In “Patriotism,” Mishima famously filmed himself going through the motions of hara-kiri four years before he eventually committed suicide in almost exactly the same manner.

In “HitoKiri,” he plays Tanaka Shinbei. When Shinbei’s sword is found at a high official’s assassination scene, he quickly commits seppuku. Given the actor, that’s hardly a spoiler.

As a still, this is one of the most menacing images I’ve ever seen of Mishima.

The film itself seems to be particularly relevant to Mishima’s concerns in 1969, which is when it was filmed. According to IMDB, the film was released February of 1970*, just months before Mishima’s own late November exit.

Hitokiri translates roughly to “manslayer.” The alternate title of the film, Tenchu!, was a battle-cry, meaning “divine punishment.”

Hitokiri is a cinematic retelling of the tale of The Four Hitokiri of the Bakumatsu. These warriors opposed the shogunate and favored the restoration of the Emperor to power. This role was chosen with artful precision. Not only did Mishima’s character commit suicide, but the Four Hitokiri, like Mishima, were supporters of the Emperor. Mishima’s private army, the Tatenokai, were a spiritual army sworn to “shield” the ideal of the Emperor.

Apparently, Mishima also sang the film’s theme song (!!?!?!). I’m working on that…

Review of Hitokiri on Midnight Eye

http://www.midnighteye.com/reviews/hitokiri.shtml

Review of Hitokiri on Movie Feast

http://moviefeast.blogspot.com/2008/06/tenchu-hitokiri-1969.html

Review of Hitokiri on Lard Biscuit Enterprises

http://www.lardbiscuit.com/jidaigeki/gosha-tenchu.html

* At least in the USA. I was unable to find a Japanese release date, but it couldn’t have been much sooner if the film was produced in 1969.

h/t  the Werwolf Ensemble guys, who told me about this film.

Aaron Embry of the group Amnion has recently re-scored the film with his own composition, and made it available for download here, free of charge.

I really enjoyed the haunting main theme. I downloaded it and listened to it in my truck on the way to work this morning and it worked in the rain, though while the old lp effect makes sense with the film, it might be reduced in the mix a bit for use as a stand alone track–it can be kinda distracting.  And one thought-and this is just my own thought–I had was that it might be nice to have some sort of metallic sound over Mishima’s the officer’s suicide.

In the story that the film is based on, Mishima wrote this:

“Was this seppuku?–he was thinking. It was a sensation of utter chaos, as if the sky had fallen on his head and the world was reeling drunkenly. His will power and courage, which had seemed so robust before he made the  incision, had now dwindled to something like a single hairlike thread of steel, and he was assailed by the uneasy feeling that he must advance along this thread, clinging to it with desperation.”

It would be interesting to hear some musical evocation of that thread, which I mentally picture as being something like a silver wire…Sun & Steel reference I suppose…

All in all it is an excellent effort and I always like to see creative work inspired by Mishima.

Norbert Elliot
New Jersey Institute of Technology
World Literature II, Lecture 12 – Yukio Mishima

The presentation is fairly even handed and informative, and Elliot does a decent job of putting the short story in context with Mishima’s other work as well as the events of November 25, 1970. Mercifully, he avoids the overbearing narcissism angle and identifies Mishima’s suicide, correctly I think, as a carefully executed aesthetic and symbolic statement–poetry with a splash of blood.

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