alms from the lord of the house. But Kageyu Saito tells Hanshiro a warning story. Earlier in the year, another ronin, Motome Chijiiwa, made the same request and the samurai retainers of the house called his bluff: they forced him to go through with the ceremony and kill himself. Not only that, but when Motome’s sword was revealed to be a fake made of blunt bamboo, they insisted that he disembowel himself with it anyway, so that Motome’s death was agonizingly painful. Despite this warning, Tsugumo is not discouraged and maintains his request to commit seppuku.
While getting ready for the suicide, Hanshiro Tsugumo recounts his tale to Kageyu Saito and his retainers. His lord’s house was considered a threat and toppled by forces of the shogunate. His friend, another samurai, committed seppuku and left Tsugumo to look after his son, who, it turns out, was Motome Chijiiwa. With the responsibility of looking after Chijiiwa and also his own daughter Miho, Hanshiro was unable to choose the ‘honorable’ way to end his life, and instead has had to live in poverty and work menial jobs in order to support his family.
When they got older, Motome Chijiiwa and Miho Tsugumo end up getting married and had a son, Kingo, but they continued to live on in poverty. When Miho and Kingo got ill, they couldn’t afford the services of a physician and Chijiiwa came up with the plot of threatening to commit seppuku at a lord’s house. Following his death, Miho and Kingo end up dying from their illnesses.
Before coming to Kageyu Saito’s house, Hanshiro Tsugumo tracked down three retainers of the house, Hikokuro Omodaka, Hayato Yazaki and Umenosuke Kawabe, who he blamed for the deaths of his family. Instead of killing them in combat, he disgraced them by cutting off the topknots of their hair.
After finishing his story, Hanshiro Tsugumo is attacked by the retainers of the furious lord Kageyu Saito. He has to fight all of them off alone, killing four while slowly succumbing to his wounds. Finally, as a new group of retainers arrives armed with guns, Tsugumo commits seppuku to avoid being killed by them.
The film presents a negative view of the emerging feudal system at the beginning of the 17th century, depicting the hypocrisy in the flimsy pretext of honor exhibited by the daimyo. At the time, harakiri was seen as a means to retain one’s honor after a disgrace, better even than doing good deeds.[citation needed] The vanity of the feudal lord’s counsellor Kageyu Saito is also shown: the outward appearance of honour is shown to be more important to him than real honour. He orders the retainers disgraced by Hanshiro Tsugumo to commit seppuku, and makes sure that those who were slain and who had their topknots cut off by Hanshiro are written off as casualties to illness so that his house would not appear weak.
Harakiri stars Tatsuya Nakadai and Rentaro Mikuni.
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