He wants me to reproduce a Calvin & Hobbes cartoon now?
47 Ronin (2013) is a modern retelling of the Japanese historical event and morality tale known as Forty-Seven rōnin, an incident in which the warriors sworn to a lord become suddenly masterless when their lord is provoked into attacking Kira, a powerful court official of the shogun, who has come visiting. The lord, Lord Asano, is required by the shogun to commit seppuku for this crime.
This movie enhances the moral clash at the heart of this tale by adding in the servant Kai, a half-breed who, along with being Japanese and a Westerner, also appears to be a demon. As good a warrior as those who are warriors, his counterbalance, fictional as Kai, is Mizuki the Witch, supernatural in her powers, who serves Kira. She, in fact, provokes the attack on Kira, not as an assassination attempt, but in order to give Kira the opportunity to take Lord Asano’s title and property, once he’s been condemned for his crime.
To finish the summary, the forty seven rōnin endure torture and must counter both tactics and witchery before they get to commence the final assault on Kira. And should they succeed, they know what comes next for disobeying the shogun: death.
And this is moral center of this story. The shogun, as I understand it, provided stability in a land divided between Lords of various standing, ambitions, and egos. When Lord Asano attacks Lord Kira under the hidden prodding of Mizuki, he seals his fate because the shogun cannot risk the stability of the country. The purpose of the shogunate is to bring peace, and thus his command must be moral.
But the very provocation results in an immoral action requiring a counteraction, and the shogun sealing off that counteraction does not impose justice upon the rōnin, but injustice. Deprived of their beloved leader by a deliberate action of an unjust nature, we now have the clash that makes for a tragedy, as the rōnin become a group separate from the rest of society.
In this way, Forty-Seven rōnin functions as an example of a fracture in the governing nature of this society, a lesson in how imposition of pacifism is not necessarily a moral action. That it’s a recounting of a historical tale, even if dressed up a bit, simply makes it a stronger.
And it’s not a badly told story, either. It’s a good way to spend a couple of hours, in fact, if you like fantasy with your historical tales. Enjoy.
