Samurai Champloo's
concluding three-parter, “Evanescent Encounter” has a lot of
narrative work to do. On top of the task of bringing the series to a
satisfying conclusion – a Herculean labour in any TV show, one that
anime shows in particular have a habit of botching – it also needs
to bring together a story that has been disparate and episodic,
ranging over a host of genres and tones, and make it seem like all
one satisfying progression to a climactic moment. The search for the
samurai that smells like sunflower has been until this point
something of a quixotic dream, maybe even a joke, the thin framing
device used to put these characters together. Now, it takes central
stage, and we need to believe that the sunflower samurai has been
essential to the series all along.
Once upon a time, this
would not have been a problem. In the age of fully episodic TV, a
finale could just be a regular episode with perhaps a bit more in the
way of dramatic stakes. It didn't really have to tie together the
entirety of what had come before. But in our day even episodic
series like Samurai Champloo make
pretensions to an ongoing narrative, a narrative that must ultimately
be settled. So these episodes take great pains to assert that the
seemingly rambling narrative has actually been a seamless whole.
One-off characters from past adventures are mentioned, and we learn
that there's been a hidden force guiding our characters' mission this
whole time. I'm not sure that this is entirely successful, nor do I
think it needs to be: fragmented narratives are not intrinsically
worse than singular ones, and offer pleasures and possibilities that
one continual story does not.
“Evanescent Encounter” succeeds as a finale in
another way: by taking the series's usual ideas and amplifying them,
turning the rhythms of an episode into a movie-length maxi-adventure.
While there are plenty of atypical installments, your average
episode of Samurai Champloo has a kind of pattern: the central
trio roll into town, hungry and broke, get split up, run into a
character with ambiguous allegiances, there's some swordfighting, and
ultimately they're the few that get out alive. The conclusion
escalates all of these trends to their highest points.
The first part of “Evanescent Encounter” mostly
concerned itself with the first part of this plot. Fuu leaves the
group, as she has on numerous times before, but this time it is
treated more seriously: after a rare harmonious night by the fire,
she leaves a heartfelt letter and dismisses her two alleged
bodyguards. Fuu leaving, which would previously be a comic beat to
set up the plot, is here allowed to be a genuinely emotional moment.
It is not the comedic act of an impetuous girl but the proverbial
sparrow leaving the nest, with Fuu finally deciding to confront her
problems on her own. Similarly, we have more and more important
guest characters with ambiguous allegiances, and they seem even
stranger than the usual crop. There's a samurai more skillful than
any seen before in the series, and a trio of assassins that . And
then of course there's the sunflower samurai, who has achieved a
colossal presence in the series despite having yet to appear.
The second episode in this trilogy opens with a recap, a
rarity in Samurai Champloo. The recap is mostly functional,
but contains some interesting choices. We get almost all of Fuu's
letter, set to quiet and contemplative beats and shots of Mugen and
Jin walking in a daze through the town. This suggests that the
emotive impact of Fuu's departure and the perhaps-final splitting of
the party is what is really important, instead of the more plotty
developments that occurred in the first part. Fuu's letter gets so
much weight in the short recap because it is what we are supposed to
have taken away from the previous episode. The music, rather than
psyching the viewer up for a climactic fight, reinforces the sense of
ambivalence and maybe even loss to Champloo's conclusion.
The beat changes to something higher-paced when the
episode proper starts, and with it the seemingly climactic swordfight
between Mugen & Jin and Kagetogi Kariya, the shogun's hired man
and hence the bearer of institutional power. Kariya draws his sword
in slow motion, while Mugen rushes forward, apparently more in time
with the music. In the past, Mugen's wild fighting style has made
him appear a force of nature, as in the chilling final scene of
“Misguided Miscreants”. Here, it makes him look sloppy and
careless next to Kariya's delicate swordsmanship, and Mugen's wide
swings come nowhere close to drawing blood.
