The Inheritance

As a wealthy businessman nears death, his decision to leave a fortune of ¥200 million to three illegitimate children sets off a tense and ruthless battle behind closed doors. Those around him, driven by greed and self-interest, begin maneuvering to secure a share of the inheritance, turning the final days of his life into a quiet war of manipulation, suspicion, and betrayal. What follows is a bitter family and corporate power struggle in which long-buried secrets rise to the surface and money exposes the true nature of everyone involved.

What makes The Inheritance especially fascinating in Masaki Kobayashi’s filmography is that it arrived in the same remarkable year as Harakiri. While Kobayashi is often remembered for grand moral dramas and open confrontations with authority, The Inheritance turns that same critical eye toward money, family legitimacy, and upper-class corruption in modern Japan. Criterion places it within the director’s broader body of work attacking rigid and abusive systems, which helps explain why this seemingly intimate inheritance drama feels so sharp and poisonous beneath the surface.

The film also stands out because it is not simply a family melodrama. Criterion describes it as an “entertaining condemnation of unchecked greed,” and that is exactly where its bite lies: the story uses a dying patriarch and missing heirs not just for suspense, but to expose the moral rot of the people circling his fortune. Critics have likewise noted that the film is more sardonic than many viewers might expect from Kobayashi, pushing it closer to social satire than solemn tragedy.

Another reason the film deserves more attention is its creative team. The Inheritance features music by Toru Takemitsu, one of the most important Japanese composers of the twentieth century, whose film work would become legendary far beyond Japan. It also stars Tatsuya Nakadai and Keiko Kishi, two major screen presences, with So Yamamura playing the dying businessman whose decision detonates the plot. Even on paper, that combination gives the film unusual weight: it brings together a director at full maturity, a major modernist composer, and a cast loaded with prestige.

Its afterlife is quietly impressive too. The film won the 1964 BAFTA United Nations Award, an honor given to films seen as embodying principles associated with the UN Charter. That is an intriguing distinction for a story built around scheming, blackmail, and inheritance warfare, but it makes sense when viewed as a critique of greed and social corruption rather than a celebration of them. In other words, the film’s cynicism was understood not as mere bitterness, but as moral argument.

There is also a small but revealing detail about its modern reputation: Criterion later included The Inheritance in Eclipse Series 38: Masaki Kobayashi Against the System. That placement is telling. It suggests the film is no minor side note, but part of a larger pattern in Kobayashi’s career—one in which institutions, hierarchies, and respectable surfaces are repeatedly stripped bare. For viewers who know him mainly through The Human Condition, Harakiri, or Kwaidan, The Inheritance shows how effectively he could compress those concerns into a tighter, nastier contemporary drama.

And perhaps that is the most interesting fact of all: despite its title, the film is not really about what is passed down in legal terms. It is about what wealth leaves behind morally—fear, manipulation, resentment, and the collapse of any illusion that family and business can remain separate. That is why the film still feels modern. Its plot may turn on a will, but its real subject is the marketplace of human behavior.