The fight scene in the woodcuter's version

He couldn't admit he lacked the courage to be honest, so what does he do to make himself look better? He paints others in a cowardly light.

I would approach this from a different direction.

The woodcutter doesn't have the first clue what he is looking at and seeing. He knows absolutely nothing about kendo or anything else similar or related. So it's not even *possible* for him to describe any such contest in terms of rational and intentional movements. He has no concept of (what a modern Western fencer would refer to as) "maintaining proper fencing distance". Therefore he can't possibly see that a step backwards might be a well reasoned tactical choice; instead he interprets it through the lens of his own experience and thought process and takes it to be what it would be if he did it: panic stricken flight. In the woodcutter's eyes, every retreat becomes uncontrolled fleeing to the furthest corner of the clearing; and every advance becomes an out-of-control bull-rush charge.

While the woodcutter's description of the fight is a realistic depiction of what a sword fight between the woodcutter and another, similarly clueless person would look like, I don't think there's any chance that it is anything like what *this* fight looked like.

We have to remember what a samurai was. They were hereditary, professional soldiers. That means that their full time job, from childhood on, was practicing their skills with a sword and a bow (and a few other related things). Frankly, I suspect that if the samurai were trying to look as much like a toddler as he could, he would have difficulty making his footwork as bad as it is depicted in the woodcutter's version of that fight. By that point in his life, he would have spent too many thousands of hours practicing his footwork into a completely automatic habit. Thinking that fear could have destroyed those habits so completely is the same as thinking that a sufficiently scared professional baseball player would revert to throwing exactly like a toddler. That's not how "muscle memory" works.

Undoubtedly, the bandit's memory of the fight figures to be a bit idealized, and there are almost certainly times where he remembers what he meant to do instead of what he actually did. However, my bet is that his version is closer to what actually happened than the woodcutter's version is.

---

I would also mention that, even in the bandit's idealized version, there are times when the bandit (having less formal training than the samurai) over-commits to an attack and ends up putting himself off balance for a moment. The samurai doesn't attempt a counter-strike when the bandit has made himself vulnerable. I couldn't help wondering whether the samurai's "suicide" might have included engaging in a katana duel without ever seriously attempting to strike his opponent; sooner or later, the bandit would land one of his strikes even the samurai were the far better swordsman.

Then again, since the samurai's ghost felt the dagger being removed from his corpse after he could no longer see: I also find myself wondering whether the bandit had wounded the samurai, and had left him for dead, and *then* the samurai finished himself. In that case, nobody would have actively lied about anything other than the already acknowledged bit about the woodcutter and the dagger; the samurai would have just omitted the fight from his version while telling the truth (as he saw and remembered it) about what happened before and after it.

Of course, all of this is beside the point relative to the primary thrust of the movie.

reply share

add reply

formatting help