黒牢城,
Murashige suspects foul play, and sets out to determine the culprit by interviewing suspects, many of whom mention that Koori Juemon (Bright Future's Joe Odagiri) was wielding a longbow that night, though he swears it was to protect the castle from invaders. With no other leads, Murashige takes an unorthodox step by asking Kanbei, the prisoner, to help him solve the mystery. With his help, he does, but the film isn't over as the battle for Arioka Castle continues.
As the seasons change from winter to spring to summer to fall, there are more murders and further mysteries involving theft and arson, and Kanbei helps him to solve each one. Murashige offers to release him if he renounces his allegiance to Oda and joins his war council. After all, that's what Murashige once did, and the prisoner has earned his respect. Kanbei agrees, but that doesn't mean he's trustworthy, not least when he says he's more interested in serving the man, whom he also respects, than the mission, which he believes is lost. Murashige also has his men to consider, sibce they're unlikely to accept a Harima member as a colleague. It's a conundrum with no easy answers.
I haven't seen all of Kurosawa's feature films, but I've seen a baker's dozen, and The Samurai and the Prisoner marks his first jidaigeki. He does the genre proud on every level, particularly the cinematography from Cloud's Yasuyuki Sasaki who works wonders with light and shadow, though it isn't his first historical effort, since the Ryūsuke Hamaguchi co-written Wife of a Spy, one of his few films to center on a female character, took place during World War II.
Kurasawa has always been terrific at casting, and he's really upped the ante this time around, because every actor rises to the occasion, including Yuriko Yoshitaka, the sole woman, as Murashige's wife, Chiyoho, a Siege of Nagashima survivor who doesn't understand her husband's reticence to kill even as she's haunted by the blood-soaked, Nobunaga-fueled nightmares of her childhood.
(Kiyoshi Kurosawa, 2026, Japan, 147 minutes)
True to its title, Kiyoshi Kurosawa's The Samurai and the Prisoner is a jidaigeki, or period drama, adapted from Honobu Yonezawa's 2021 novel Kokurôjô, with a warrior and a captive, but it's also an eastern proto-western and a murder mystery with all the trimmings.
In 16th century Japan, specifically during the Sengoku period, there will be mysteries aplenty and circumstances will make a detective out of Araki Murashige (Departures' Masahiro Motoki), lord of Settsu and enemy of brutal warlord Oda Nobunaga (Shingo Bandô), who aims to overtake Arioka Castle. Though merciful, Murashige will do what it takes to protect his holdings.
When Kuroda Kanbei (Cloud's Masaki Suda), an exceptionally clever Oda envoy and a member of the rival Harima clan, tries to persuade him to surrender by insisting he can't win, Murashige imprisons him, and when Abe Jūemon switches loyalties from Murashige to Nobunaga, his 11-year-old son Jinen asks to be killed, just as Kanbei had done. Murashige refuses, despite his wife's entreaties, but the boy ends up dead anyway. According to the bushidō code, it was less shameful to be killed than to be imprisoned.
Though merciful (and possibly infertile), Murashige is hardly a pacifist, and when he feels it's time to attack Nobunaga's forces, he leads the charge, and his men successfully beat them back. In the melée, though he loses a favored warrior, and vows to keep an eye on his son. Considering Jinen's death combined with his wife's sorrow over their childlessness, I expected the boy to play a larger role, but Murashige never mentions him again.
The battle itself, though, produces another mystery regarding the death of Nobunaga commander Ōtsu Nagamasa and the role of two clans under Murashige's leadership, so he questions the Christian Takayama Dario (Ikkei Watanabe) and the Buddhist Saika Magoroku (Kiyohiko Shibukawa), just as he questioned the suspects in Jinen's murder, but the case remains unsolved until he seeks Kanbei's counsel, and once again, the prisoner delivers.
Like a Watson to his Holmes, Kanbei points him in the right direction, but Murashige comes to find, on his own, that all these mysterious deaths are connected. His mercy was seen as a vulnerability and an impediment to Settsu's survival, so an associate took matters into their own hands, but no one could see the long game Murashige was playing quite like Kanbei.
If there's a lesson here, and I believe there are a few, it's that listening can be a leader's greatest defense. I won't say whether Kanbei proves trustworthy or not, but Murashige takes him as seriously as his closest advisors, and learns more from him than anyone else. If they don't exactly ride off into the sunset at the end, Murashige is better off for knowing him.
That said, it took me a while to ease into the richly-detailed world Kurosawa creates, because there are so many characters, and their relationships to each other are as vital as they are complicated, but the more I watched, the more it all made sense. The director's films aren't usually this densely populated, though the way this one boils down to the tension between two worthy opponents, isn't especially unusual, and also powers previous films, like 1997 J-horror classic Cure, which took inspiration from the Starling vs. Lecter relationship in Jonathan Demme-by-way-of Thomas Harris's Silence of the Lambs. That captor vs. captive dynamic continues here.
Another notable performer, Yamato Kochi--a man with such a serious countenance that he tends to look a little loony when he smiles--who plays the crucial role of Settsu warrior Itami Ichirozaemon, may be most familiar to non-Japanese viewers, because he played "the walking man" in Genki Kawamura's Neon horror hit Exit 8, but Masahiro Motoki as Murashige makes the most significant impression as an unorthodox leader who doesn't owe his beliefs, in the film, to Christian or Buddhist teachings, but simply to the idea that there's nothing weak or unmanly about mercy, about knowing when to walk away, and about knowing how to make the perfect pot of tea.
The Samurai and the Prisoner plays SIFF Cinema Uptown through Thurs, Aug 20. Images from The Japan Times (Masaki Suda and Masahiro Motoki) and the IMDb (Motoki and Joe Odagiri and the defenders of Arioka Castle).
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