The Last Samurai

My name is Katsushiro Okamoto. Please, please let me become one of your followers.

Followers? I am Kambei Shimada. I am only a ronin. I have no followers

I thought about Liberace and Lord Leighton and the author of the magazine article. Even if she’s right, what’s bad about these people is that they are bad artists. Maybe my father was a bad writer—but it could be because he had more important things to think about. If you’re travelling across Siberia with a team of huskies you may not have time to polish every word. Sibylla does tend to take art too seriously.

I went up to my room after a while. She has been watching Seven Samurai for the last 10 years and she still has trouble with the Japanese. I could hear it downstairs. I knew she’d be there for at least another hour.

I had once seen an envelope in her room marked To Be Opened In Case of Death. I thought—well surely if she thought she’d be dead she’d say who my father was. I thought—I’ve tried to play by the rules, but this is ridiculous. I could just see myself in 10 years looking at the picture by Lord Leighton and not seeing anything wrong, or trying to find something wrong with one of the greatest writers of our time.

I had practised walking silently. I walked silently across the landing to her room. There’s a drawer where she keeps her passport. I thought the envelope might be there. I crossed the room and opened the drawer.

There was a folder with a thick stack of papers in it.

2

I know all the words

I read through the papers quickly.

There was quite a lot about my father, but she’d thought of a nickname and stuck to it. I kept thinking she’d say who Liberace was, or at least mention the title of one of his books, but she didn’t. Before I could start looking again for the envelope Sibylla called from downstairs

LUDO! ARE YOU UPSTAIRS?

I said

YES

and she said

WOULD YOU MIND BRINGING ME THE DUVET?

I put the folder of papers back in the drawer and took the duvet downstairs. I don’t know what I thought. I think I thought It’s not too late not to know and But I have to know.

The first part of the recruitment was over, the part where Katsushiro stands behind a door with a stick. When I was very little I would practise reading fast from the subtitles and Sibylla would say why do you think he did this and why do you think he did that and why doesn’t Shichiroji have to take the test and why does Gorobei take Heihachi if he says he always runs away? I would say something and she would laugh and say she never thought of that.

Kambei and Katsushiro find two samurai stripping bamboo poles for a match.

The fight begins. Kyuzo raises his pole. X holds his pole over his head and shouts.

Kyuzo draws back his pole. X runs forward.

Kyuzo raises his pole suddenly and brings it down.

X: Sorry, that was a draw

No. I won

Nonsense

If it had been with real swords you’d be dead.

Sibylla put the duvet around her shoulders. She said she would start typing soon.

I wanted to say: Was he really as bad as Liberace?

Liberace was the one thing she’d shown me that I could see was bad. Could my father really be that bad? Could he be worse? I wanted to say: How bad is bad? Is it worse than gap-toothed urchins and coltish grace? Worse than scrap of humanity? Worse than veritable cathedral of ice? I wanted to say: But at least he’s seen the world.

I thought of saying to Sibylla, If I’m such a genius why won’t you let me decide for myself? I thought of saying, I thought you disapproved people who purely because they happened to arrive on the planet a few years earlier make other people who happened to arrive on the planet a few years later obey them without persuading them of the justice of their position. I thought you thought disenfranchisement on grounds of age the hallmark of a BARBARIC SOCIETY. I thought of saying, How do you know something I don’t know is something I don’t want to know?

In runs the gambler, who says they’ve found a really tough samurai.

Katsushiro runs to stand behind the door with a stick.

Gambler: You dirty cheat!

Kambei: If he’s a real samurai he won’t be hit.

Gambler: But he’s drunk.

Kambei: A samurai doesn’t get so drunk that he loses his senses.

A man runs through the door; Katsushiro brings the stick down hard. This samurai doesn’t parry the blow. He falls moaning to the ground.

This was the first scene I understood. It was because the scroll made me realise I could see the words. Obviously hearing something is just reading backwards, what I mean is, when you read you hear the word in your mind, and when you talk or hear someone say something you see an image of the word in your mind: if someone says someone you see a word in Roman letters, and if they say philosophia you see φιοσοφíα, and if they say kataba you see , you actually see an image of something you read from right to left. But for a long time I didn’t realise this worked with Japanese. I’d hear Nihon in my head if I saw on the page, say, but I didn’t realise I could see something in my head if I heard something. Anyway Kambei picks up the end and reads from it—what he actually says is ‘Tenshōsecond year second month seventeenth day born’, he says the sounds Tenshō ninen nigatsu jūshichinichi umare and suddenly I realised I could see some of the words, he was seeing them on the scroll and saying them and when he said ninen nigatsu jūshichinichi in my mind I could see . Second year second month seventeenth day. Probably because I was obsessed with Japanese numbers at the time.

For the rest of the film sounds would sort of crystallise here and there around an image and then I went back and tried to work the others out and by the time I was eight the images came into my head for most of the film and I could understand almost all of it.

Mifune recognises Kambei.

Hey you! Asking me ‘Are you a samurai?’ like that—don’t laugh at me.

Even though I look like this, I’m a genuine samurai.

Hey—I’ve been looking for you the whole time ever since then…. thinking I’d like to show you this [pulls out a scroll]

Look at this

This genealogy

This genealogy of my ancestors handed down for generations

(You bastard, you’re making a fool of me)

Look at this (you’re making a fool of me)

This is me.

[Kambei, reading] This Kikuchiyo it talks about is you?

[Mifune] That’s right

[Kambei] Born on the seventeenth day of the second month of the second year of Tensho … [bursts out laughing]