The Moral Ambiguity of Kurosawa's Early Thrillers

James Maxfield

During the Second World War Japanese censors denounced Akira Kurosawa's maiden directorial effort, Sanshiro Sugata, for being too "British-American" in style (Autobiography 131). The charge was ridiculous in connection with perhaps the most characteristically Japanese film this director ever made, but after the war Kurosawa did make two films that seemed to revel blatantly in British-American influence: the gangster film Drunken Angel, 1948, and the police procedural Stray Dog, 1949. Drunken Angel, in the manner of American gangster movies of the 1930s, is a studio-bound film; as a matter of fact, it had its genesis in an existing set that had been used for another film: the studio asked Kurosawa if he "couldn't use it to film something, too" {Autobiography 156). Stray Dog, in contrast, employs considerable footage shot on the actual streets of post-war Tokyo (Autobiography 175)- perhaps in imitation of the documentary style of such American police dramas as Naked City, 1948. But if the basic styles of these films are, broadly speaking. Western or American, the characters remain distinctly Japanese, and in his treatment of the protagonists Kurosawa varies considerably from American models in his refusal to pass definitive judgment on their moral natures. Although I intend in this essay to focus on the characters portrayed by Toshiro Mifune as the "heroes" of the two films, I should first acknowledge that a good case can be made for the slum doctor Sanada (Takashi Shimura) as the true hero of Drunken Angel. Certainly he is the title character a physician who has drunk up the alcohol allotted to him for medical use but who is still entitled
20

to ctaim to the young gangster Matsunaga that he (the doctor) is "a sort of angel" since he wishes to cure Matsunaga not only of tuberculosis but of the corruption of the yakuza way of tife. Atthough there can be tittle question about Sanada being preeminently a force for good in the film, considerable ambiguity or uncertainty neverthetess surrounds this character. Firsf of alt, why is he a doctor in the stums? A fettow student from medicat schoot (Takahama) is now obviousty weatthy and is driven about in a chauffeured car, but Takahama tetls Matsunaga that no one knows more about curing tuberculosis than Sanada, so the latter's tack of financiat success is ctearty not the result of timited skill at his profession. Sanada, however, implies that he is not as successfut as Takahama because he didn't focus as ditigenfty on his studies in medicat schoot: "I'd pawn my clothes to go see a girl." He goes on to say he "messed up [his] life then," then adds, "But I had a reason to." This "reason" is never referred to again in the course of the film, so the viewer has no way of judging how valid it may have been or indeed if such a "reason" actuatty existed, tn any case Sanada's comments indicate his own view that he coutd have been as successfut as Takahama if he had worked harder in schoot and hadn't "messed up" his life. Yet the film as whote suggests another view: that Sanada is a doctor in the slums because that is exactly where he wishes to be: not among well-to-do patients as Takahama is but with the poor who need him-and are also more willing than higher class patients would be to allow him to express his own true, abrasive, tactless self. The circumstances of Sanada's personal life are no more clear than those of his professional life. The doctor lives with an older woman and his nurse. Is the older woman a servant or a retative? (She treats him with familiar contempt when he is drunk.) And what is the nature of his retationship with fhe nurse, Okada's former mistress? Stephen Prince's description of the retationship seems accurate enough as far as it goes: "[Sanada] has taken Miyo, who is Okada's wife [?],' as his nurse and has cared for the woman and hetped heat her emotionat scars while Okada was in prison" (81). But has he taken her only as his nurse and ward or also as his mistress? [t wouid not be illogicat to assume the tatter relationship for a man who when younger pawned his clothes "to go see a girt." When asked about the woman by one of the gangsters, Sanada asserts, "She's mine." Depending upon how one tooks at the character, this statement coutd be interpreted atmost allegoricatly as Sanada the angel affirming that the nurse now belongs to the forces of good rather than to those of evii represented by Okada, or it could taken as an expression of sexuai possessiveness: this woman beiongs to

