Word: samurais
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...SAMURAI!, by Saburo Sakai, with Martin Caidin and Fred Saito (382 pp.; Dutton; $4.95), sweeps through the South Pacific with all guns firing as Pilot Sakai and his squadron of Zeros effortlessly shoot U.S. planes out of the sky. In five seconds over Port Moresby, four Airacobras are sent spinning into the sea. Another time the Japs down six of seven null without the loss of a Zero...
...done. Two weeks later Rikichi returns from the nearest city at the head of an army-of seven samurai. What follows is a sort of military eclogue, wandering and sometimes tedious, as war and country life are apt to be, but flaring up again and again with a wonderfully natural effect of shock and unexpectedness. At the last, victor and vanquished alike, heaving their cutlasses, sink into the muck of the rice fields; and freedom, when it is born, comes staggering up from the mud all men are made...
...there is nevertheless something tiresome in all this sensuality. In The Magnificent Seven, as in Rashomon, Kurosawa has provided a feast of impressions, but has skimped on some of the more essential vitamins. The characters are clearly written and admirably played, especially the leader of the Samurai (Takashi Shimura). But only rarely does the story seem to drop through the floor of everyday reality into the moral hell that war really is. Unlike some of his Japanese colleagues, Director Kurosawa is not centrally concerned with spiritual statement. He would rather make a social comment, and in The Magnificent Seven...
...Harris' arrangements with the Japanese called for the geisha to be spirited away whenever the "black ships" of the Americans were in port-and as these absences lengthened, Okichi consoled herself with sake. Consolation became alcoholic degradation, and Harris would have nothing more to do with her. No samurai, but still a carpenter. Tsuru-Matsu came back and married her; but love and liquor would not mix. When she was told that Townsend Harris had been buried "among the silent hills of Brooklyn." Okichi lingered on a few years, then suffered a paralytic stroke; dragging herself painfully...
...Plucky Poet. The story of Tsumakichi has the universal appeal of plain grit. During one night of horror in her 17th year, Tsumakichi woke to find a human head rolling past her on the teahouse veranda, saw a samurai sword flash twice toward her own body, leaving her armless. Her berserk adoptive father, the manager of the teahouse, had lopped off the heads of five of the six people sleeping under his roof that night. Primarily a dancer, she painfully mastered a new art. Holding a paintbrush between her teeth, she learned to paint ideograms and to draw designs...