Samurai Reincarnation (1981)

aka Makai Tenshou

Directed by Kinji Fukasaku
Written by Kinji Fukasaku and Tatsuo Nogami, based on the novel by Futaro Yamada
Starring
- Shinichi (“Sonny”) Chiba
- Kenji Sawada
- Akiko Kana
- Ken Ogata
- Hiroyuki Sanada

It’s time for another roundtable from the B-Masters Cabal! The banner above will take you to the supersoaker of links for all the participating websites. Enjoy!

I’ve poked gentle fun at Sonny Chiba before (specifically here, here, and here — and that last one wasn’t really too gentle). But let’s face it: When the man is in his element, he is the ultimate bad-ass. (By “in his element, I mean he’s speaking his native language and the American distributors are letting him use his own voice instead of being dubbed by Truman Capote and he’s not fighting rubbery fishmen.) He’s so bad-ass that he can make a Barbie-style ponytail look cool.

Granted, in Samurai Reincarnation it actually takes a while to meet up with Chiba, but that’s okay; everything else about his movie is pretty impressive, too. In fact, it’s probably the best “reanimated Christian turns evil and assembles a posse to take down the Shogun” movie out there.

The historical preamble takes us back three centuries, to when the Christians of Shimabara staged an uprising against the Shogun. The Shogun responded with characteristic forbearance, i.e. none at all, and slaughtered the Christians in a three-month battle. All 37,000 of them. All of this is helpfully explained to us against a backdrop of the defeated Christians, their heads stuck on pikes amidst a smattering of destroyed crosses. Coupled with the low-lying fog and the muted purples of the stormy sky, it makes for a very impressive tableau, and an indication that we’re in for some sumptuous visuals ahead.

Having defeated their enemy, the Shogun’s men take some time to celebrate, by which I mean they sit stock still with stony expressions while a single masked dancer gyrates and sings a mournful-sounding dirge. (History remembers this as the “Partying Shogunate.”) During the performance, a storm whips up, and as lightning strikes the pavilion, the severed head of the young Christian leader Amakusa Shiro (Kenji Sawada) flies across the stage… The lightning leaves the men all unconscious or dead on the ground, with only the dancer, now become Shiro himself, standing.

And nary an empty pew to be found.

Shiro surveys the carnage, crying for the lost ones and raging against God for letting this happen to His people. (Apparently Shiro’s knowledge of the history of Christianity goes back no farther than monolithic Catholicism and the “Church Triumphant.” He would have been well served to study the first couple of centuries of Christians in the Roman Empire — you know, the ones whose pacifism made them the preferred food for pet lions everywhere.) Inconsolate and offended against what he sees as divine betrayal, he turns his back on God and instead offers himself to the powers of darkness if they will help him take vengeance on the Shogun. Said powers are usually only too willing to accomodate, and so…

The structure of the movie is really very simple. Shiro collects a posse of similarly disillusioned souls, each suffering from some betrayal or unfulfilled desire, and persuades them to also give themselves over to them dark powers in order to be “reincarnated” (a poor choice of wording in the English translation) as demonically empowered beings and help his crusade. That takes about half of the movie; the other half is Sonny Chiba taking down Shiro’s posse one by one.

Shiro’s first recruit is the dead soul of Lady Hosokawa (Akiko Kana), whose Christianity became such a sticking point with her unconverted husband that he abandoned her bed in favor of concubines, and later abandoned her altogether as an unclaimed hostage during a military campaign. Promising her a chance to revenge herself upon her husband personally, Shiro summons her soul into another body (whose? I dunno) and restores to her her legendary beauty.

Next up is Miyamoto Musashi (Ken Ogata), a legendary and undefeated swordsman who, at age sixty-two, is about to go down to his grave unfulfilled. He gave up everything for his swordsmanship, including the love of his life Otsu, but in the end he never had a chance to cross swords with the Shogun’s personal trainer and his son Jubei, both reputed to be the best swordsmen in all of Japan. Shiro and Lady Hosokawa bring him back on his deathbed with the promise that he will be able to prove his skill on both of them. In a stroke of irony, no sooner has Musashi turned to the demonic side, but who should come by his place looking for him? None other than the aforementioned Jubei (Sonny Chiba, decked out all in black with a small sword guard as an eyepatch), hoping to learn from him. Oh, the irony.