21

me and to no one else. The film, it would seem, commits itself to neither interpretation but allows both. The primary relationship of the film, between Sanada and Matsunaga, also possesses a measure of ambiguity. One thing that is clear is that Matsunaga is not just an ordinary patient to Sanada. The doctor's commitment to this patient may at first seem strange since Sanada hates the gangster's way of life, and Matsunaga repeatedly responds to his physician's diagnoses with acts of physical violence toward him. But as Donald Richie argues, "[The doctor] and the gangster.. .hate each other with such intensity that one must suspect love as well" (48). With this idea in mind, one can interpret an otherwise curious comment Sanada makes to the bar girl Gin early in the film. When she remarks that Matsunaga is "too skinny," he says, "Are you in love with him too?" There does not seem to be anyone else present to be included in the "too" other than Sanada himself. At the end of the film, although Sanada and Gin seem to have diametrically opposed interpretations of Matsunaga (she thinks Matsunaga was ready to reform; the doctor says a gangster could not change; "A dog's a dog...Hoodlums end that way"), these different reactions are rooted in similar feeiings. Sanada tells Gin, "I know how you feel. That's why I can't forgive him." Sanada's bitterness in some sense is that of a frustrated lover. (Matsunaga's death scene was intercut with shots of Sanada carrying home two fresh eggs for his patient, the doctor's happy smile being that of a suitor carrying flowers to his beloved.) If Sanada loves Matsunaga, what does he love in this man who is everything he disapproves of: a force for disease and death rather than health and life? Richie's suggestion again seems quite plausible: the doctor loves the reflection of his younger self in Matsunaga (48). Sanada says to his nurse, "That gangster. He reminds me of myself when I was young. He acts tough, but he's lonely inside. He can't kill his conscience." Because of his sense of identification with Matsunaga, the doctor in a way is trying to heal his former self to show that even though he "messed up" back then, his life can now change for the better, move from sickness into health. Even though drinking aicoho! undoubtedly is bad for a person suffering from tuberculosis, Sanada's denunciations of Matsunaga for drinking also manifest his internal hatred toward himseif for his alcoholism. If drinking will kill Matsunaga, it is also surely killing Sanada, if more slowly. Perhaps another reason Sanada cannot forgive Matsunaga at the end of the film is that the iatter's death seems to foreclose hope for himself as weii. Although the fiim ailows the viewer to speculate on the
22

doctor's motives for trying to help the gangster, in the end ail that is certain is that Sanada tried to cure Matsunaga of ailments physical and moral but that he failed-and the patient died. Matsunaga's death is probably the most ambiguous element of the fiim. Evidence for this judgment can be seen in the interpretations of Matsunaga's death found in the two leading critical books on Kurosawa's filmsinterpretations that are almost diametrically opposed. Donald Richie sees Matsunaga's death as heroic, virtually a redemption: "...how he died is the most important aspect of his death. He died fighting what he finally identified as evil, he died fighting his former self" (52). Stephen Prince, on the other hand, regards Matsunaga's death not as heroic but "pitiful" (84). The gangster does not die fighting evil; rather he "goes to his extinction out of concern for his reputation": Okada has "seize[d] his territory," and Matsunaga must try to kill the older man to restore his warped sense of honor as a gangster (84). His values remain distorted to the end. Although I am inclined ultimately to agree with Prince's assessment of Matsunaga's death, the sequences leading up to the fatal stabbing offer evidence of a variety of motivations behind the ganster's ultimately self-destructive actions. He begins with clearly admirable motivations, but they become deflected by events over which he has no control. A carefui examination of the sequences depicting the last day of Matsunaga's life wiil demonstrate how his motivations seem to shift from scene to scene. But first we should look at three key sequences that precede Matsunaga's flnai day. One, Matsunaga's dream, seems to be a symbolic foreshadowing of his ultimate fate. The dream, however, is directly preceded by a sequence that offers hope for Matsunaga. The gangster has been displaced from his girifriend's apartment by Okada (who has encroached upon the younger man's erotic territory as well as his gang turf), and he stands weakiy leaning against a slanted post directly in front of the polluted sump that is the film's symbol for the source of evil and disease in the postwar Japanese society. Sanada, who comes up to Matsunaga (having failed to find him at the apartment), wants to lead the gangster away from the source of contagion, the sump, and the contamination of the criminal society of which he has been a part, to the safe haven of the doctor's house where the young man can heal himself. Sanada offers hope to Matsunaga, but the ending of the pond sequence and the entire dream scene that immediately follows it both suggest that the hope cannot, and will not be fulfilled. The finai shot of the pond sequence is aimost identicai to the one that opened it: the camera iooks down at a doll floating face23