Fight scenes, when done properly, are really character
moments – the way in which a character fights reveals something
about their personality, or at least their history. So Mugen fights
in a way that is powerful but undisciplined, willing to chanllenge
orthodoxy and make a ruckus – as he does in his assault on Kariya
when he tries to use a barrel of beans as a weapon. But none of this
works against Kariya. Reflecting his placid character, a personality
that almost doesn't register, Kariya appears to momentarily become a
ghost and take Mugen by suprise.
Jin battles Kariya one-on-one later in the episode, and
doesn't fare much better. The fight is your classic samurai duel,
which is to say that it's basically symmetrical, with swords flying
fast but always meeting in the middle – until one doesn't. Jin's
style and ethos are too close to Kariya, the avatar of authoritarian
power. He is exceptionally good at following the laws of
swordsmanship, but this will never succeed against the man who writes
the laws.
We learn via flashbacks that Kariya previously wanted to
enlist Jin's school of samurai as assassins, and ordered Jin's master
to kill his prized pupil. Jin surpasses his master in a quick
late-night scuffle, but the real father figure here is the man who
controlled his master all along, and who represents the
state-supported system of honour that Jin has been cast out of. This
bit of backstory resolves the moral ambiguity that's been with Jin
since we learned he killed his master, putting his actions in the
best possible light. In that, it is simply convenient storytelling,
but it also serves a greater purpose: establishing Kariya as the
paternal force that Jin has to overcome in order to leave behind
societal rules and truly be his own person.
It's worth noting that Mugen and Jin appear to have the
most success when fighting Kariya two-on-one, although this is
quickly abandoned as not suiting honour or ego. Mugen and Jin are
foils for each other, reserved and classical matched against of
outspoken and wild. This is also reflected in their fighting styles.
Jin's classical kenjitsu is more beautiful, but it lacks the kinetic
energy that Samurai Champloo finds in Mugen's style and the
hip-hop music it samples. To stretch the metaphor a bit too far, Jin
is the classical chanbara element of the series, and Mugen is its
anachronistic remix side. Fuu is, I dunno, it's emotional core, or
maybe the act of creation involved in bringing the two together.
This is why it's crucial for the series that Jin and
Mugen never resolve their delayed battle. This is not just because
it would kill off one of the main characters. For Samurai
Champloo to ultimately make one man's style victorious to the
other would deny the power, both aesthetic and philosophical, that
Champloo finds in the other. The series's entire ethos is the
merging of the modern and the traditional, of chaotic creativity and
orderly aesthetics. Mugen and Jin began the series alone and in
mortal peril, and when the party seems to finally have separated for
good their existence is almost immediately threatened.
This is underlined by the cut to Fuu on her own. While
Fuu has her own strengths, she is physically the weakest of the
group, and as such is vulnerable to any two-bit shogunate thug she
runs across on her own. It should be said here that Samurai
Champloo does not have the most progressive gender politics. Fuu
often plays the role of the damsel in distress, with her stubborn
pride and rambunctious affect being the only form of resistance she
can offer in a world of violence. She is often sexually imperilled,
as in the multiple times she is trapped in a brothel, and there are
undertones of that in this scene. Fuu isn't even touched by her
opponent's blade before she falls to her knees. Her yukata rides up
and Fuu has to hold the fabric so as not to expose her crotch,
highlighting her sexual vulnerability.
Her assailant crouches down next to her and appears to
molest her. As much as Fuu has been sexually threatened over the
course of the series, this is the only scene where she is actually abused. Absent her protectors, Fuu's spiritual strengths offer
little protection against the world of masculine violence she finds
herself in. When trying to escape, we see her running as fast as she
can through the grass, but her pursuer only has to speed-walk. In a
world defined by the physical, Fuu simply doesn't have the right body
[1].
So of course, Mugen has to go to the island and rescue
Fuu. There's a brief exchange between him and Jin in which Mugen
clearly wants to be the one to fight Kariya, but eventually agrees to
accept the less glorious mission of rescuing Fuu from a less
impressive group of baddies. This would appear to be callousness on
both men's part, but the subtext of the scene suggests that this is a
careful negotiation that involves an evaluation of the relationships
between the trio.
Throughout most of Samurai Champloo there's been
little romantic tension between the main trio, especially considering
that in different hands the same premise would have instantly
resulted in a love triangle. The central characters even correspond
to the archetypes in a two-suitors romance: the wild but sexy Mugen,
the dull but dependable Jin, and the woman stuck between them.
