One of two key inflectional points in Kurosawa Akira’s Mādadayo (1993) occurs about halfway into the film. Living amidst the wreckage of a Japan utterly ruined by the United States, Uchida Hyakken (Matsumura Tatsuo), writer and retired professor of German, and his wife (Kagawa Kyōko) receive a visit from their neighbor across the street (Yamashita Tetsuo), a now impoverished former member of the dissolved House of Peers. He is accompanied by a prospective buyer for his property, an oleaginous, new money profiteer (Kusanagi Kōichirō); the sort of malefactor that proliferates in times of hardship. Arriving at Uchida’s doorstep with grand plans for a McMansion, he turns apoplectic when the property owner first reprimands for his lack of consideration for his neighbors, then refuses to sell to him. In a gently paced film that is often about losing with dignity, it is a rare moment of triumph.
Watching this final screening at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures’ retrospective of Kurosawa’s extant filmography, the film’s ambivalent depiction of Japan under imported demokurashii contrasts tellingly with the more overt sympathy for American liberalism evident in the director’s films from the “economic miracle” period. Where films such as Stray Dog and High and Low depicted the new Japan’s shortcomings as, at best, local failures to be mended with reform, at worst, necessary evils, Mādadayo is far more cynical. “They say that democracy is the ideal system,” Uchida sings out in a rowdy, doggerel ondō at the height of festivities at the dai-ichi mādakai. “But it’s only thieves who reap the benefits.”
Mādadayo is Kurosawa’s final film and it brings to mind another conflicted Japanese film that was intended as a valedictory, Miyazaki Hayao’s The Wind Rises (2013). Both films treat their subject as a proxy for the director’s own anxieties about man and nation facing the corrosive power of time. Whereas the later film treats this theme more ambiguously, Kurosawa is characteristically blunt, all but asking just what the hell was Japan’s 20th century all about.
This doubt is further intensified in the film’s other pivotal nodal point, towards the later half. In that scene Uchida somberly presides over a small dinner ostensibly celebrating his peace with the sudden loss of a beloved house cat and the just as sudden arrival of a new one. The sensei recalls an old dōyō recounting the legend about the White Hare of Inaba meeting the god Daikokuten. Skinned and bloodied, both legend and song conclude with the White Hare restored to health thanks to the god’s benevolence. Yet his fur is really only a coat of cattails. As the grief-stricken silence of Uchida’s former pupils and the whimpering of his wife imply, the new-found serenity that the sensei and the new Japan attain is only surface deep.
A friend of my brother’s described Mādadayo as an “old man’s film.” On our return home from watching Ran at the David Geffen Theatre, my brother rued that Kurosawa had “lost something” in his final films. To an extent both statements are true about Mādadayo. Its characters inhabit a world defined by youthful idealism betrayed — Uchida’s as much as Kurosawa’s. Drenched in the retrospective gaze of lateness, linear narrative is no longer possible; the film instead is broken into a series of sometimes incongruous vignettes. The experience of watching is like that of thumbing through a stranger’s photo album.
At the film’s final mādakai, the humility of the first is contrasted with the display of plenty and, tellingly, of women who earlier remained mostly in the film’s wings. The sensei, older and more fragile now, remains the center of this social fabric, and this gives rise to further unsettling implications. Because after the sun in this solar system burns out, nothing will be left to keep its satellite planets from dispersing into the void. Even the presence of young people in this scene suggests they have no sensei of their own to build their lives around. Kurosawa leaves the question dangling in the air, all the more provocatively given that he posed it in the wake of the end of Japan’s bubble economy and the start of its “Lost Decades”: If the old, monarchist, patriarchal world fostered this sort of community, was it really all that bad?
When in August 1945 the Shōwa emperor (to whom Matsumura’s Uchida bears a probably not uncoincidental likeness) broadcast Japan’s surrender, he exhorted the nation to make peace by “bearing the unbearable and suffering what is insufferable.” The characters and even the landscape in Mādadayo do just that. Like in the dōyō about the White Hare, even the most harrowing pain can be transcended. But survival comes at a great cost and some hurts can never be healed.
Better to be a hare left whole than a skinned one, no matter how prosperous.