Jis desh mein manga bikhti hai... stupid Japanese guy meets terrifying Indian city

In a recent piece, I mentioned the pitfalls of writing simplistically about poverty and squalor in India. That’s relevant to a reportage-driven project, where the writer has a responsibility to understand historical and cultural context, but there are other types of writing where an individual’s honest account of his impressions can take precedence over providing a “fair” or “balanced” view. Take the case of a Japanese comic artist in his mid-50s who decides, almost on whim, to travel to India (a country he knows practically nothing about) to sell Hindi translations of manga publications. He lands in Delhi, fumbles through immigration, can’t locate the airport exit, is horrified to find his bags dumped near the conveyor belt, outraged to see a man using a simple calculator at the foreign-exchange counter…and all this in the first few minutes. The business of actually living in this country without being able to speak English or Hindi still lies ahead of him.

Little wonder then that Yukichi Yamamatsu’s graphic novel Stupid Guy Goes to India – an account of his India stay in 2004-05 – contains such observations as “It’s like the ground was entirely made of cow turds” and “People were eating something that looked like potato, out of something that looked like tree bark...with their hands!” Little wonder too that parts of this book feel like a horror story about an innocent abandoned in a crepuscular forest, even though most of it is set in Old Delhi in broad sunlight (and the people around aren't monsters but speak a strange language presented as geometric symbols in speech balloons).

In fairness, Yamamatsu makes not the slightest pretence of being worldly wise. Uninformed and provincial, he is devastated to discover that homegrown Indian comics exist (he was expecting to single-handedly introduce a new art form to the country!) and this shock is conveyed in one of the book’s more amusing panels, where Yukichi’s head appears to be sliced by a samurai sword. He gets fleeced, goes around in circles and flies into existential rage when he learns the cost of printing a comic - he had figured it would be no more than 20 or 30 Yen, things being famously cheap in India. The more I read, the more I felt that the “stupid guy” in the title wasn’t just a sweet exercise in self-deprecation.

Still, I liked this book’s resolutely unsentimental tone. Yukichi is in India with a single-point agenda. He isn’t interested in the local culture beyond how it helps him achieve his ends (before his trip he half-heartedly goes through an India guidebook, but soon forgets most of what he’s read). Age may have something to do with it: this isn’t a spry youngster looking to discover an exciting new place; this is an irritable elderly man who is set in his ways and who worries about walking around for long periods because of a bowel incontinence problem (it doesn’t help that the ubiquitous song “Dhoom Machale” sounds to him like “Unko Tare”, meaning anal leakage!). When he describes playing an impromptu game with street kids, it’s more a way of passing the time than an attempt at being friendly (or at least being friendly in the elaborate Indian way). There’s even an irreverent, unexpectedly pornographic passage when he acts on a friend’s suggestion that Indian women are “probably pretty good for sex”, and makes a trip to GB Road (he proceeds to detail his inability to sustain an erection, which led me to happy thoughts of Stupid Guy ... being placed in the children’s section of bookstores, something that often happens with adult comics).

But the lack of sentimentality doesn’t necessarily make this a cold, detached narrative. Part of its charm comes from how Yukichi, in spite of himself, gets absorbed into the Indian way of doing things, such as the vague bob of the head that indicates direction (and which he dramatises with a "wik" sound). He is often very funny when he describes his struggles to have conversations in broken Hindi, and hyper-dramatic wails of “Nahin!” punctuate the story when he gets stressed (which is often). And since he is so passionate about what he does, one comes to feel invested in his heroic attempts to get comics translated, properly lettered and typeset. The magnificent culture of manga will bring a new dawn to India, he exults at one point, in the foreground of a drawing that shows the sun rising above “the cold, dark Himalayas”. The effect is mainly humorous, but by the end it’s a conceit almost worth buying into.