Samurai Champloo takes these characters' flaws to extremes:
instead of being a sexy outlaw Mugen's wildness makes him an
unappealing brute, while Jin's devotion to the straight-and-narrow
makes him frightening, and Fuu's desire to postpone the conflict
between the two becomes petulance. In this way, Samurai Champloo
chooses farce over romance.
But there have been glimmers of attraction between Fuu
and Jin throughout, and a moonlight conversation between the two in
“Evanescent Encounter Part 1” would seem to confirm a degree of
affection. But Fuu ultimately ends their conversation with the
ambiguous phrase “Because Mugen is... I'm sorry”. When Jin
flashes back to the scene in Part 2, this is the only line he
recalls. Jin seems to interpret this as Fuu refusing him in favour
of her love for Mugen, but I think it's more likely that she
recognizes that choosing one man to have an affair with would disrupt
the essential unity of their trio[2]. This is akin to her refusal to
allow Mugen and Jin to fight, postponing the inevitable choice that
will collapse a dynamic trinity into an uncomfortable dyad. Jin
sends Mugen after her, but perhaps it would be better if both ronin
went together. In the end, their decision to separate ends up nearly
killing all of them.
Fuu is kept captive in a ruined church, with a red cross
the only undamaged thing in sight. This is as good a time as any to
talk about the role Christianity plays in this plot. We learned in
the last episode that the Sunflower Samurai was the leader of a group
of reclusive and persecuted Christians. The struggle between
Japanese Christians and the dominant culture has popped up in a
number of episodes before, and is presented here as a fairly
straightforward group of virtuous rebels.
It seems at first a little strange for a contemporary
series to celebrate Christianity as a form of rebellion against the
mainstream. But I don't think that it's the specific precepts and
values of Christianity that Shinichiro Watanabe wants to praise.
Rather, it's the presence of Christians in a predominantly Shinto
society as a marker of cultural hybridity – the same hybridity that
comes from, say, using hip-hop music in a samurai anime [3].
Samurai Champloo presents
Edo Japan as a society on a doomed quest to enforce cultural purity.
It sees the mixing and remixing of cultures as not just inevitable
but ultimately beautiful. This is in evidence throughout the several
episodes involving improbable encounters with foreigners (“Artistic
Anarchy”, “Stranger Searching”, “Baseball Blues”). Samurai
Champloo makes us aware of the
shogunate's extensive and complicated attempts to regulate cultural
exchange, and how the influence of Western society seeps through
anyways. In “Evanescent Encounter”, this cultural warfare
becomes literal violent combat.
Christianity is in
itself not a force for hybridity and openness – the Old Testament
in particular is obsessed with purity. In “Unholy Union” Samurai
Champloo shows some skepticism
to the religious impulse, while still portraying the Christians as
more or less virtuous. But it also recognizes that even a
conservative piece of culture can become revolutionary when it
becomes hybridized, as in fact Japanese Christianity did during the
Shimabara Rebellion. Similarly, the mostly flawed personalities of
Mugen, Fuu, and Jin become something more – something disruptive –
when they are put together.
Ultimately, these are
really the values that Samurai Champloo celebrates
– hybridity, openness, and rebellion against a hegemonic society.
These values inform the show's style arguably more than they do the
content of its stories. Champloo exults
hybridity in both word and deed. It's possible to criticize this
aesthetic politics as merely a neoliberal celebration of individual
creativity, but I think that ignores that the series's protagonists
never fare well on their own, and need each other in order to create
a truly hybrid social unit. It's this kind of new,
artificially-fashioned unit that Champloo tentatively
suggests is truly heroic.
[1] I'd have to go back to check on this, but it
wouldn't surprise me if the stories in which Fuu has the most power
are the ones in which she is comically overweight.
[2] It's possible to take a pro-polyamory message out of
this, as in this reading of the Hunger Games. If you're so
inclined, that is.
[3]Japanese Christians play a similar role in Watanabe's
series Kids on the Slope.
