A Fistful of Ryo

It was the Daniel Pinkwater novel, Alan Mendelsohn, Boy From Mars, that first drew us, indirectly, to this excellent Kurosawa film. Leonard Neeble and Alan Mendelsohn, the protagonists of Pinkwater’s book, receive Yojimbo’s Japanese-English Dictionary as part of their Advanced Course in Hyperstellar Archaeology course, and later meet the author, Clarence Yojimbo, who is actually a Venutian... well, the rest of that is going to have to be another epinion. On with this story.

So, being the reverent Pinkwater fans that we are, imagine our reaction when strolling through the video section of Border’s Book and coming across a film entitled, Yojimbo. We soon had the video in hand and in our video machine, so receiving our introduction to Akira Kurosawa’s samurai films.

Kurosawa was strongly influenced by American westerns, and used a similar film format to spin tales from feudal Japan. The storyline for Yojimbo, however, was borrowed from Dashiel Hammet’s Red Harvest. Compare the two stories. The similarities between Kurosawa’s nameless samurai and Hammet’s nameless “Continental Op” are obvious. The borrowing continued in Sergio Leone’s Fistful of Dollars, clearly a re-make of Yojimbo in the American west, minus Kurosawa’s wry humor, with Clint Eastwood grimly playing the lead role. More recently, director Walter Hill borrowed the storyline once more for the violent-yet-dreary, Last Man Standing, set in 1930’s Chicago and starring Bruce Willis.

Of all these “borrowings,” Hammet’s original story and Kurosawa’s film remain the best. Both employ subtle, tongue-in-cheek humor, though sometimes what Japanese consider screamingly funny may leave Americans shrugging. In Yojimbo, the masterful actor Toshiro Mifune plays the role of a ronin, an unemployed samurai, who wanders into a village torn apart by feuds between two gangs. Mifune’s nameless ronin is everything that the classic heroic samurai is not: he’s dirty, ragged, surly, and scratches himself frequently, suggesting he either needs a bath or has fleas -- or both. He’s out for his own gain, and expresses little interest in the goings-on of the village.

Yet he clearly is interested. Underneath his scruffy appearance, this snarling loner possesses a keen sense of honor. He’s also extremely clever.

His first clue that something is amiss in the village is pretty obvious: a small dog comes trotting around the corner with a severed human arm in its mouth. That’s enough to get anyone’s attention, and the ronin decides to rent a palette and a daily bowl of rice in a cheap flophouse and observe for a while. His peace is frequently disturbed by the hammering and gleeful cackling of the coffin-maker next door whose business is brisk in the violent times.

Once the thugs from both gangs get a taste of the ronin’s mastery of swordplay, both gang leaders want to hire him as a “yojimbo” -- a bodyguard. The ronin seems to waver between the two gangs, and both continue upping the price. The flophouse owner scorns the ronin for selling his honor. What he does with the money, however, reveals his true self under the ragged disguise.

The ronin continues playing one gang against the other, leading both gangs to systematically destroy one another. It nearly gets the ronin himself and his allies killed, but as one might expect, justice does triumph in the end.

In addition to Yojimbo, don’t miss its sequel, Sanjuro, (“thirty-year-old”) where our ragged ronin returns to help nine naive and terribly young samurai root out the corruption that is destroying their clan.