Review - Movie - The Hidden Blade

 Since around June/July, I've been working on a new fantasy WIP which takes place across a sizeable chunk of Japan's history. And one of the films that helped solidify my liking for it, and that I've watched recently since I'm suffering from a horrendous variety of the common cold, is The Hidden Blade, a 2004 drama film directed and co-written by Yoji Yamada based on the stories of Japanese author Shuhei Fujisawa.

Image credit: IMDB

Set during the 1860s, the late years of the Bakematsu when the Tokugawa Shogunate was in the process of falling apart under encroaching Western influence and growing Imperial pressure, the story follows the life trials of low-ranking samurai Munezo Katagiri. From the forbidden feelings he has for his servant Kie, the social burden of his father committing seppuku following a financial debacle he was not directly responsible for, to ending up pitted against a former student of the blade Yaichiro Hazama by his clan's retainers, Katagiri's struggles in his small town existence are real and a lot more relatable than a wandering swordsman defending a town or the noble (quasi-fictionalised) plight of forty-seven ronin.

An interesting element to this story is that, counter to the typical samurai shown in the work of Kurosawa and a number of others, . Multiple films during this time, including Yamada's two other notable samurai films Twilight Samurai and Love and Honour (and Takashi Miike's 13 Assassins) seem to tear down the mythology built around the Edo-period samurai. The Hidden Blade is a slow-paced deconstruction of the laws and codes which trapped samurai, the corruption of their lords during the late Bakematsu, and the growing discontent and disconnect among different factions with the increasing influence of Western martial techniques. There is a real sense of the suffocating social rules that by this point were creaking at the seams which must be attributed to the actors and their peerless performances.

I must also mention the PEAK HISTORICAL ACCURACY to be found in this film. The setting is on point, the armour and fabric and cloth colours are on point, the smaller details are peak, and in an interesting example of the time's culture clash a retainer sent to teach Western military tactics is shown blending Japanese and Western dress styles in his clothing that makes him stand out as an almost-alien presence. There is also no modern locality names to spoil the mood (there is mention of "Ezo" rather than its modern name Hokkaido, which would've been a big gaff), and the architecture and long camera shots show little to no modern elements to spoil the illusion that this is late Edo Japan. Combine that with a mixture of contemporary-style musical elements and an admittedly ahistorical orchestral score by Isao Tomita, and you have...probably one of the best modern Japanese films.

Is this film a must watch? Yes, absolutely. This should be on the list of every true Japanese film fan, regardless of genre. The writing is engaging, the story slow but entertaining, the atmosphere is peerless, the acting is great, and the score is heartwrenching. Please, please find a way to watch this film.

9/10

Life events = story ideas?

 On Monday, I had to go to a local hospital. It was nothing serious as it turned out, but it did provide me with something every author should be able to have: an eye for people. And today, I was reminded strongly of that quality when I heard/saw a small little scene play out between a nurse and someone I assume was an outpatient.

For the sake of privacy and decency, I won't reveal this person's name or gender or appearance. I will say that they had a cornucopia of medications to deal with a number of simultaneous conditions, and two people close to them were afflicted with permanently debilitating ailments: one increasing blindness, and one progressive dementia. It was sad and strange hearing those bits from them while talking to a nurse over necessary procedures that would require them to stay in the hospital overnight, and not being able to avoid hearing them since we were in the same waiting area on a quiet day in the hospital.

This isn't the first time that real-life events have stuck in my mind. Getting pseudo-lost in a shopping centre when I was less than ten years old, hearing a train refreshment steward advertising "soft drinks for the saints, hard drinks for the sinners", being briefly manhandled by a flustered hotel employee one BristolCon because he assumed I was part of a rowdy group of young men whom he had been directing away from the convention rooms. But this also applies more broadly to a recurring piece of writing advice to write what you know. Now, I've always considered that advice in part reductive, especially as you may think you know something and be completely wrong. I prefer to think of that advice as "write what you can learn about and what you're comfortable writing about".

Now, there are some authors who did nothing but use real people for inspiration. Looking at you, Ian Fleming, who stole his most famous character's name from an ornithology book and based all his female leads on this one girl he had a ding-dong with back in the day. There needs to be a line drawn between randomly plucking events and names without consideration. But it is also true that authors draw on real-life events to put in bits of their story. Sometimes events that seem wildly improbable are actually traceable back to very real events. Agatha Christie notably drew on two real-life tragedies as the basis for two of her mysteries: it's commonly accepted that the character Marina Gregg in The Mirror Crack'd from Side to Side is at least inspired by actress Gene Tierney, who suffered greatly in her personal life, while her long-running play The Mousetrap was explicitly inspired on the O'Neill case, a horrifying example of domestic abuse. And lest we forget the creators of K9 from Doctor Who, with one of the writers of his debut story inspired by the recent loss of his dog in a road accident.

This is absolutely not intended as a justification for using real-life incidents in this way. I wouldn't advise it, I wouldn't want to do it myself except in a very broad way or if I was referencing them within the context of a real world/real world-adjacent setting. And even then, you wouldn't be exactly paralleling something. Juliet McKenna's Green Man's Quarry highlights some real social and judicial issues without making direct references, and Xiran Jay Zhao's Iron Widow is more inspired by the life of female emperor We Zetien than directly paralleling her life in a sci-fi setting.

All this comes back to that story I heard. As I heard it, I freely admit my author's brain went into action. I was playing the thing out as a scene in a book, whether from my perspective as onlooker or in the person of the patient or the nurse. It was a scene I had met multiple times in more melodramatic dressings, but this one was so raw and emotive that I might've found myself taking notes on it without thinking. I already was doing in taking mental notes. Sometimes I can find myself shocked at how much my brain takes things as 'copy'. Odd phrases, incidents, scenes, weather conditions, sequences of events. There are some events that are going to make an impression no matter what. The circumstances surrounding the deaths of my father, my grandparents, a dear friend in a local singing group. Or on a lighter note, meeting my cousin's young child, getting to have a good talk with relatives, making connections and friends that persisted, seeing a place for the very first time.

There are some ideas you can take from life. But there are others you shouldn't, or at least not without suitable obfuscation. Especially so in this age of intolerance, defamation, legal actions, and extremism where people are more likely to take the violent route, be that abuse, legal destruction, or actual physical harm. And when you think about it, that self-imposed or societal restriction can in itself be inspiration for stories and characters.

So, a final question for you if you've reached this far. If you could, would you turn something from your life into a story scene? And what changes would you consciously or unconsciously make?