Stupid Guy Goes to India is a breezy tale that begins quite slowly (especially if you’re not enthralled by descriptions of a foreigner making his first acquaintance with spicy food, low-budget hotels and auto-rickshaws) and becomes more involving as it goes along. But it also worked for me on a level that the author may not have intended. We are surrounded by self-congratulating India narratives these days – even the ones that aren’t explicitly about The Shining tell us that the rest of the world looks towards us with respect for our cultural wisdom, our glorious past, our economic future, our ability to manage social complexity, our film-stars, our graceful, sari-wearing women. There is more than enough affirmation for those of us who seek it. Amidst all this, it can be useful to sit down and read a book by someone from a nearby country who isn’t particularly impressed by us, and who makes no bones about it. Sometimes it’s good to be tersely told “Indians tend to barge into your room without warning.” Or that “Indian marbles are smaller than Japanese ones and they are not perfectly round but flattened”. (Yukichi is really talking about marbles here, but again, who knows.)

P.S. This English translation of Stupid Guy Goes to India (by Kumar Sivasubramanian) has been printed in the traditional manga style, meaning it has to be read from right to left. (Perhaps the idea was to make a non-Japanese reader feel as disoriented as Yukichi felt in Delhi!) I found this reasonably easy to do when I read it the first time from beginning to end, but not so easy when I tried flipping through passages later to refresh my memory.

[A shorter version of this appeared in The Sunday Guardian. And here's an old post about Osamu Tezuka's excellent Buddha series]

Putting the "act" in action: Black Friday, Sword of Doom

When we think of master-classes in film acting, we usually envision performers firing sharply written lines at each other in intense dramatic confrontations or (less often) comic setpieces. Or scenes that have little dialogue but where the silences are soaked in meaning; where each pause, each glance, is somehow significant; where “understatement” rules the moment. For a good sense of what is commonly thought of as a performance highlight, look at the short clips chosen when the acting nominations are read out at the Oscars. Watch enough of them and you'll see definite patterns emerging (and that’s without taking into account the Motion Picture Academy’s fondness for certain types of roles – physically or mentally disadvantaged characters, for instance – rather than the performances in them).

One thing that is usually not associated with acting chops is the high-voltage action sequence: fight scenes or chases are usually perceived as fillers or tempo-raisers, and that's what they often are (and in many of them, stuntmen substitute for the actors anyway). But every once in a while, an action scene does afford opportunities for fine performances as well as for character development within a narrative.

Recently I watched the Extras on a DVD of Anurag Kashyap’s masterful film Black Friday, about the investigation that followed the 1993 Mumbai bomb blasts. Among the movie’s highlights is the superbly choreographed and shot sequence where a group of cops pursue a suspect, Imtiaz Ghavate, through a slum area. “Anurag told me he wanted a performance from me in this chase scene,” says the actor Pranay Narayan – who plays Ghavate – in the “Making of” documentary, and a performance it certainly is. Over the course of this long scene, Imtiaz goes from being a menacing bhai figure (the first time we see him he is shot from a low camera angle, looming above us, looking blasé and in control) to a snivelling wreck being bullied around by the police; by the end it’s almost possible to feel sorry for him.

The scene begins on a purposefully energetic note, as you’d expect, but gradually becomes something of a comic routine, as the policemen and their quarry move in circles and get worn out. One hysterically funny shot has an unfit cop calling out “Imtiaz, ruk ja” as both men pant breathlessly – by this point they are lurching rather than running, and the effect is that of two quarrelling lovers trying half-heartedly to make up. It’s a fine depiction of the banality of police-work, humanising both cop and criminal – a considerable achievement given that this is a story about terrorist attacks that killed hundreds of people. It’s also a significant step away from the traditional depiction of cops and robbers in Hindi cinema. And the performances help make it compulsively believable.

Good acting is even rarer in full-blooded fight sequences. In her book Looking for the Big B: Bollywood, Bachchan and Me (which I reviewed here), Jessica Hines observes that in Bombay to Goa, made before he settled into the Angry Young Man image, Amitabh Bachchan seemed awkward during much of the film and then came alive in the fight sequences at the end. I’m not sure about this specific example (the fights in Bombay to Goa aren’t so much properly worked out action scenes as vignettes of various people knocking each other about in speeded-up motion), but not many people would disagree that Bachchan was extremely convincing in his really well-staged fight sequences in films like Sholay and Kaala Patthar.

