A Score Full of Grief: Fumio Hayasaka’s Music for Sanshō the Bailif (1954)

When Fumio Hayasaka began work on the music for Kenji Mizoguchi’s 1954 cinematic adaptation of the Japanese legend Sanshō the Bailif, he found a film that had turned the tale into an allegory of postwar Japan’s struggle for a national identity following the American occupation. To depict this, Hayasaka wrote a sound track that mixed traditional Japanese and European instruments, making them aural stand-ins for Mizoguchi’s narrative theme of conflict between new (Western) and old (Japanese) values. This article focuses on the music’s three main elements and discusses how they articulate Mizoguchi’s narrative interrogation of Japan’s postwar struggle.