down in the dirty water. The doll, of course, resembles a corpse, and it is appropriate that this image dissolves into Matsunaga's dream about death. At the outset of the dream the stagnant pond is transformed into the ocean with its waves breaking on the shore, and the floating doll becomes a coffin. Richie interprets the sea as a symbol of "escape" (51), but it is also a traditional symbol of the eternal, and the coffin at the edge of the water could represent the dead about to pass into eternity. The entire sequence takes place on the shore with the sea visible in the immediate background, perhaps symbolizing Matsunaga's precarious position at the very edge of life. Matsutiaga enters the frame rather dashingly clad in a dark suit and white siik scarf with white carnation in his lapel. Richie interprets this outfit as a sign of Matsunaga's aspiration toward respectability (51), but there is no reason why a successful gangster might not dress this way as well. Matsunaga has entered carrying an axe, and he immediately starts attacking the coffin with it. His intent is obscure: is he trying to attack death itself or the awareness of his won mortality? In either case, his actions do not lead to a successful conclusion. The body revealed when the coffin is smashed op)en is himself dressed in the sport shirt he wore when he came to the doctor at the beginning of the film to have a bullet removed from his hand. This former self rises like a ghoul from the coffin to pursue the new (or at least better dressed) Matsunaga, who, in a double exposure, flees in slow motion while his pursuer runs after him at normal speed. The filming technique makes clear that Matsunaga's new self has no chance of escaping from his deadly past. Matsunaga awakens from the dream to the sound of Okada demanding the return of Miyo to him from Sanada. This is the real life equivalent of his dream: Okada's appearance at the doctor's house will set in motion events that will culminate in Matsunaga's gangster self dooming his quest for a new (better) identity. Matsunaga's motives for trying to save Miyo from Okada in this part of the film need to be examined closely because from the outset they are mixed. He is not trying to save Miyo for her own sake but for the doctor's. The first thing Matsunaga says when he intrudes into the scene where Okada is threatening the doctor is, "I'm indebted to him [Sanada]." But his actions in regard to Miyo are as much motivated by pride as by gratitude to the doctor. Matsunaga does not want Sanada to protect Miyo by going to the police to inform on Okada. He says to the doctor, "1 can't have the cops know. Have to save my reputation." He also informs Sanada that "we [the yakuza] have a code of honor"--a code he feels he would violate by allowing the doctor to inform the police.
24

Drunken Angel When Sanada sneers at the "code of honor" ("Your code's only a security pact. It's money."), Matsunaga indignantly proclaims, "You don't know our world." But the next day when he goes to appeal to "the Boss" on behalf of Miyo, a conversation that he overhears indicates that Sanada's characterization of the "code" was entirely accurate. At first he smiles when he hears the boss say, "Have to be kind to a guy with TB"; but when it becomes clear that the Boss has no more use for him and is merety waiting for him to die, Matsunaga is shocked into an act of disrespect for his superior: he steps on the tatami in the Boss's room with his shoes on. One of the last shots of this sequence is a high angle close up of Matsunaga's shoes with money scattered about them that the Boss has flung at him. The shoes indicate Matsunaga's disrespect for the Boss; the money, the Boss's disrespect for Matsunaga, the sign that the gangster's code is indeed onty about money. In this sequence Matsunaga has experienced a severe disittusionment with the gangster's way of tife; in the next he is offered an atternative to it. Gin, the bar girt, tries to convince him to give up the criminat tife, go with her to the country, and get treatment for his TB. At the end of the film she tett Sanada that Mafsunaga was reatly listening to her, but the sequence in the bar teaves the young

