13 Assassins: who is the 13th assassin? Not a samurai — and, by the ending, possibly not even mortal
Takashi Miike's 13 Assassins counts twelve swordsmen and one man who is nothing of the sort. Who Kiga Koyata is, how he ends up in the plot, and why the ending keeps people arguing about him.
Shimada Shinzaemon assembles ten more samurai and a masterless rōnin for a job he expects nobody to survive — twelve men including himself. The thirteenth joins by accident, halfway up a mountain, and he isn't carrying a sword.
He's Kiga Koyata, played by Yusuke Iseya, and he turns up roughly 53 minutes into Takashi Miike's 2010 film. The assassins have left the roads to avoid Hanbei's paid rōnin, got lost in the mountains, and found a man strung up in a trap in the forest — punishment, he says, for sleeping with his boss's wife. He cuts a deal, guides them to Ochiai, and stays.
What makes him different from the other twelve
Everything, basically. The twelve are fighting for a version of bushidō they think is worth dying for. Koyata mocks it to their faces, eats insects, and arms himself with whatever the ground provides.
- No sword — he fights the Ochiai battle with stones in a sling and improvised flails, while everyone else uses steel.
- No lord — the samurai are settling a debt to an order; he has no stake in the shogunate at all.
- No place in the plan — Shinzaemon's twelve were recruited deliberately over weeks. Koyata was found in a net.
- No fear of the rock — he moves through the mountain terrain like he knows it better than the map does.
What happens to him at Ochiai
The battle runs about 45 minutes of screen time and kills at least ten of the thirteen. Hanbei opens Koyata's stomach with a blade. Later, mid-boast about how weak samurai really are, Naritsugu throws a sword straight through his throat. He goes down. Nobody comes back to check.
Two mortal wounds, one of them through the neck. Koyata describes both as scratches.
Shinzaemon and Naritsugu kill each other in the mud. Shinrokurō — Shinzaemon's nephew, the gambler who joined to redeem himself — walks out of the wreckage as the only surviving assassin.
Then Koyata runs up behind him
He's essentially unmarked. He waves off the injuries, says he's going back to elope with his lover, and heads off. Shinrokurō, meanwhile, talks about becoming a bandit or sailing for America. Both men leave separately. The epilogue notes that Naritsugu's death was officially recorded as illness, and that the Tokugawa Shogunate fell 23 years later.
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Miike never explains it. The film heavily implies Koyata is a yōkai — a spirit or demon out of Japanese folklore — and viewers have spent fifteen years picking between tanuki, kappa, ghost, and Shinrokurō's concussed imagination. Critics have noticed the joke buried in the choice.
"A demon… is far less menacing and more moral than an ignoble Lord," wrote David C. Ryan in a 2011 essay for Identity Theory.
Is Koyata in the 1963 original?
He is, which surprises most people. Eiichi Kudo's 1963 Jūsan-nin no Shikaku — the film Miike was remaking, and which he was determined not to modernise with a love story or a contemporary mindset — includes a Kiga Koyata, played by Shingo Yamashiro. What Miike and screenwriter Daisuke Tengan added was the doubt about what he is.
For the record: Iseya was a model before he acted, and had already worked with Miike on Sukiyaki Western Django in 2007. Miike cast several of the thirteen precisely because they couldn't fence — he wanted the flailing, not the form.