Branded to Kill

Is Koroshi no rakuin (Branded to Kill, 1967) Suzuki Seijun’s revenge on the ten black-and-white “hard boiled” (hādo-boirudo) crime films he had been forced to make between 1956 and 1961 as a contract director at Nikkatsu studios? These films belonged to a genre that was not yet important enough to have a name, and so far off the radar of the film-critical establishment that several of them never even garnered a metropolitan newspaper review. Branded to Kill, as Watanabe Takenobu recognised, is a kind of aesthetic “condensation” of hādo-boirudo action¹ that simultaneously reduces it as it turns in upon itself. But in its ideological problematics, it is also clearly a statement of distaste for the genre of ninkyō eiga – the ‘honorable’ or ‘heroic’ yakuza film – which by 1967 was well on its way to the peak of commercial success. Suzuki had made three path-breaking ninkyō films with the superstar Kobayashi Akira; but in later years he appeared keen to disassociate himself from the genre.²

A case study of a man who is willing to die for his shoddy principles, Branded to Kill is precisely what its most distinguished admirers – Hasumi Shigehiko, Tony Rayns – have denied: a profoundly philosophical and ethical film comparable to Kurosawa Akira’s great triptych of Rashōmon (1950), Ikiru (To Live, 1952), and Shichinin no samurai (Seven Samurai, 1954). It asks, as they do, simply, “How to live”? Suitably enough for a film directed by a dissolute naval veteran and scripted by a cadre of young radicals, Branded to Kill puts the question in a negative form: “What is worth dying for?”: and then signals its orientation by reverting to 30 seconds of negative film exposure during a sequence in which the protagonist awaits his probable doom. 

What is worth dying for? It is a question that in post-war Japan had a kind of retrospective urgency to it, since hundreds of thousands of wartime soldiers, seamen, and pilots had rushed to their deaths chanting the “mantras” of Yamamoto Tsunetomo and other philosophers who advocated for the ethical and spiritual supremacy of self-willed death. Suzuki’s characters, as they relate to this central question, are almost Brechtian in their ideological purity. 

In an immensely brave performance, Ogawa Mariko plays Mami Hanada, the newlywed of the eponymously “branded” yakuza hitman played by Shishido Jō. One of the cheerfully amoral women of the Japanese New Wave, Mami blows with the winds of yakuza politics, but would rather stay at home and eat canned food. “We are beasts!” she cries, and lives for two things only: sex and display. Her reductionism is meant to be taken quite seriously as it will be juxtaposed to two incredibly brutal alternatives, for Mami is practically a force of light in comparison to Misako (Annu Mari), her opposite number in the murderous love triangle that ensues. Misako glides through the film under a black raincloud, a mysterious, suicidal force of pure negation, a casual murderer of butterflies and small birds and a reductio ad absurdum of the archetypal association of femininity with chaos. The very extremity of Suzuki’s treatment ensures that the hoariest gender myths become not only ironic, but intriguing in their visual dimensions. Detached from everything including her own body, Misako is frighteningly lethal and works for the yakuza without a smidgeon of interest in their plans and schemes. We might take her as the truest embodiment of the spirit of Tsunetomo; the men in the picture are mere ideologues by comparison. Indeed, in the deceptively orderly patriarchal nightmare that constitutes the Tokyo of Branded to Kill, Misako’s negativity is so existential that it escapes ideology and stands in gendered relief to a national culture that for decades quite literally bet the farm, and wagered its youth for good measure, on a martial-imperialist ideology, only to be massively disillusioned by several gargantuan ironies: the meaningless annihilation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Emperor’s public renunciation of godhood shortly after, and the American-style hedonistic consumerism that seemed, for Suzuki, to have enveloped the culture during the period of the “economic miracle”.   

At the vertex of the triangle is Hanada. Shishido – perhaps the most distinctive leading actor of the studio era – commits absolutely to embodying this most awful and irredeemable protagonist. Branded to Kill finds its Beckettian aspect in Hanada’s dogged persistence in the face of very real and painful adversities about which he, as an observant paranoid, has few illusions. But this is a very low bar for admiration. Hanada sinks so low as to execute his wife with a shot, apparently, to her nether regions. Interpreters of the film may differ as to whether this drive to negate the feminine is the primary motivation of the yakuza, as Suzuki portrays them, or whether the misogyny is only a reflex of the endless homoerotic death-play of domination/submission that constitutes male competition in this world, with all of its fetishistic rituals laid out clearly before the viewer with cold and humorous detachment, devoid entirely of the identification and eroticism that one would expect from a truly “martial” artist like Mishima Yukio – who was then in the prime of his bizarre celebrity as an icon of reactionary, intellectualised machismo and had even made a film about it: Yūkoku (1966). 

Might Suzuki have addressed these mortal questions in the milieu of social realism, as contemporaries like Kobayashi had tried to do, rather than via this gloriously inglorious, fetishistic, fragmentary, anti-illusionist collage, with all of its graphics in some sense redolent of suicide and death? Certainly it would have been inefficient and more expensive to do so. Perhaps the achievement of this notorious film is not so much that it challenged the wisdom and power of the studio system – which it genuinely did – but that it gets at serious questions through the popular cinema more freely than even Kurosawa, with all his resources, could do, thus amounting to a new cinematic language of the action film. The film’s many allusions to pre-war surrealism only underscore that there was nothing in the post-war narrative cinema, unless it be Kazuki Kuroi’s independently produced and briefly seen Chinmoku tobenai (Silence Has No Wings, 1964), to predict or prefigure its astonishing freedom of non-diegetic stylisation. The floodgates of cinematic change truly opened after the “Suzuki Problem of 1968”, which saw the director ousted from Nikkatsu for making a so-called “incomprehensible” film,³ and Branded to Kill was one of the crowbars that opened them. 

There is a stark beauty to the ugliness of Branded to Kill, and I wonder if our admiration is at all separable from the sense that there is an exceptionally skilled and mature craftsman behind it all, marshaling the chaos, applying the blowtorch to filmmaking norms and romantic illusions alike. I know of no other film that so defies the antithesis of “wildness” and “control”. Suzuki’s belated sequel, Pisutōru opera (Pistol Opera, 2001), is an auteurist theatre macabre, but its theatricality lacks the photographic and affective immediacy, the immanent sense of crisis of the original, whose “erotic grotesque nonsense” (ero-guro-nansensu) is quite the opposite of cheap commercial nihilism. Harrowing, austere, a long-suppressed masterpiece of world cinema, Branded to Kill’s world-weariness is personal and dearly bought. Suzuki was not merely fired (without notice) by Nikkatsu for making this film: he was professionally assassinated. Public insult and industrial proscription followed hard upon his daring to speak out. But these were revolutionary times for Tokyo – April 1968 – and Suzuki’s instinct for trouble, both inside and outside the film, paid off.

Koroshi no rakuin/Branded to Kill (1967 Japan 91 mins)

Prod Co: Nikkatsu Prod: Iwai Kaneo Dir: Suzuki Seijun Scr: Guryū Hachirō (the collective pen name for Suzuki Seijun, Kimura Takeo, Yamatoya Atsushi, Tanaka Yōzō, Sone Chūsei, Okada Yutaka, Yamaguchi Seiichirō and Hangai Yasuaki) Phot: Nagatsuka Kazue Ed: Tanji Mutsuo Mus: Yamamoto Naozumi Art Dir: Kawahara Sukezō

Cast: Shishido Jō, Ogawa Mariko, Annu Mari, Nanbara Kōji, Tamagawa Isao, Minami Hiroshi, Chō Hiroshi, Yamatoya Atsushi

Endnotes