Peace in 17th-century Japan causes the Shogunate's breakup of warrior clans, throwing thousands of samurai out of work and into poverty. An honorable end to such fate under the samurai code is ritual suicide, or hara-kiri (self-inflicted disembowelment). An elder warrior, Hanshiro Tsugumo (Tatsuya Nakadai) seeks admittance to the house of a feudal lord to commit the act. There, he learns of the fate of his son-in-law, a young samurai who sought work at the house but was instead barbarically forced to commit traditional hara-kiri in an excruciating manner with a dull bamboo blade. In flashbacks the samurai tells the tragic story of his son-in-law, and how he was forced to sell his real sword to support his sick wife and child. Tsugumo thus sets in motion a tense showdown of revenge against the house.

Production Budget Analysis

The production budget for Harakiri (1962) has not been publicly disclosed.

CAST: Tatsuya Nakadai, Akira Ishihama, Shima Iwashita, Tetsuro Tamba, Masao Mishima, Ichirō Nakatani DIRECTOR: Masaki Kobayashi CINEMATOGRAPHY: Yoshio Miyajima MUSIC: Toru Takemitsu PRODUCTION: Shochiku

Box Office Performance

Theatrical box office data is not publicly available for Harakiri (1962). This may indicate a limited release, direct-to-streaming, or a release predating modern box office tracking.

Profitability Assessment

Insufficient publicly available data to assess profitability.

INDUSTRY IMPACT

AWARDS & RECOGNITION

Summary: 9 wins & 3 nominations total

CRITICAL RECEPTION

In a contemporary review, the Monthly Film Bulletin stated that Masaki Kobayashi's "slow, measured cadence perfectly matches his subject" and that the "story itself is beautifully constructed". The review praised Tatsuya Nakadai's "brilliant, Mifune-like performance" and noted that the film was "on occasion brutal, particularly in the young samurai's terrible agony with his bamboo sword" and that although "some critics have remarked [...] that being gory is not the best way to deplore wanton bloodshed, Harakiri still looks splendid with its measured tracking shots, its slow zooms, its reflective overhead shots of the courtyard, and its frequent poised immobility". The New York Times reviewer Bosley Crowther was unimpressed with "the tortured human drama in this film" but added that "Mr. Kobayashi does superb things with architectural compositions, moving forms and occasionally turbulent gyrations of struggling figures in the CinemaScope-size screen. He achieves a sort of visual mesmerization that is suitable to the curious nightmare mood". Cid Corman wrote in Film Quarterly that "the beauty of the film seems largely due to Kobayashi's underlying firmness of conception and prevailing spirit, by an unevasive concern for cinematic values".

Donald Richie called it the director's "single finest picture" and quoted Kobayashi's mentor Keisuke Kinoshita who named it among the top five greatest Japanese films of all time. Audie Bock wrote: "Harakiri avoids the sentimentality of some of his earlier films, such as The Human Condition, through a new emphasis on visual-auditory aesthetics with the cold formality of compositions and Takemitsu's electronic score. But none of Kobayashi's social protests is diminished in the film's construction – it's Mizoguchi-like circularity that bitterly denies any hope for human progress". Roger Ebert included Harakiri in his list of "Great Movies", writing in his 2012 review: "Samurai films, like westerns, need not be familiar genre stories.