One of my favourite “action performances” in this vein is by the great Japanese actor Tatsuya Nakadai in the climactic scene of the 1966 film Sword of Doom. Nakadai plays a sadistic swordsman named Ryunosuke who spends much of the story killing and plundering. At the end, as he sits alone in a geisha-house, he is visited by the ghosts of his victims as well as by real people who want him dead; turning completely psychotic, he slashes wildly at these phantoms over the course of an extraordinary, bloody 10-minute sequence.

Jaw-dropping in its length and persistence, this scene is the perfect apocalyptic finish to a story about a cruel and violent man facing his demons - it’s almost Shakespearean in its suggestion of the past haunting the present, and Nakadai (who would play King Lear for Kurosawa years later) is outstanding in the way he seems to be simultaneously a sentient person and a zombie. At times his movements become so mechanical one gets the impression that his arm is being driven by his “evil” sword. His eyes are hollow and lifeless, he flails unthinkingly at the air, but then he comes alive again and seems briefly conscious of what is going on around him; and then again he retreats into his own private world, while his arm continues slashing away.

Nothing in this sequence (or in the Black Friday one) would make it to those smooth Oscar acting clips, but these performances are integral to the films’ effectiveness. They are reminders that some action scenes require a little more from a performer than a grunted, expressionless “I’ll be back.”

[Did a version of this for my Business Standard film column]

A film and its cover

[The Yahoo column for this week. With images! In full colour! Originally published here]


Two very nice things happened to me last week. First, Manjula Padmanabhan (friend, multi-talented author and illustrator who once put me in a comic strip with the peerless Suki) dropped in with a gift: a couple of posters that she had designed for Govind Nihalani’s Ardh Satya in 1982. Second, I got my hands on a bunch of Criterion Collection DVDs that another friend, Tipu, had picked up for me at a sale in the US. (It was my first brush with legitimately bought Criterions: Tipu had disapproved of my pirated discs from the underground market in Delhi, and decided to help make an honest man out of me.)

Both the posters and the DVD designs were reminders that high-quality promotional artwork can have a life of its own, even while it enhances one’s appreciation of the film. One of Manjula’s posters is a large close-up – a drawing done in black ink – of Om Puri's lined, weary face. You might recall that in Ardh Satya, Puri plays a sub-inspector named Velankar who is facing a crisis of conscience. To my eyes, the poster suggests the inner turmoil more effectively than a still photograph would have done. The thick black lines appear to cast shadows across the actor’s face, and looked at in a certain light, Velankar seems scruffy and unshaven - something you never see in the film, where he is neatly turned out from beginning to end. There’s an artistic rather than literal realism on view here, and it's perfect for the character.

****

I’ve been fascinated by poster art – cool and formal, loud and kitschy, and everything in between – for a long time. Many a lunch at The Big Chill café in Khan Market has been spent with my fork and knife suspended in the air, my mouth half open, while I study the wall posters of Attack of the 50-Foot Woman and The Bride of Frankenstein instead of concentrating on my food. When the annual Osian-Cinefan film festival in Delhi started displaying vintage posters, lobby cards and paintings, I routinely spent more time in the foyer than in the auditorium, to the disapproval of friends who believed that watching five movies back to back was the thing to do at such an event.

This interest has led to a few good (and I must admit, cheap) purchases over the years. On a wall in my living room is a 5ft x 3ft poster of Nargis and Raj Kapoor in the famous clinch in Barsaat. It’s a painting, not a photograph, and though the faces are very accurately drawn, the poster (unlike the film) is in bright colour, with a florid red background. On the other hand, my An Evening in Paris poster features a Goldfinger-like image of a naked green woman with prominent nipples, which I’m fairly certain wasn’t in the film. But I love it anyway.

