I Would Like to See It: The Bad Sleep Well

A man plummets from a seventh story window, pushed not by his enemies but by the verbal urging of his superiors at a large construction firm subsidized by the public as part of the rebuilding of Japan’s national infrastructure. He carries their culpability in a massive bid-rigging scandal all the way down with him, his clothes and hair rippling with the wind of his fall, and when his body breaks against the sidewalk all that guilt evaporates at once, dissolving into the cool night air. The offscreen suicide of this man, Furuya, sets into motion the wheels of Kurosawa’s most ambitious and elliptical film noir. The Bad Sleep Well is a brutal study of the corporate culture of Japan’s postwar years, riddled with graft and corporate secrecy, the rich extracting as much as they could from their social inferiors as the country’s identity slowly reformed in the wake of the second World War.

Caught in the gears of these titanic socioeconomic forces is Kōichi Nishi (Toshiro Mifune), the ambitious young secretary and son-in-law to the vice president of the Public Development Corporation. By day a quiet, efficient, and intelligent underling, Nishi harbors a secret identity and by night conducts a campaign of psychological terror against the company for reasons of his own. Much of the film concerns his struggle to maintain a harsh approach toward the objects of his quest for revenge, namely his father-in-law Iwabuchi (Masayuki Mori). As Nishi falls in love with a wife he meant to use solely as a means to get closer to his quarry and learns of Iwabuchi’s attentive and devoted parenting, Kurosawa deftly plays with audience sympathies to separate the ideas of humanity and culpability, repeatedly confronting the viewer with emotional truths which complicate rather than clarify the film’s stakes.

More than anything it’s the bonds of loyalty which chain the film’s characters to their fates — Furuya to his suicide for the good of the company, Nishi to his quest for revenge, his wife Yoshiko (Kyōko Kagawa) to her father Iwabuchi — which form the crux of Kurosawa’s story. It’s a quality much praised in the world of Japanese business, especially in the postwar era, but here it takes on a cold and frightening moral emptiness, a sense that chains are chains and it’s what they bind you to that matters in the end. Again and again the film’s characters destroy their own lives and those of their loved ones, act counter to their own interests, and purposefully crush their emotions in pursuit of abstracted goals which only matter — indeed only make sense — in a narrow circle of cultural practice. Mifune is at his most beautiful here, but it’s the beauty of a fire consuming its source of fuel, of a thing which, like an ideal, cannot survive contact with the vagaries of reality. The bad sleep well because they know all this and choose it anyway, dedicating themselves to a vast and terrible emptiness not just of the mind but of the soul.