Serdar | Genji Press

I once said to someone that the decisions that affected my life the most seemed so inconsequential at the time that I barely remembered making them. The job that determined the course of my career to this day, I jumped at because it seemed like fun. The woman I’m still married to, I met by accident. The same sort of logic applies in Samurai Rebellion, a grand and somber tragedy where the downfall of all cannot be pinned on a single moment’s misstep. One thing simply leads to another—inevitably, in so closed-ended a fashion that by the time it is over, we wonder how it could have ever turned out any other way.

Sword of the Beast plunges us immediately into its story with so little forewarning that for a long time we’re not sure if the character we’re seeing is worthy of our sympathy or our derision—just what’s needed in a movie loaded with moral ambiguities. When we first encounter Gennosuke (Mikijiro Hira, of Zipang and the undeservedly obscure Face of Another), he’s hiding out in the tall reeds from men who has presumably come to kill him. A woman, possibly a prostitute, offers herself to him, and he obliges. Almost too late does he discover she was paid by the very same men to distract him, and after one of the film’s many vigorous and expertly choreographed swordfights he’s on the run once more.

Watching Criterion’s restored print of Ugetsu reminds me of the way the proud colors of the Sistine Chapel ceiling remained buried for centuries under a somber patina of grime. The shimmering beauty of this movie, one of the greatest to come from Japan and certainly one of the greatest ever shot in black-and-white, was virtually invisible for decades no thanks to the wretched condition of the prints that were screened at festivals and used for the earlier home video transfers. When I first watched it on VHS all those years ago I almost had to second-guess how lovely the movie really was. Now, on the new DVD, there’s nothing to guess at.

Ugetsu has more than beauty to its credit. The plot is relatively familiar territory (it was adapted from a series of short stories), but the telling is not—and the greater understandings drawn from the material by the director, Kenji Mizoguchi, stayed with me every bit as much as the gothic mood of the piece. Mizoguchi was one of Japan’s first great directors, starting in the silent era and continuing through almost to the mid-Fifties. Ugetsu was made in 1953 and borrows equally from the devices of the silent and sound eras, since it is almost always better to show an image in a movie when a line of dialogue might be used instead.

I’ve always been a little hesitant of the “hidden influences” theory of popular culture—the idea that the real driving forces behind all the things we’re surrounded by are not the prime movers themselves (U2, the Beatles, the Stones, Elvis, etc.), but the people they took their cues from. I’m not against the theory in the abstract, because it makes an awful lot of sense. Consider the number of bands who hit it big after being inspired to do their thing by people who were dismissed or ignored entirely at the time: could The Ramones have been possible without the vastly less famous New York Dolls, for instance? My main reason for being touch-and-go about the theory mostly revolves around the way some people have run with it to such a degree that they ignored common sense—Greil Marcus’s Lipstick Traces, for instance, has some good ideas about such things buried beneath hundreds of pages of tendentious twaddle.

When you come up against one of those influential sources first-hand, though, the theories take a back seat to the raw thrill you get from the material itself. I got that charge while reading Yoshihiro Tatsumi’s The Push Man, not simply because this is the first time most English-language audiences will have ever read his work but because it seems virtually impossible that someone like this could not have influenced most anyone who read him. His work is that universal and accessible. For over thirty years Tatsumi has worked in manga, often for miserable money, creating comics with unvarnished surfaces but startling depths, and getting published mostly in magazines like Tezuka Osamu’s experimental-works outlet COM—places where a great many modern masters of the art themselves got their cues.

The Push Man is the first in a planned series of collections of Tatsumi’s work courtesy of graphic-novel publishers Drawn & Quarterly. The fact that there is more of his work outside of this one volume is in itself startling: I half-expected his career to have been brutally abbreviated, like Nathaniel West or Delmore Schwartz. No story in the book runs to more than sixteen pages or so, and none of them need to be more than that. They arrive, they deal a stinging blow, and leave.