Bring on the body stackers! The villagers of Ajiro didn’t ask for this disgusting job, but when a lord’s impulsive son goes off script and transforms a crowd of rival samurai into red paste, all they can do is pile the remains on a cart and complain about the conditions. beasts. Canyon. The scenes that open a physically and emotionally shocking episode five of shÅ pistol Chalk this up to the personal cost of the coming conflict, as Yoshii Toranaga has to discipline Nagakado once he arrives at the village with a full contingent of his army. All this boy did was speed up Lord Ishido’s pretext for an attack. “You fell so easily into his trap,” Toranaga tells his son as he goes on a hunt with his beloved birds of prey. “Broken in another man’s fist. Like a falcon, but without beauty.” It is a hallmark of the jungle, to speak with an incisive metaphor. But here, Hiroyuki Sanada also deliberately lets Toranaga’s serene veneer of coolness slip, because Nagakado needs to know that he’s screwed. Still, what’s done is done. And the lord continues to twist the uncle and nephew duo of Yabushige and Omi towards each other like two rusty spikes on a concertina wire rope.
With Toranaga’s arrival in Ajiro, the real revelation is that Lord Toda “Buntaro” Hirokatsu managed to leave Osaka. That’s right, Mariko’s apparently dead samurai husband will now join her under the roof of John Blackthorne. Hatamoto and Fuji-sama look to Lady Toda for guidance, but she makes no reference to her or Anjin’s nightly activities. Instead, the family’s attention and clenched nostrils are directed to the pheasant, gifted by Toranaga, which Blackthorne lets hang unattended to the point of rotting. It may be a small taste of home for the English, but it is a terrible blight on the local constitution and will end up being an even more dramatic flashpoint.
In case Ishido and the rest of the ruling council didn’t know about the cannon attack, Jozen’s severed head arriving by courier is a pretty good indicator. And while they can’t decide who will replace Toranaga, perhaps they won’t have to: Lady Ochiba no Kata (Fumi Nikaido), mother of the young heir Yaechiyo, has returned to Osaka. Ochiba is not a fan of Toranaga nor does she suffer fools. (“Maybe the ‘kingdom of God’ is in your own butt, have you thought about that?” she told a Portuguese priest in a flashback to TaikÅ’s second deathbed episode). Ishido, normally cold and calculating, offers only hesitant promises that he will get things back on track, she immediately silences him. “The time of politics has come to an end. The Council will answer to me. Toranaga had good reason to kidnap Lady Ochiba in Edo while his sister, who is married to one of her children, was giving birth. The heir’s mother is as ruthless and intimidating as she is beautiful.
Macho sake drinking challenges will only get you so far, and Buntaro’s tense first dinner at Anjin’s house quickly moves from veiled insults to drunken feats of strength. While the slow-motion shot of Buntaro’s arrows passing Mariko’s face and piercing shoji walls before burying themselves precisely in a pole is cool, it’s also a foreshadowing of how combustible their marriage is, with the volatility added to the Blackthorne and Mariko’s still fresh romantic flirtation. Blackthorne’s sense of honor manifests itself in error, and his ignorance clashes once again with the current reality of life in feudal Japan. All she takes away from Mariko’s heartbreaking story about how her late father was forced to murder her entire family is that she should leave Buntaro, who cruelly wives her and yearns for revenge on her. He doesn’t see that his silence is not submissive, but a weapon in itself. “I will not give anything to my husband. Not even my hate. Because that’s what he deserves.”
And it turns out that Blackthorne’s ignorance has even worse consequences. When he forbade his family to interfere with the smelly hanging pheasant, he forced Fuji-sama to be his consort. In the reality of life in Japan, she was not the one who killed the elderly gardener who ended up moving him. They were the Anjin, whose harsh words had become the dictate of the people. For every advance Blackthorne makes (skillfully training the cannon regiment, becoming familiar with its customs, and developing a command of the language), his ingrained pride and stubbornness take him back a step. “It is you who is imprisoned, Anjin-sama,†Mariko tells him. Imprisoned by his assumptions about the nature of the love of order. “We live and we die,” she says, echoing Rodrigues’ advice in episode one. “We don’t control anything beyond that.”
And how. Because when a large earthquake suddenly hits the village, it threatens to consume the bush itself.
When Toranaga is sucked into a chasm that seconds before was not there, the immediate danger negates any discussion of hatamato protocols and Blackthorne’s sudden desire to leave Japan permanently. Together with Mariko and Nagakado, he jumps into the tangle of uprooted trees and dirt, and digs with his hands until the body of his lord appears. He is coughing, choking on dirt and disoriented, but alive. We’ve heard it before: not yesterday, not tomorrow, just today. And that day, Toranaga emerges from the rubble just in time to see half of his gathered forces consumed by waves of shaking earth. If there was a silver lining to Nagakado’s reckless cannon attack, it was that the action would move Ishido’s forces away from the heavily fortified Osaka Castle and closer to an entrenched Toranaga army, which could then diminish his power. numbers. Now the Lord of KantÅ is at a greater disadvantage, a disadvantage that Lady Ochiba will surely take advantage of.
Johnny Loftus (@glennganges) is a freelance writer and editor living in Chicago. His work has appeared in The Village Voice, All Music Guide, Pitchfork Media, and Nicki Swift.
