For years, he had wanted to watch the films of Kurosawa. People had mentioned Seven Samurai with the sort of reverence he associated with religion. The film Seven Samurai, at least according to other people, was the sort of film that would renegotiate his sense of self. Well, they didn’t say that exactly, but that’s how he took their praise. Why else would everyone speak so reverentially of Kurosawa?
He thought the film must be about honor, about faith, about the triumph of the human spirit. He thought it would be like La Dolce Vita or Melancholia, movies that pierced to the very existential core of what it meant to be human. In his understanding, this was the purpose of film. To pierce to the core of being.
So, he was surprised when Seven Samurai turned out to be an action film about assembling a team of heroes to defeat an enemy horde. A plot he recognized from action movies from his youth, like The Dirty Dozen, Red Dawn, and Rambo, along with every movie in the Marvel universe. Certainly, there was more to the film. For instance, the battle scenes had a kind of screaming chaos to them that contemporary films couldn’t approach. The soldiers from the bandit horde really were dragged from their horses. He supposed they didn’t have as many shots to record the battle, no endless amount of film to get everything right. Now people had smooth choreography, swords clashing, or, more often, someone wielding an axe in front of a green screen, fending off aliens. The old film, the real film, was a beautiful mess.
And then there was the matter of the last shot, the graves of the fallen samurai, which maybe made it, in his mind, a kind of anti-war film, especially the hero’s final utterance, “we are the ones who lost.” Someone somewhere, Truffaut perhaps, had once said that it was impossible to make an anti-war film, which was provocative enough to pause the man in his thinking about the film, and he wondered about class as well, samurais and villagers, which was a core theme of the movie.
And yet, what the movie had really shown the man was the distance between what he thought he understood about the world and what he actually understood. There was a vast and yawning gulf, which the movie had exposed. He had spent at least twenty years misunderstanding his relationship with the films of Kurosawa, which he had always imagined as something other than what they were. He didn’t know whether this should excite or depress him.
Adult life had so few surprises. And so, though the movies of Kurosawa were not what he’d thought they’d be (an examination of the depth of the human spirit, an idea which he knew was probably influenced quite deeply by his Western upbringing and, he was sure if he read enough, problematized), he wasn’t so much depressed as excited by the fact of this surprise. Perhaps the world, which he had begun to think of as closed, was more open than he’d thought; perhaps there were still discoveries and surprises for him, beyond even the films of Kurosawa.
He went for a walk on the snowy streets and admired the lamplight on the white. He said hi to his neighbor while she walked her dogs, the neighbor he’d pegged as unkind. They talked for a few minutes, their breath making cloud formations. He suddenly realized he liked her. He invited her over sometime to watch a Kurosawa film. I’ve never seen him, she said, but I’ve heard so many good things. He didn’t want to disappoint her. He didn’t want to disappoint himself. He wanted the night to last forever.
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Andrew Bertaina is the author of the short story collection One Person Away From You (2021), which won the Moon City Short Fiction Award, and the forthcoming essay collection, The Body is a Temporary Gathering Place (Autofocus). His work has appeared in The Threepenny Review, Witness Magazine, Prairie Schooner, Orion, and The Best American Poetry. He has an MFA from American University in Washington, DC. He is currently the Visiting Writer at American University.
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image: Simon Gardner
Rejection Letters 