Samurai Trilogy, films by Hiroshi Inagaki

Before the Marvel Universe of superheroes, there were noble warriors in film. And the samurai of medieval Japan lend themselves particularly to the combination of physical skill, mental alertness, and spiritual centeredness that make an ordinary man heroic. The finest of these is the great actor Toshiro Mifune, who loves to embody penniless and slovenly characters who possess animal alertness, easily underestimated. 

Director Akira Kurosawa, who made Seven Samurai in 1954, also featured Mifune in later samurai epics: Yojimbo in 1961, Sanjuro in 1962. Between these, Inagaki made Samurai Trilogy, released in 1955. They’re all great for aficionados of the posturing, extended setup, and lightning fight scenes of swordsmen in action. 

Subplots aside, Part I broadly follows the development of a man (Mifune) who rejects his humble beginnings as a farmer and runs away to war, to win renown and to escape his extended family who despise him because he is savage, untamed and unrepentant. His physical prowess brings him to a certain point on his road to becoming a samurai, but as a Buddhist priest tells him, this strength is an obstacle to true development. 

Part II finds him, after three years locked in an attic with books, emerging as a more centered and learned man. He is now a respected and feared warrior, meeting the head of a famed samurai school in a duel. But he still has not learned to calm his spirit. 

In Part III, returning to his farming roots brings contentment – but his reputation has inspired a great young swordsman, played by Koji Tsuruta, to challenge him to a duel. They put off the fight while each develops his skills and fame, then at last they meet, in a memorable confrontation on the shore of an island. 

That’s the main story line, but this film is also shot beautifully: magnificent huge old pine trees, rolling fields, waterfalls, lush mountainsides, beautiful houses and castles, and hovels and inns full of flies and thieves, all form a compelling visual tapestry. When the plot bogs down in unrequited love, there’s still plenty to look at – your time is not wasted here despite melodramatic interludes. 

One might find oneself longing for a time when honor, courage, and dignity were cardinal virtues, and one needn’t resort to bullying to make one’s power felt. Those of us who love these films are grateful for the presence of Toshiro Mifune, playing the consummate outsider whose sword is, purportedly, for hire, but ultimately wielded in the service of justice.

Little, Big - by John Crowley

Little, Big by John Crowley

This is a novel to savor. It’s the Tale of Edgewood, a five-fronted house in the center of a pentangle of lands somewhere in upstate New York. This house, built around 1900 by architect John Drinkwater for his bride, Violet Bramble, daughter of Theosophists, hosts an ever-widening circle of Drinkwaters, Clouds, and Barnables. Violet as a child was known to have seen fairies, and one of her sons uses his granddaughters to entice and photograph them. The folk of the surrounding woods have names like Marjorie Juniper, Grandfather Trout, Amy Flowers, Robin Bird – while not fairies exactly they are sympathetic spirits. The world they inhabit touches ours, but is not the same as ours. Little, Big of the title refer to the interpenetrating realities variously larger and smaller than one another, and their larger and smaller inhabitants.

City cousin George Mouse hosts a party, at which his quiet noncommittal friend, Smoky Barnable, meets tall red-haired Daily Alice, for whom he leaves everything to join her at Edgewood: having children, teaching school to the neighbors, tinkering with the orrery (large moving brass model of the solar system) at the top of the house. Smoky, a mild rational man who doesn’t believe in fairies, lives with a household who consult an ancient tarot, keep secrets, and pursue dreams. Daily Alice’s father, who wrote dozens of children’s books about animals, confesses to one of his grandchildren that he didn’t make up the stories, he just eavesdropped on the small creatures of the woods and fields.

Society deteriorates. In the City, George Mouse converts a city block of rowhouses into Old Law Farm, the center an open space where he and those who join him raise goats and chickens, vegetables, and burn excess furniture to stay warm over increasingly long bitter winters. Wolves human and canine roam the streets, Old Law Farm is barricaded with locks, bars, and bricked-up doors and windows. Smoky and Daily Alice’s youngest child, Auberon, comes to the City to seek his fortune and takes up residence there, falling in love with Sylvie, a Puerto Rican with a Destiny, whose disappearance hollows out his sense of purpose, all his joy. He writes scripts for a popular soap opera, “A World Elsewhere,” based on his grandfather’s children’s stories.

A Hero wakes from eight centuries asleep, more demagogue than savior, and, questing for his lost Empire, foments war. In the struggle and economic collapse people starve, winters deepen and lengthen, and his Empire shudders along. Violet Bramble’s illegitimate daughter Ariel Hawksquill, a mage in the art of memory, first advises a cabal who seek to control the Hero, then when they turn on her, casts her lot with him. But Ariel’s wisdom lacks the chaos element. Late in the story, at Edgewood she observes, “No memory mansion of her own was built more overlappingly, with more corridors, more places that were two places at once, more precise in its confusions, than this house. She felt it rise around her, John’s dream, Violet’s castle, tall and many-roomed. It took hold of her mind, as though it were in fact made of memory; she saw, and it swept her into a fearful clarity to see, that if this were her own mind’s house, all her conclusions would now be coming out quite differently; quite, quite differently.”

Little, Big is full of joys and sorrows, wonderfully apt names and a multitude of small brilliant observations. One could read it a hundred times and find new connections, new notions, surprises and satisfactions. Like the greatest fictions of invented places, it has unerring internal consistency, integrity. We are the playthings of time and space, and other worlds interweave with the one we’re accustomed to, in ways we might glimpse or may never be capable of acknowledging. If you find “the world is too much with us,” as William Wordsworth’s poem says, take respite. Dig into this Tale, reimagine life.

Easy, a film by Andrea Magnani

Easy is a hero’s journey tale. Main character Isidore, “Easy,” is a fat Italian schlub who at thirty still lives with his mother. His brother Nico, the favored son, arrives for his birthday and receives a gift of a knitted sweater vest emblazoned with a huge 1. Easy’s vest has an equally huge 2 on it. Ouch.

But Nico has a problem. He’s a construction contractor, and one of his crew died onsite in an accident. The man was from Ukraine, and his body needs to be delivered there. The casket is sealed, the hearse is acquired, and Easy, who before he became a pill-popping catatonic was a Go-Kart driving champion, is given the task of delivering it. He is so passive that Nico must yell at him to get going before he finally starts the engine and drives away.

The Hero’s Journey, an archetypal human story, finds an ordinary person, gives (in this case him) a task he is not equal to, and forces him to undertake it. In the course of his journey the task becomes more difficult, and the man loses every advantage and guide he started with. He must learn to rely on himself, and to accept the aid of those he encounters. The essential task does not change, but his means for accomplishing it are so different from when he began, that it is only his loyalty to its completion that sustains him. The man able to meet the challenge is thereby transformed into a Hero. But for every hero there are countless people who fail.

I won’t spoil the film by spilling details, except to say that the director woos us with Easy’s plight: he soon leaves precincts where Italian is spoken, and must struggle with poor English or nod helplessly as people address him in Slavic languages. And slowly, his face comes to life, that blank look replaced by gentle bafflement and determination.