25

gangster's reactions unclear. Not only does Gin do all of the talking, but most of the one sided conversation is filmed so that the viewer cannot even see Matsunaga's facial expressions. For about half the sequence his back is to the camera; in most of the remainder his head is bent so far down his face is mainly in shadow. Toward the end of the sequence, though, he does say one thing that might indicate he was paying attention: he says he is staying at Doc's house, a statement that would seem to indicate his intention to return there and continue his treatment. The bar girl's parting advice then could have saved him if he had been willing to heed it: "Listen, you're sick. Don't do anything bad." Unfortunately, his experiences on the street in the next sequence impel him irresistibly toward bad action and his doom As he had done previously in the film, Matsunaga, passing a flower seller's stall, picks up a flower for his lapel, but on this occasion the girl from the shop follows him and politely requests payment of 30 yen. She is acting under orders from the owner, who when confronted by Matsunaga says he is following orders from Okada because "It's his territory now." Matsunaga has entered the shop to confront the owner, so that when he straightens up after receiving the news of his loss of all power and privilege to Okada, his head disappears in shadow. He has photographically lost face just as he realizes he has metaphorically done so within the gangsters' society. The sequence then ends with a shot of the stricken Matsunaga starting to move foreward along the street double exposed over a shot of the sump. The image of Matsunaga disappears, leaving only the sump, and another image of the polluted pond then dissolves into a shot of Okada playing his guitar in the apartment Matsunaga formerly shared with Nanae. The primary symbol of evil and disease in the film seems triumphant here: both the younger and the older gangster are fatally infected by the corruption it represents. Matsunaga's paramount motivation for going after Okada with a knife, therefore, is not concern for Miyo or the desire to suppress evil as embodied by Okada but rather wounded pride. Okada has taken from him all the things that were once his: his girl, his apartment, his territory, and {most important) his prestige as a gangster. Matsunaga's inner knowledge that none of these things truly has any value does not deter him from the pursuit of vengeance. The scene of violence between Matsunaga and Okada is nothing like a duel between two armed combatants: rather it is 26

composed of two successive attempts at the murder of an unarmed opponent. Matsunaga initially stalks Okada about the apartment with a knife, allowing his older opponent to arm himself wit h nothing more dangerous than a pair of Nanae's shoes. After Matsunaga hemorrhages and Okada disarms him, the older gangster retrieves his own knife and ruthlessly advances on his weakened and now defenseless opponent. Up to this point in the sequence there has been no background music, merely naturalistic sound (perhaps somewhat amplified), but strangely when Matsunaga is trapped in a corner apparentiy about to be stabbed to death, music suddenly wells up and it is the theme that earlier in the film has been identified with the hope for Matsunaga's recovery from his illness. Its use here seems either entirely inappropriate or bitterly ironic. But then, with the music continuing, the film cuts to Sanada buying eggs for his patient from a street stall, and the viewer perhaps wili conciude that the music has never stood for the genuine possibiiity of Matsunaga experiencing a real cure but rather for the doctor's dream of both curing and rehabilitating his patient. The music continues for a while, though, after the film returns to the gangsters. Matsunaga bursts through the doorway of the apartment into the hallway and lurches, stumbles, crawls down the hall untii he seizes a can of paint off a painter's scaffold and hurls it at Okada-whereupon the music ends and the naturalistic sound resumes. Perhaps the music just prior to this point lures the viewer into thinking Matsunaga has a chance of surviving, but the graceless physical actions and harsh naturalist sounds that immediately follow probably destroy that hope even before Okada stabs Matsunaga in the back. (The two gangsters slip fiaiiingly about in the spilled paint from the thrown can; their breathing is loud, desperate, animalistic.) The sequence ends with the fatally stabbed Matsunaga staggering through a pair of doors and about a balcony until he collapses beneath some washing hung out to dry and breaks through a flimsy railing to die with his head hanging down off the edge of the balcony. His finai collapse is shot from a crane at a considerable distance and a very high angle, but at the end the camera comes down much closer untii the body fills most of the frame. The crane shot at first seems harshly judgmental: the camera looks down at an obscure and wasted life. Does the camera's moving closer to a less pronounced high angle soften that judgment or merely urge the viewer to contemplate this wasted iife most closely? The death scene on the balcony is also accompanied by the "health" music, which again is continued through the following brief scene of the doctor carrying his newly purchased eggs through the
27