Among the posters I sadly don’t own, some of my favourites are the ones created outside the film’s home country, so that the familiar original title is turned into something exotic (and the film itself appears transformed and foreign as a result). For example, I much prefer the Belgian Psycho poster that spells the title “Psychose” (you’ll find a version of it here) to the relatively staid American and British versions. And who can deny that “Reporter des Satans” is a more evocative title than Ace in the Hole for a film about a rotten journalist exploiting a cave-in victim?

A poster I once saw of Deewaar had the alternate English title “I’ll Die For Mama!” scrawled across Amitabh Bachchan’s face in a dramatic font size. The Danish posters for From Here to Eternity (“Herfra til Evigheden”) and The Bridge on the River Kwai (“Broen Over Floden Kwai”) make these stodgy, Oscar-honoured epics seem more interesting than they are. And speaking of stodgy Oscar-winners, there’s an awesome Polish poster of Attenborough's Gandhi with the central image a fragmented drawing of Gandhi in a sitting position, hands joined in prayer. The great man appears literally to be disintegrating even as his country is being divided. There is more delicate artistry here than in most of the film.

As you can probably tell, I'm not as interested in posters made up of publicity photographs or stills, but even these can be imaginatively designed, or combined with other media – as in the Umrao Jaan poster Manjula showed me, with a photograph of Rekha in the foreground and a Taj Mahal painting (done by Anjolie Ela Menon) in the background.

The artwork on the Criterion DVDs occupies a smaller canvas (the size of a DVD cover or, at most, the size of the Main Menu on your TV screen), but has greater scope for mixing media. For instance, the DVD cover of Onibaba, the Japanese horror classic about a woman who gets hold of a demon mask, features a bright, coloured caricature (again, the film itself is in black and white), while the Main Menu shows a short animation of the “demon” popping up from behind tall grass while two woman flee in terror.

The designers at Criterion frequently use striking, original art – I have too many favourites to mention, but consider the minimalist cover of Kurosawa’s The Bad Sleep Well, with a simple line drawing of a tall building marked with a bright red cross on one of the upper windows (the film’s plot is set in motion by a man leaping to his death). Or the whimsical, New Yorker-like drawing on the cover of Make Way for Tomorrow, with two old people walking away from each other in the middle of a big city.

But at other times, images from the films are used to equally good effect. Nearly all the Criterion covers of Ingmar Bergman's movies feature the faces of his actors, often seem in tight close-up, expressions of contemplation or barely suppressed anguish on their faces – and what could represent Bergman better? In such cases, the very act of selecting a specific frame from a movie (from among the thousands available), then blowing it up or giving it a slight tint, can do wonders for packaging.

Thus the cover of Winter Light, a stark film about a tormented, self-doubting pastor, has a full-length shot of the actor Gunnar Bjornstrand – who plays the lead – lost in thought. The disc menu shows the sallow face of Max von Sydow, who plays a man seeking religious solace; in the background of the image we can see the uncommunicative pastor, his back turned to us. It's a lovely summation. As is the cover of Criterion’s A Woman Under the Influence, which shows the lead character in bed, looking fatigued and hung-over – the choice of visual, but also the fact that the colour has been deliberately toned down, perfectly captures the film's subject matter as well as its mood.

None of this is to say that a movie should be judged by its cover, but there’s no question that a well-executed design can be something worth studying on its own terms. It can deepen our understanding of a film, or it might simply be great fun to look at - or it can do both, as in some of the ones mentioned here.

