Fall is naturally when one’s thoughts turn to Samurai, especially when one is writing the annual back-to-school newsletter for the Japanese Language School, and one fantasizes that one might have been a Japanese warrior in a past life. One’s husband says one was Chinese, but I’m not sure about that. So, naturally, this is a time I like to reconsider Toshiro Mifune, when I line up Kurosawa films, in the hopes that I will finally “get” them. Because I’ve never really understood why I always fell asleep during these very, very important films we used to watch earlier in our marriage.

Excepting, of course Yojimbo. The most important part of that film, for me, is the resounding spaghetti western refrain, with diminished chords, followed by augmented, exploding trumpets. The startling juxtapositions clash, as Western ideals must have when they appeared in the Japanese mainstream (oooh, am I getting it now?). My husband tells me that these films are about the rebuilding of Japanese identity after WWII.

Am I just dense? If I’m going to watch Samurai films, I want them to be beautiful and mythical. I want them with Ken Wantanabe and lots of galloping. Not brooding postwar reconstruction anthologies.

So, for all the important movies I “get,” here’s to the ones I don’t.