Sonny Chiba, keeping his tsuba where he can keep his eye on it.

The next up is Inshun, a martial artist and pilgrim whose chastity isn’t sitting so well with him. In fact, it’s fair to say that Inshun has issues, which express themselves as fantasies of slaughtering passing women on the trail. Lady Hosokawa tempts Inshun herself, taunting him with her body as she leads him over cliffs and streams, until finally he commit suicide at his own frustration. As you can imagine, he readily comes back when given the promise of flesh for the taking in Shiro’s service.

And finally, there’s Kirimaru (Hiroyuki Sanada), a young man of a hidden Iga Ninja village. His home is attacked by the Koga Ninja, and when Kirimaru is left the last survivor with a fatal wound, it’s easy to see why he would accept Shiro’s offer of demonic reincarnation and vengeance. Shiro and friends also take the occasion to wreak havok on the Koga Ninja, with Inshun fighting like a bandit in contrast to Musashi’s calm economy of motion. (There’s also a female ninja among the Koga, and I have just one word for Inshun in regard to the treatment of a woman’s breasts: GENTLY.) Jubei shows up soon thereafter, only to see the ghostly cohorts ride off cackling.

Now. I’m going to plant this asterisk here, but don’t worry about it. Just remember that it’s here, and I’ll tell you why in a bit.

The demons being assembled, Shiro’s plan of revenge begins. First up, Shiro arranges for the beautiful Lady Hosokawa to be at the Shogun’s private shrine under the adopted name “Otama” to bewitch him. It works; the young Shogun (Noboru Matsuhashi) is smitten, especially when Otama arranges for him to see her change her clothes in the middle of the night. The chamberlains try to head off the romance and make Otama “disappear,” but they’re too late. And even if the Shogun hadn’t already bedded her (can you say “futoned her”?), Shiro shows up to make sure the chamberlains can’t upset his plans. Shiro uses an unusual weapon; a whiplike rope made from clumps of hair from the beheaded Christian women at Shimabara. From the way that sparks fly down its length whenever Shiro wields it, I’m guessing the Christian women had a terrible problem with static cling.

This is Shiro, and as you can tell, he’s dying for a smoke.

One of the few left who can see the danger posed to the Shogunate by Otama is Yagyu (legendary actor Tomisaburo Wakayama of the “Lone Wolf and Cub” movies), who, though elderly and afflicted with a terminal disease, can still slice’n'dice with the best of them. He intends to go and kill Otama, then, naturally, kill himself. But on his way over… he meets Inshun, who’s having his way with yet another maiden. Thankfully, in the battle that ensues, Yagyu does a favor and removes the most distasteful character from the movie; these demon-revived dead can apparently still be killed (again) by the normal means. And then Yagyu succumbs to his disease. But just as he’s fading, Shiro comes and makes him one of his patented offers (mostly to fill out the spot in the posse now vacated by Inshun), and Yagyu comes to realize that his greatest rival in swordsmanship is none other than his son Jubei — and that his unfulfilled desire is to fight him one-on-one.

Which means that, once Jubei comes home, he ends up fighting his zombiefied dad until he can make his escape.

Now. I’ll go ahead and put in another asterisk to bracket these paragraphs:

Right. Up until the recently-released remastered DVD with English and Japanese language tracks, the only way to see this movie in America was the pan-and-scan dubbed VHS (or the cheap pseudo-public domain DVDs mastered from the VHS). And in that version, the scenes between the asterisks — a full half-hour of the movie — are omitted in their entirety. This isn’t just tightening the movie up for American audiences; that’s doing wholesale violence to the story. I first saw the movie like that, and without all of that I had no idea who Yagyu was when he appears later, or that he had joined up with Shiro; hell, I had no idea that the Shogun was the Shogun! Whatever possessed the earlier distributors to simply lose two whole reels of the movie, I’m sure it kept Shogun Reincarnation from ever achieving the fan following it should have. (And knowing this, I watched both versions! Am I not worthy of your respect, your admiration, your GoogleAd clickthrus?)