street. Atthough the music seems definitely associated here with the hopes of the doctor that have proved false, in a way the effect of the music is not purely ironic. There was something truty hopeful about Matsunaga; the viewer cannot feet that Sanada and Gin were wrong in seeing potential for physical and moral recovery within him. He is doomed by the conjunction of his pride and circumstances beyond his controi. It is not difficult to believe that the hopes of Sanada and Gin for him could have been fulfilled if Matsunaga had by passed the flower shop on his way back to the doctor's house. Murakami, the detective hero o( Stray Dog, 1949, is the mirror image of Matsunaga. in the earlier fitm Toshiro Mifune plays a criminal whose potential for goodness is over-whelmed by sociat and environmental forces he lacks either the witt or the intettigence to resist; in the later film Mifune's character does have the will to pursue the path of virtue (or sociatty responsibte action) and is abte to win out over a potentiatly destructive environment. Murakami has won his own personal struggle with evil before the film even begins. Like the robber killer Yusa, whom the detectives are pursuing, Murakami had his knapsack containing all his money and possessions stolen from him right after the end of the war. He was tempted to turn to crime, to become a thief himself, but he fought against that impulse to the extent of becoming a member of the police force in order to declare his absolute opposition to crime. His flaw in the film is not any predisposition to evil action but an over-developed conscience that tends at times to obstruct his effectiveness as a police officer. This over-developed conscience is apparent in the first sequence of the film in which Murakami confesses to the police chief that his pistol has been stolen and offers to resign. The chief responds, "Don't talk iike that. This isn't the army." Having been denied the major punishment of forced resignation for his sin of losing his pistol, Murakami seeks out small self-punishments perhaps as a form of penance: for instance he refuses to let the pickpocket division chief fan him while he is looking through file photos of known perpetrators. (Nearly the entire film is set during a mid-summer heat wave in Tokyo.) But in the first thirdof the film, Murakami's sense of responsibility seems primarily a positive force since it motivates him to feats of endurance that do achieve positive results. After the pickpocket division chief introduces him to the woman who had stolen his pistol from him on the bus, Murakami follows her on foot all over town until she takes pity on him (or realizes that drastic action is needed to get him off her back) and advises him to investiqate the pistol black market. The detective's 28

determination is more graphically demonstrated, though, in the montage sequence that follows. Murakami disguises himself as a returned soldier who has nothing to wear but his old uniform and is searching through the slums of Tokyo for a pistol that he could presumably use to gain a living. Montage sequences typically condense the passage of time; Stephen Prince exaggerates only slightly when he says that this one "instead of collapsing time, as such transitions usually do, expands it to an astounding degree" (91). Of course, the sequence does not literally expand time: Murakami searches for a dealer in stolen weapons perhaps for several days, and the sequence take slightly less than ten minutesbut ten minutes is awfully long for a montage sequence, and this one repeats many of the same basic shots over and over again, most strikingly close-ups of his striding feet and of his intensely alert eyes. Richie is surely correct in implying that most viewers probably find the sequence so lengthy and repetitious that it becomes fatiguing (63). But Kurosawa's point is that Murakami is willing to endure the numbing fatigue of a day-after-day, repeatedly frustrated foot search for a contact with illegal arms dealers. If the viewer grows tired of the sequence, so Murakami must have grown tired of his search, but he persevered until he finally made his contact and then was able to arrest the woman who was renting out his stolen pistol (among others). If this sequence demonstrates Murakami's strengths as an investigator-his willingness to do the dogged legwork necessary to reach his goal-his arrest of the gun dealer in the cafe reveals certain of his weaknesses. He tells her she is under arrest as soon as she presents him with a stolen pistol and asks for his rice ration card (for security?). Ironically, she later tells him that at the exact moment he was pursuing her through the restaurant to apprehend her, the man she has rented his pistol to appeared at the door (apparently ready to return the gun) and was frightened away by what he saw. Murakami's failing is not merely in his neglecting to ploy the role of customer a little longer {which might have provided him with further information about the illegal arms trade and allowed him to spot the real customer), but in his not informing anyone else in the police department about his progress in the search so that he might have a back-up at the arrest scene who could have spotted Yusa even if he did not. Because he allowed his pistol to be stolen, Murakami seems to think that it is his responsibility to recover it all by himself. He does not even think about the pistol black market being a social problem that the whole police force should be concerned about. Even at the end of the film when his older partner Sato tells him that he should 29

