Kiyoshi Kurosawa Doesn’t See The Samurai And The Prisoner As A Mystery Movie

Kiyoshi Kurosawa wasn’t sure how American audiences were going to react to his newest film. The director of such acclaimed J-horror classics as Pulse and Cure took a big risk with his latest film, a jidaigeki (a Japanese term for stories set in the premodern era) film called The Samurai and the Prisoner. It was a big departure for a director mostly known for his digital-age horror films, and he worried that it wouldn’t translate for audiences not well-versed in ancient Japanese stories.

“Even in Japan, this film, because of its content, the old use of the Japanese language, the historical context and background can make the film a little bit inaccessible to people,” Kurosawa tells Inverse. “But I imagine that Americans know even less about 16th-century Japan.”

However, to his delight, the reception at the New York premiere of The Samurai and the Prisoner was rapturous. “It’s reminded me of just the power of film,” Kurosawa says, “that people watching seem to really be able to grasp the situation and the concerns that the main character is wrapped up in. It really is just a testament to the power of storytelling.”

Perhaps it’s because The Samurai and the Prisoner isn’t your typical historical epic. In fact, it has more in common with Agatha Christie-style whodunits, with its protagonist, real-life feudal lord Araki Murashige, attempting to solve the rash of mysterious murders occurring throughout his castle following his rebellion against the warlord Oda Nobunaga. Based on the novel of the same name by Honobu Yonezawa, it attempts to piece together the real-life mystery of what happened in the 10-month period when Murashige began his rebellion before suddenly deserting his castle with no explanation. It’s a historical mystery that had long intrigued Kurosawa, and one that compelled him enough to make the leap to a genre that he had never worked in before.

Inverse spoke with Kurosawa about making his first jidaigeki, how it connects with his past films, and why he thinks The Samurai and the Prisoner is not truly a murder-mystery movie.

This interview was conducted via translator. It has been edited for clarity and brevity.

The Samurai and the Prisoner is a movie unlike many of your past films — one difference being this is your first movie set before the 20th century. What was it about this story that made you finally want to tackle a historical epic in this time period?

I’d always had a kind of simple desire to one day make a jidaigeki of my own. But jidaigeki are very expensive to produce, and it’s also very hard to come up with an original story set in a period in the past. But I knew that I’d love to have the chance. Before I encountered the novel that the film is based on, I was already interested in this historical figure of Araki Murashige, who was a feudal lord in 16th-century Japan. He’s someone who rose up the ranks to attain much authority and power but then discards of that power, deserts his castle, and is historically regarded as a weakling, a coward, and a traitor.

But I speculated that his deserting of the castle was actually some kind of courageous decision that came from a complex situation that he was in. However, the actual truth of the situation is historically a mystery, and I was pleased to encounter this novel, which details a fictionalized account of what happens leading up to his fleeing the castle.

And this is something that I thought was very much worthy of turning into my very first jidaigeki film.

How did you come upon the novel?

So the novel was brought to me by my producer. They said that you might be interested in adapting something from this novel. And the novel itself is incredibly popular and has won many literary awards, but I had no idea that it would be a novel about this figure that I was already so interested in.

This is also not a horror movie, like many of your past films. Instead, it’s more of a mystery or whodunit. Was that a refreshing or interesting challenge for you?

Yes, it was a very fresh experience, but I’m not sure that this film fits specifically into the mystery genre because it’s not one in which, for instance, a private detective or a police officer solves a case. It doesn’t come from a novel with a very simplistic premise in this way. The greatest mystery of the film is, in fact, why did Araki Murashige desert the castle alone? In that sense, I didn’t approach this in the genre of mystery as I was writing the script.

So how did you approach it then, if not as a mystery?

At least with this story, it veers away from mystery in the sense that it takes place in a progressive manner, at least temporally. It tells the story of the events leading up to Murashige at the very end deserting the castle. That is how I wanted to structure the story. I think in most mystery novels, for instance, the important events, the inciting events, all happen in the past. And then those events are introduced through either someone talking about it, maybe a flashback. And then a detective solves the case and explains what happens.

Narratively, this is really not suited for cinema. It does not progress forward. Instead, it relies on so much going back into the past, and that’s not quite interesting when made cinematically. So I wanted to make sure to treat the content of the film as something that happens very much progressively in that the forward momentum is central to the story.

Was that something that you found a challenge in adapting the novel, which is structured in seasons, similar to how your film is structured?

Yes. So the novel is also set in chapters separated by four different seasons. And of course, this is depicting a period in which Araki Murashige is trapped within a castle for 10 months. And 10 months is a very long period to try to depict. And I wanted to think about how to depict the progression of time. There are certain ways that one can express the passing of the seasons. Sometimes it might snow, sometimes flowers bloom, but that’s also difficult to film. So I thought that the chapter structure was helpful in that there is a forward momentum and a propelling of the narrative towards a conclusion, a way to convey that 10-month period of time passing.

Although you don’t approach this movie like a mystery, it is revealed that the culprit, so to speak, of all of these strange occurrences is Murashige’s wife, Chiyoho. And that her intention was to essentially debunk the saying “Advance to Paradise, retreat to Hell.” Do you think she embodies this conflict between modernity and tradition that the movie represents?

Yes. I think that’s a really interesting thing that you point out. I think as far as a legible dichotomy that exists in the film, Araki Murashige almost represents a kind of progressive nature in that he is very just logical and a kind of realist. While Chiyoho is someone who is perhaps more traditional in the sense that she believes in concepts like Paradise, Hell, the Afterlife, these Buddhist belief systems. So maybe a surface-level reading of that dichotomy exists.

But when you point it out, it’s interesting that Chiyoho might reflect something more about the shifting nature of coexisting ideologies in Japan in that time. So there was the introduction of Christianity, technology like rifles, and there was also a kind of shift away from Buddhist ideas or even changes within Buddhist traditions itself. So in this moment of a fluctuating culture, you can kind of say that Chiyoho represents the shifting nature of that itself.

And I’d like to add that it’s very much about the influence of authority, the strong influence of authority in this situation. “Advance to Paradise, retreat to Hell” is originally a Buddhist concept, but within the realm of this film, it is used by the authorities to get people to fight. It’s basically used as a weapon of war. And because of that, many people end up dying meaningless deaths. And Chiyoho is a character who was able to very surely see through that — and you see how — and kind of try to fight against this idea that religion and Buddhism might be co-opted by authority in order to wage war. And that’s why she set out to do the actions that she did.

This movie, as we said earlier, is not like any of your other movies, but do you think that this shift in technology and culture does tie it to your past films, which are frequently about that shift in technology in the 20th century?

Yeah, I can see that kind of similarity, although I don’t know how much of it is intentional. Certainly in my contemporary films, I’m not trying to depict a world that has a unified set of values. In fact, the protagonists of the worlds that I depict are often those that sit on the outside of these value systems. No matter what era I end up setting my films in, there’s rarely something like a legible or stereotypical unified ideology. The protagonists are always these people that end up questioning those values, fleeing from those values, confronting those values, and then ultimately doing away with them.

The Samurai and the Prisoner is playing in New York and LA theaters, and now expands nationwide.