All right, enough of the castigation; back to the action. Shiro now curses the Shogun’s lands, so that the crops are all too blighted to harvest. The local farmers all go haywire, asking the governor to forgive them their tax debt for that season; but because the governor’s too worried about pleasing the Shogun, he does nothing for his peasants. When the Shogun announces he’s coming to the area for a deer hunt (thus placing a heavier burden on the locals for his upkeep), some of the farmers try to present a petition to the Shogun directly during the hunt. But Omatsu/Lady Hosokawa’s and Yagyu’s sorcery make the Shogun take the farmers for deer, and the three of them shoot them down with arrows as part of the hunt.

How does this serve Shiro’s purposes? Well, when the governor has the six men’s bodies crucified as a public warning, Shiro causes one of the women in the crowd of mourners to incite the crowd to attack the governor and take down the bodies to lift the curse. Then, once the crowd’s bloodlust is high, Shiro whips them up even further and leads them down the road in a revolt against the Shogun.

As usual, Jubei shows up just a bit too late, and gets to help with the cleanup. (He also gets to bury Kirimaru, the young demonified Iga Ninja who had gotten into a disagreement with Shiro about a woman. Sorry to shortchange that storyline, but jeez — how long do you want this review to be?) He’s also got an ace: a sword made especially for him by reclusive swordmaker Muramasa (Tetsuro Tamba), a reputedly evil man whose swords are therefore evil as well, and thus just the thing to strike down demons in the flesh.

“I HATE fighting in wet socks!”

From here, we head into the two best fight scenes in the movie, and possibly all of samurai cinema. One pits Jubei against Musashi along the seashore, both men running along the edge of the tide as they strike at each other. Jubei manages to prevail over the older (and deader) swordsman, and turns himself toward the Shogun’s palace at Edo.

But things are already underway there. Omatsu/Lady Hosokawa manages to work the Shogun into a jealous rage, and in attacking her he accidentally tips over a lamp, which appears to start the fire that soon engulfs the entire city. (Okay, it might also have been the peasant uprising, but we never actually see them again after a scene in which two old men watch the mob jogging down the road and comment on the damn-fool possessed farmers off to hit the capital.) By the time Jubei gets there, the Shogun has perished in the flames, Yagyu and Lady Hosokawa have killed half of the Shogun’s household, and the castle is going up in flames. Here begins the fight scene that places the seashore fight, as beautiful as it was, in distant second place: Jubei, his skin painted with mystical Sanskrit symbols for protection, faces off against his father in the burning palace. What’s most amazing about this is the realism: This isn’t just a few random flames and some smoke to indicate the fire, this is two actors chopping at each other inside a very real, very on-fire structure. And once Yagyu is defeated, Jubei still has to face Shiro, as the castle gets even more flame-filled than before. It’s a sequence that will have you wondering, How in the hell did they shoot this?

“Hold up a sec– I think I got a cinder in my eye.”

If you know anything about Japanese history (and I’m scarcely an expert), you’ll recognize almost all of the names herein. Amakusa Shiro was the real leader of the Christian uprising; Miyamoto Musashi was a real and respected swordsman of incredible skill, as were Yagyu and Jubei. Of them all, Jubei is the one about whom most tales were told, owing to his unexplained absence from the Shogunate’s official records for a dozen years; romances and folk tales grew up around the hardened but righteous fighter, black-clad and one-eyed, wandering the countryside and exacting justice. Even in those tales, though, he never fought the resurrected Christian leader or Miyamoto Musashi, nor did he ever fight his own father to the death while Edo burned down around his ears. It’s a fast-and-loose treatment of history, which should be right at home with Americans who recently awarded a Best Picture Oscar to a film in which a Roman emperor is killed in public gladiatorial combat with an Australian.

But history be damned; the Edo period is to the Japanese what the Old West is to Americans, a mythic past whose historical confines are almost infinitely malleable to accomodate the confines of the story. Think of it as a historically-flavored fantasy if you must; above all, simply appreciate the beauty of some of the best samurai action ever committed to film.