take pride in assisting in the recovery of thousands of stolen weapons, that fact is ciearly less important to Murakami than that he finally got his gun back. Murakami's initial guilt over carelessly allowing his pistol to be stoien is intensified once he realizes that the weapon is being used in the commission of serious crimes. Because he pruviH4>d the pistol that wounded one woman and killed another in the course of two robberies, Murakami feels that he is an accomplice. Moreover, as he and Sato find out more about the background of the criminal they are pursuing, Murakami seems increasingly to identify with Yusa so that the olher man's crimes in some sense become his own crimes. Both Yusa's sister and the girl Harumi say that Yusa went bad because of the disiilusionment of having his knapsack stolen after the end of the war-just as Murakami's own knapsack was stolen. This similarity is one of the things that leads Donald Richie to say that "the theme of the picture" is "the identical humanity of all humans" (60). But one couid argue that the similarity of events merely demonstrates how completely different individual human beings are. One man responds to the theft of his knapsack by becoming a thief himself, the other by becoming a law enforcement officer dedicated to opposing crimes iike theft. From an existential point of view-defined by their actions--Yusa and Murakami could not be more different. Even though Murakami seems to be affirming this definition of character by action when he teli Harumi that the theft of Yusa's knapsack is no excuse for his crimes, he stili seems to feei an underlying identity with Yusa. Although Murakami chose to become a poiicemen rather than a thief, his mere choice of profession may indicate that the temptation to become to a criminal was so strong for him that he had to oppose it in the most vigorous manner possibie. Murakami has to regard Yusa as his evil double because Yusa represents a direction his iife couid have taken. The fact that Yusa is committing his crimes with Murakami's pistol merely underlines the detective's sense that YU:>J embodies the potential for evil that exists within himseif. None of the rational comments of the older policemen-for instance Sato's that Yusa would be using another gun for his robberies if he did not have Murakami's allay the young detective's sense of guilt. This guilt reaches its crescendo after Yusa shoots Sato and places the older detective at the brink of death. The first question Murakami asks upon reaching the hospital is whether the bullet that wounded Sato was from his Colt; the other policemen do not answer, but their very silence confirms the young detective's fears.
30

Because Sato is a wise older man who has been acting as Murakami's police department mentor, he is ciearly in the rote of a father figure to the younger man. Murakami's guilt when his pistol is used by Yusa for this crime is overwhelming because it is some sense Oedipal. Even though Sato's life is saved on the operating table, the persistence of Murakami's sense of guilt is the only reasonable explanation for his behavior at the climax of the film. In this sequence Murakami succeeds in capturing Yusa and retrieving his pistol, but his success does not negate my judgment that the detective's behavior during much of this part of the film is thoroughly imprudent. To be sure, an American audience may not notice Murakami's recklessness because it is a convention of our action films that the hero goes one on one against the villain (or one against a number of villains) at the climax of the movie and that in the finai conflict the hero defeats any and all adversaries. But American films typically giorify indlviduaiistic seif assertion while Kurosawa's fiims normally do not, as the fate of Matsunaga would seem to indicate. Murakami's behavior in the climax of the fiim is totally contrary both to common sense and accepted police procedure, and it is ironic that at the end of the film he receives a commendation for the happy result (the capture of Yusa) of his slipshod methods. Of course, it was also ironic that Sato was wounded when he was correctly following police procedures regarding the capture of a dangerous felon: he had aiready called headquarters for reinforcements, but Yusa was abie to get away because he inadvertently overheard the manager's wife teiling her child that a police detective was in the building. The message of both incidents seems to be that no man can fully control his destiny. Yet it would seem to be the obligation of any police officer to try to adjust the odds far more in favor of the apprehension of the criminal than Murakami attempts to do. When Harumi tells Murakami that Yusa will be at the Ohara station at six, the young detective does not even consider informing his colleagues from the police department of the whereabouts of Sato's would be-killer. All of these men have been at the hospital, manifesting their deep concern for Sato's life (although displaying it less hysterically than Murakami). Surely each of them would have a personal desire to be in on the capture of Yusa, and for practical purposes a large number of men should have been involved in the capture to forestall any chance of Yusa escaping. (At the very minimum there should have been more policemen than Yusa had bullets.) Murakami thinks of none of these things because of his guilty identification with Yusa; he feels that it is his duty alone to

