J: You have to show interest. Be excited. And flirty. Let’s practice.
M: Okay.
J: “Hi.”
M: “Hey, Sexy!”
J: …..
M: Too much?
“Here’s a secret. Many novelists, if they are pressed and if they are being honest, will admit that the finished book is a rather rough translation of the book they’d intended to write. It’s one of the heartbreaks of writing fiction. You have, for months or years, been walking around with the idea of a novel in your mind, and in your mind it’s transcendent, it’s brilliantly comic and howlingly tragic, it contains everything you know, and everything you can imagine, about human life on the planet earth. It is vast and mysterious and awe-inspiring. It is a cathedral made of fire.
But even if the book in question turns out fairly well, it’s never the book that you’d hoped to write. It’s smaller than the book you’d hoped to write. It is an object, a collection of sentences, and it does not remotely resemble a cathedral made of fire.
And still. We, as a species, are always looking for cathedrals made of fire, and part of the thrill of reading a great book is the promise of another yet to come, a book that may move us even more deeply, raise us even higher. One of the consolations of writing books is the seemingly unquenchable conviction that the next book will be better, will be bigger and bolder and more comprehensive and truer to the lives we live. We exist in a condition of hope, we love the beauty and truth that come to us, and we do our best to tamp down our doubts and disappointments.
We are on a quest, and are not discouraged by our collective suspicion that the perfection we look for in art is about as likely to turn up as is the Holy Grail. That is one of the reasons we, I mean we humans, are not only the creators, translators and consumers of literature, but also its subjects.”
MICHAEL CUNNINGHAM
Is there any group of people on the planet more eagle-eyed than 8th graders? I think not. Eighth graders are the people we should’ve sent out to locate Osama Bin Laden. They see everything. They forgive nothing.
– Sugar, Dear Sugar
Wrapped in a white kimono with a katana and tantō at his side, a Japanese nobleman kneels before an ornate temple. He ceremoniously unties the thick cloth belt around his waist, loosening his jacket and exposing his stomach. We know what will happen next – anyone who watches Samurai films knows what will happen next, but still, we’re unprepared for Miike’s depiction of hara-kiri.
The nobleman pulls his short blade from its sheath, and with only a moment’s hesitation, plunges it into his tender gut. We focus on the nobleman’s face as he fights back yelps of pain, groaning and grimacing with every push of the blade. His insides squish and stir as he pulls the blade slowly from left to right, each grotesquely real sound penetrating and forcing you to shift in your seat. He continues to drag the knife across his body, fighting against the thick resistance of his organs until he fully disembowels himself and falls forward onto a blood-soaked robe.
It is the first of many unsettling scenes Miike masterfully depicts in this two-hour Samurai epic. The gore is intense, but always more disturbing than nauseating, and always with purpose.
The nobleman’s ritual seppuku is a tragic necessity after being shamed by the corrupt Lord Naritsugu who raped and murdered the nobleman’s daughter. And Lord Naritsugu (played perfectly by Gorô Inagaki) embodies evil in its purest form. His insatiable bloodlust and hatred reminds me of Amon Goeth (Ralph Feinns) in Schindler’s List, who stands on a balcony, shooting Jews with a rifle for sport.
Lord Naritsugu’s evil becomes impossible to ignore when Shinzaemon Shimada (our hero) is presented with one of Naritsugu’s victims: Another nobleman’s daughter whose limbs have been cut off and tongue cut out, only to have been raped repeatedly by Naritsugu before he grew bored and threw her onto the street. Seeing this horror, Shinzaemon played by Kôji Yakusho (Memoirs of A Geisha, Babel) and twelve other assassins take up the cause, vowing to kill Naritsugu before he gains complete control over the powerful Shogunites.
The story remains faithful to the genre, paying homage to the original 1963 classic and to films like Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai. And like these films, our band of outsiders is tasked with an impossible mission with impossible odds. From the beginning, we know few, if any, will make it out alive.
But despite the conventions, Miike reinvigorates the genre with glossy cinematography and ingenious flairs of creativity during battle, including four or five incredibly clever surprises in the 45-minute battle scene. Yes, 45 glorious, suspenseful, heartbreaking, surprising, superbly choreographed, gory minutes of battle that start with Shinzaemon’s “pep talk” to his outnumbered men, “You’ve entrusted me with your lives, and I’ll spend them at my disposal.”
When the epic battle finally comes to an end, you’re exhausted, physically and emotionally, but completely satisfied. My only disappointment with Miike’s Thirteen Assassins is that I have to wait until it’s released on DVD to see it again.