[Since this is nowhere near enough space to do justice to most of the posters I'd like to talk about, I might consider doing a sequel to this post sometime]

The cowardly Samurai: audience manipulation in Harakiri

[Full version of my latest Persistence of Vision column]

I’ve been a big fan of classical Japanese cinema for a long time, and like most other viewers who develop an interest in that country’s movies, my approach route was through the three big names: Ozu, Kurosawa and Mizoguchi. But in recent years I’ve been following other Japanese directors of the 1950s and 60s – Kon Ichikawa, Masuki Kobayashi, Kaneto Shindo among them – and I’ve been struck by the recurring themes of pacifism and anti-heroism in some of the best films of that time; the revulsion for the idea that there’s something glamorous or exciting about a life of violence, even when the violence is supposedly for a good cause; and the reminders of how conflict affects “little people”. These motifs probably come from introspection about the country’s very martial past – especially between the late 19th century and WWII – and you’ll discover traces of them in literature too, often in unexpected places (e.g., a bulky Haruki Murakami novel that’s set mostly in 1980s suburban Tokyo but contains unsettling inserts about the Sino-Japanese conflict). In cinema, this introspection can take the form of a “war is hell” story such as Ichikawa’s Fires on the Plain, about a sad-faced soldier turned away by his own army. Or a horror film – Shindo’s Onibaba – in which a scarred face beneath a demon mask suggests the visages of Hiroshima and Nagasaki survivors.

Or it can take the form of a period movie that sharply debunks some of our ideas about those enigmatic warriors, the Samurai.


Masaki Kobayashi’s Harakiri is just such a film. There’s a lot that can be said about this plaintive, beautifully composed movie, but I’d like to dwell on an audience-manipulation technique used in its first half – a technique that implicates us in the idea that the Samurai code of “death over dishonour” is an inherently noble one, and then pulls the carpet (or tatami mat) out from under our feet.

To discuss this properly, some plot exposition is required. Harakiri begins with a title card telling us that it’s set in the early 17th century, a time of relative peace in Japan. An unemployed Samurai (or ronin) named Hanshiro arrives at the feudal estate of the Iyi clan with a request: being master-less and with nothing left to live for, he wishes to commit ritual suicide (seppuku or harakiri) on their grounds.

The estate retainers and their lord, Saito, are sceptical: there have been many recent cases of destitute Samurai visiting wealthy houses and making such assertions when what they really want is money or employment. They try to dissuade Hanshiro by telling him a story about another ronin named Chijiwa, who had come to them a few months earlier with a similar request, and this story is shown to us as a flashback.

In the images now presented to us, we see that Chijiwa is much younger than the scruffy, steely-eyed Hanshiro. He’s clean-shaven, somewhat shifty, he doesn’t look like he’s ready to stare death in the eye. From our first viewing of him we suspect that he’s a wastrel seeking easy money, and these suspicions seem confirmed when he expresses almost indecorous delight on being told that he will get to meet the head of the clan (perhaps to be employed as a retainer?) – and later, when he looks terrified on hearing that his wish for harakiri has been granted and the ritual dress is ready.


Now he loses his nerve, stutters, asks for respite: he has some important business to take care of, so could he be granted two days’ leave? His pleading comes across as pathetic and cowardly, and his hosts will have none of it. You came here to kill yourself, they say. Now do it. Or else...

Forcing young Chijiwa to commit harakiri is a ploy by the Iyi clan; they figure it will teach a much-needed lesson to any other Samurai who might want to come a-begging. And at this point in the story, the viewer’s feelings are likely to be divided, especially if he doesn’t know much about the nature of feudalism and the class divide in medieval Japan. For one thing, Lord Saito and his retainers aren’t sneering villains. They speak in restrained tones to each other, talk about the need to preserve the dignity of their house; there’s something melancholy about Saito (an understated, arresting performance by Rentaro Mikuni) himself. Also, if our main acquaintance with the Samurai culture has been through action movies, we have certain pre-conceptions. We have been conditioned to think of Samurai as men who never cringe or beg, and it strikes us as shameful that this young man is using a “noble” ritual like seppuku as a cover-up for his greed.