31

confront this murderous extension of himself. He not only confronts Yusa alone, he confronts him unarmed. When he and Yusa recognize each other in the station, Murakami gropes in his pocket for his (replacement) pistol and beiatediy remembers that he gave it to Sato the night before. On an unconscious level this "forgetting" is clearly deliberate. Murakami wants to give Yusa the opportunity to kill him-to punish him for allowing his pistol to be stolen and used to harm innocent people. When Yusa halts within a grove of trees and points the gun at Murakami, both men stand stock still until Yusa fires, wounding the detective in the arm. Murakami then advances slowly toward Yusa until the latter wildly fires off two more shots, emptying the pistol. It is notable that in this part of the sequence Murakami does not dodge or crouch or attempt to charge Yusa. He seems to want to offer his adversary the best possible target, and only Yusa's unsteady nerves prevent him from killing the detective. Had Yusa killed or seriously disabled Murakami with the first shot, he then wouid have been free to use the remaining two builets to wreak further havoc on society. Murakami is motivated in this sequence by a psychological compulsion that is totally oblivious to any sense of social responsibility. It undoubtedly would have seemed oniy just to him to be killed by Yusa, but this would not be the sort of justice the police are expected to uphold. Fortunately for both Murakami and society, he can regard being wounded in the arm as the punishment destiny has chosen for him and then feel free (after he has retrieved his pistol) to go after Yusa and capture him. Richie says that when Murakami and Yusa lie side by side in a field of flowers after the detective has succeeded in handcuffing the killer, "...both [are] so mudcovered that it is difficult to tell which is which. They look identical" (60). Actually, 1 have never had much trouble telling the two characters apart in this section of the film, but for those viewers who do, Kurosawa provides an easy means of distinguishing them at the end of the sequence. Yusa is the one who cries out in anguish. The significance of this cry needs to be considered. Stephen Prince interprets Yusa's "heartrending wail" as an expression of "remorse and misery" (96). But it is in fact quite difficult to decide exactly what the captured criminal is wailing about. It could an expression of guilt for his crimes, but perhaps instead it is an expression of fear of the probable punishment that awaits him (execution). It could also be a cry of exhaustion or release of tension following the long, physicaily and emotionaliy arduous pursuit over difficult terrain. (The same actor, Ko Kimura, lets out a
32

similar cry at the conclusion of the climatic battle scene in The Seven Samurai, and in that film he has nothing in particular to feei guilty about or to fear in the future.) I tend to regard Yusa's cry as the non-verbal equivalent of Kurtz's "The horror! The horror!" at the climax of Conrad's Heart of Darkness, and it is no easier to give a definitive interpretation to Yusa's utterance than to Kurtz's. One thing is clear about Yusa's wail, though: whatever emotion the captured criminal is expressing, Murakami does not share it. As Yusa lies wailing on the ground, Murakami rises up to a sitting position and iooks down at his captive in apparent puzzlement. His guilty identification with the kiiler has been broken by the capture and-especially -the retrieval of his pistol. After he handcuffs Yusa at the end of the chase, he immediately checks his pocket to make sure the gun he had picked up is still there; in the remainder of the sequence he cradles it in his hand. Since there are no bullets left in the pistol, it is clear that Murakami is holding it for emotional rather than physical security. Retrieval of the Colt reaffirms his identity as a detective, a man firmly on the side of law and order, not crime and chaos. At this moment in the film Murakami can be confident that he and Yusa are completely different. But this confidence is wavering in the coda of the film, a scene between Murakami and Sato in the older detective's hospital room. Murakami begins a statement to Sato, "But 1 somehow feel that Yusa...," but Sato will not let him complete it. He says he remembers his own first case (when he presumably felt as Murakami now does), but he assures the young detective that "sympathetic feelings fade in time"; "in time you'll forget [Yusa]." The message is that in order to fulfiil his duty as a police officer, to protect "good people" from "bad people" like Yusa, Murakami must repress his capacity for empathy with evil doers. The advice is doubtlessly sound from a professional standpoint; the viewer, however, may be left with doubts about Murakami's ability to follow it. Despite the complexities of characterization that Kurosawa brings to his protagonists (including the doctor in Drunken Angel as well Matusunaga and Murakami) and the moral ambiguities those compiexities carry wit h them, both Drunken Angel and Stray Dog in the last analysis remain firmly within the norms of their genres: the gangster pays with his life for his career of crime; the poiiceman apprehends the criminal. Kurosawa's characterizations merely complicate the audience's emotional response to these expected events. In the early 1960s Kurosawa returned to the thriller genre with two much more radically revisionist films. In The Bad Sleep Well, 1960, not only do the corporate criminals apparently get off
33

