Unleashing Chaos: How Akira Kurosawa's 'Yojimbo' Masterfully Spins a Tale of Deception and Dark Humor

 Written By: Ken Hulsey.

For the last few weeks, Terri and I have spent our Saturday afternoons watching films by legendary Japanese filmmaker Akira Kurosawa. The first film that we watched was the 1961 samurai epic Yojimbo, which has inspired numerous films like A Fistful of Dollars (which is a direct rip-off) and Star Wars, just to name two.

The film follows a former samurai named Sanjuro who wanders into a rural village controlled by two rival gangs. Seeing an opportunity to raise a little money and have a little fun, Sanjuro plays the two sides against each other by manipulating their lust for power and paranoia to make them destroy each other. Desperate for the samurai's allegiance to destroy their rival, each faction tries to buy his services. Just as one side believes they have bought the samurai and he is on their side, he flips allegiances and demands a higher price.  

It is a dark comedy that works on so many levels and, like most Kurosawa films, draws the viewer into the story and action to where you almost feel like you lived through the events instead of just viewing them.

Roger Ebert wrote about Yojimbo:

Almost the first thing the samurai sees when he arrives is a dog trotting down the main street with a human hand in its mouth. The town seems deserted until a nervous little busybody darts out and offers to act as an employment service: He'll get the samurai a job as a yojimbo -- a bodyguard. The samurai, a large, dusty man with indifference bordering on insolence, listens and does not commit. He wants sake and something to eat.

Yojimbo / Sanjuro: Two Samurai Films by Akira Kurosawa (The Criterion Collection) [4K UHD] - $39.99 @ Amazon.com - Order Now!

So opens "Yojimbo" (1961), Akira Kurosawa's most popular film in Japan. He was deliberately combining the samurai story with the Western, so that the wind-swept main street could be in any frontier town, the samurai (Toshiro Mifune) could be a gunslinger, and the local characters could have been lifted from John Ford's gallery of supporting actors.

Ironic, that having borrowed from the Western, Kurosawa inspired one: Sergio Leone's "A Fistful of Dollars" (1964), with Clint Eastwood, is so similar to "Yojimbo" that homage shades into plagiarism. Even Eastwood's Man With No Name is inspired, perhaps, by the samurai in "Yojimbo." Asked his name, the samurai looks out the window, sees a mulberry field, and replies, "Kuwabatake Sanjuro," which means "30-year-old mulberry field." He is 30, and that is a way of saying he has no name.

He also has no job. The opening titles inform us that in 1860, after the collapse of the Tokugawa Dynasty, samurai were left unemployed and wandered the countryside in search of work. We see Sanjuro at a crossroads, throwing a stick into the air and walking in the direction it points. That brings him to the town, to possible employment, and to a situation that differs from Hollywood convention in that the bad guys are not attacking the good guys because there are no good guys: "There is," the critic Donald Richie observes, "almost no one in the whole town who for any conceivable reason is worth saving." It's said Kurosawa's inspiration was Dashiell Hammett's novel Red Harvest, in which a private eye sets one gang against another.

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