Koto no Tsume, Revisited (or: Koto no Two-me)

This is just a quick post to make mention of something I'm extraordinarily excited about. Recently, I was contacted by someone who had read my post about Koto no Tsume (which we're henceforth going to call Last Days of the Samurai) and asked me if I was interested in subtitling the movie, since they actually had a copy of it. That's the kind of thing you don't have to ask me twice!

You can now, for the first time in close to 70 years, watch this movie with English subtitles here. Massive thanks to kagetsuhisoka for proofreading and re-timing the entire thing after Aegisub let me down.

Now that I've actually watched the movie, I can say more about it. Last Days of the Samurai is a very emotionally fraught film, but in terms of its visuals, it's quite the bare-bones affair: there are maybe two or three sets (which could very well have been re-used from another production), the whole thing takes place over the span of about two days, and it has a relatively small cast, out of which surprisingly few people have speaking parts. Hirata's character Ushioda only has a couple of lines; his role is basically to be salty about the whole affair and then eventually die off-screen, and yes, as seen above, when we first see him he is shaving Yu Fujiki's face, which is, uh, interesting? Again, not as fun as his role in Inagaki's Chushingura, but I do always enjoy these roles where he gets to be angsty as I think he plays that particular emotion very well.

I find it kind of unusual that Ushioda isn't referred to by name in the film - as in, there's no point where anybody directly addresses him using his name (his name is mentioned, but only when he's off-screen). The same goes for most of the miscellaneous ronin. Looking at the Toho News sheet I included in my last post, it seems like the actors did have their characters' names written under their pictures in promotional materials, but aside from that, you wouldn't be able to tell who the less-prominently-featured members of the cast were meant to be playing.

As for the rest of the cast, this film feels mostly like a vehicle for its three leads (Ganjiro Nakamura, Chikage Ogi and Koshiro Matsumoto), and they really hit it out of the park. There's not much of a script to work with, here, and the storyline is well-trodden territory, but Ogi and Nakamura as the star-crossed lovers especially give a very evocative performance, and Matsumoto pulls off his role with exactly the strong sense of dignity that was no doubt intended. (We may recall Senjaku Nakamura getting all his teeth pulled out in Yagyu Secret Scrolls.) 

Takanori Ushioda's terrible, horrible, no-good, very bad day.

Anyway, if all of that sounds like something you'd be interested in, you can now judge the film for yourself. It's a pleasure to know that this is out there in a format more accessible to English-speakers, so I hope you'll give it a look-see. The link, again, is here, the movie is available as both an mp4 with burned-in subtitles and as a higher-quality mkv.