scot free, they murder the protagonist of the film, Nishi, who was trying to bring them to justice toavenge his father's death. Kurosawa seems to be pointing out that the police, adequate to the task of apprehending lower class criminals like Yusa, are powerless against the criminals who control big business and politics. This message is so contrary to norms of the action thriller (and, since the character of Nishi is partly based on Hamiet, to those of the Revenge Tragedy), that most viewers probably react to the film as Donald Richie does: "This truth is completely unpalatable, unsavory" (146). Drunken Angel and Stray Dog are more successful films than The Bad Sleep Well largely because they do supply the expected endings-instead of, say, allowing Matsunaga to go off to the country to restore his health or having Murakami killed by Yusa. In High and Low, 1963, though, Kurosawa, instead of remaining within convention (as in Drunken Angel and Stray Dog) or completely subverting it (as in The Bad Sleep Well) succeeded in transcending it to produce his most original and completely satisfying thriller. A long fiim (143 minutes). High and Low is in a sense two fiims. The first is a nsuchoioqica! study of the shoe manufacturer Gondo (Toshiro Mifune), who must struggle with the decision whether to ransom back his chauffeur's son (who was kidnapped by mistake instead of Gondo's son) or use the same funds to gain control of a shoe manufacturing company. The second fiim is a police procedural following the efforts of the authorities to apprehend the kidnapper and get back the ransom Gondo ultimately agreed to pay. But at least two unusual tilings happen in this second film. The poiice allow the kidnapper to try out the potency of some heroin he has purchased by kiliing a junkie with an overdose. If this event does not suggest Ihat the poiice are as ruthiess as the kidnapper, it siightiy undermines the viewers sense of their unailoyed triumph in capturing him. And the iast speech of fhe film is given not to a representative of the police or to Gondo but instead to the murderous kidnapper who is awaiting execution. This speech is a bitter condemnation of the inequalities of the Japanese capitalist society which have made it possible for people like Gondo to live in air conditioned comfort high on a hiiitop above the sordid lives of those like the kidnapper sweltering in slums down below. This final speech in no way justifies tiie kidnapper's crime, but it does indicate that the very structure of society itself is also a significant crime. Drunken Angel and Stray Dog lack the element of radical sociai criticism found in the two later crime films, and of course neither of the films from the late forties possesses the technical mastery Kurosawa had achieved by the early sixties. But in these
34

early genre films Kurosawa demonstrates true originality within the confines of convention, and in his probing of the mysteries of human character through his protagonists, he points the way directly to the more boldly original film that made him intentionally famous in 1950, Rashomon. Notes ' When Okada comes in search of Miyo af Sanada's house, he first refers to her as his "girl," then as his "wife," but 1 take the "wife" as an exaggeration intended to reenforce his claim to the woman. Works Cited Kurosawa, Akira. Something Like an Autobiography. Trans. Audie Bock. New York: Aifred A. Knopf, 1982. Prince, Stephen. The Warrior's Camera: The Cinema of Akira Kurosawa. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton UP, 1991. Richie, Donald. The Films of Akira Kurosawa. Rev. ed. Berkeley: U of California P, 1984.

35