Thus the film, in a way, makes us complicit with the actions of the Iyi clan. But then, as the flashback continues, we see the long, increasingly disturbing scene where Chijiwa is forced to disembowel himself. Further, the Iyi sadistically insist that he do it with his own sword, which is made of bamboo, not steel. Somehow, with great effort, the young man manages to pierce his belly with this wholly inadequate weapon, but it’s impossible for him to complete the ritual, which entails cutting across his chest, left and right, up and down. Meanwhile his “second” (the swordsman who is assigned to cut off the warrior’s head once the self-mutilation is complete) stands about impassively, refusing to bring down his sword and end Chijiwa’s agony. Eventually Chijiwa takes the “easy” way out – he bites off his own tongue.

As you can imagine, this is a difficult scene to watch, even though it isn’t too gruesome (this is, after all, a black-and-white film made in 1962). It amounts to a bucket of cold water in the face of the viewer who may have felt that Chijiwa was getting what he deserved. Perhaps some of us even thought Lord Saito only meant to frighten this craven Samurai before sparing his life and booting him out of the gate – that would have made for a nice comic sequence! But what actually takes place is horrific and forces us to think again. Harakiri has only been running for half an hour at this point and its central themes aren’t clear yet, but at a subconscious level it has already started demystifying the grandeur and honour associated with the Samurai code.

The misleading nature of the Chijiwa flashback will become even more apparent as the story progresses and Hanshiro relates a tale of his own. We will discover something of young Chijiwa’s background, discover the circumstances that led him to the gates of the estate. In retrospect we will realise that when he asked for two days’ respite he was being sincere and would probably have returned to fulfill his promise. (When we first view the scene, we assume that he’s making an excuse to escape.) Our subsequent knowledge gives a whole new complexion to that early sequence, and makes a second viewing even more disturbing.

I’ve written mainly about (an aspect of) Harakiri’s narrative here but what strikes me most while watching it – especially in the sharp new transfer on the Criterion Collection DVD – is the cleanness of its composition. Some of its frames are like minimalist paintings, a reminder of Kobayashi’s gorgeously shot ghost film Kwaidan, which was full of sequences that look like lovely colour dreamscapes placed end to end. In their own discreet way, Harakiri’s black-and-white images are equally striking.

****

Among the many high-quality action films with pacifist undertones is Kurosawa’s great The Seven Samurai, about ronin protecting a village from bandits. There’s a melancholy strain in this masterpiece, a genuine sense of regret for the loss of human lives, and its protagonist (the wise Samurai leader Kambei) is a reluctant hero who has already seen too much bloodshed for his liking. But precisely because Kurosawa is such a superb director of action, and because he puts us right in the middle of the battles, it’s impossible not to feel a thrill during those scenes – and this can end up being our lasting impression of the film.

On the other hand, Harakiri has a formalness, a stillness, that goes with its plangent subject matter. A lengthy swordfight towards the end is filmed mainly in long-shot and though it’s extremely well-choreographed, there’s also something detached about it. We aren’t placed right in the middle of the blood and the grunts; there are several cutaways to Lord Saito sitting alone in an inner room, almost in a meditative state, listening to the swords clanging, waiting for his men to come and tell him that the fight is over.

Even though Hanshiro is a truly heroic figure (in a deeper sense of the word “hero” than the average action film gives us), the emphasis isn’t on the glamour of his sword-fighting, merely its efficiency. It’s possible at this moment to see a Samurai warrior as an individual worker, doing a job that circumstances have equipped him for – rather than as a representative of a way of life. Kobayashi’s haunting film is about the human beings – men with families, hopes and emotions – beneath the garb of the Samurai.

P.S. Tatsuya Nakadai, who plays Hanshiro, was one of the great Japanese actors. He makes a poetic remark in an interview included on my DVD of the film. “My twenties felt like a long climb up Mount Fuji,” he says, “and the burden I was carrying on my back was everybody’s masterpieces – the films of Kurosawa, Kobayashi, Ichikawa, Naruse.” It’s hard to believe Nakadai was only 30 when he played the aging, weary Hanshiro; it’s even harder to believe he’s the same actor who, only a year earlier, played the young, chuckling, pistol-wielding psychotic in Kurosawa’s Yojimbo.