I became interested in the enormously prolific author Renzaburo Shibata (柴田錬三郎) through the Nemuri Kyoshiro (眠狂四郎) series, which was made into movies and TV series several times, the most famous of which was the 12-movie series released in the 1960s, starring Raizo Ichikawa (市川雷藏). In 1962, Kenji Misumi (三隅研次), who directed loads of chanbara movies (剑戟片), including a couple of Nemuri Kyoshiro entries, helmed this gem and proved that he was much more than a chanbara-churning machine.
As a fan of Japanese chanbara movies of the 60s and 70s, I have seen well over a hundred of them over the past few years. Never, however, have I seen a movie that is closer to the spirit of the Nemuri Kyoshiro novels --- and the style of Shibata --- than this 71-minute gem of a movie.
While jidaigeki movies with swordfights come in buckets, what I particularly like about those from this period, right before television sucked most money and talent out of the movie industry, is the real or realistic period scenery and gorgeous art designs in even the pulpiest products. The contrast between the beauty of pre-industrial Japanese society and the bloodthirsty death scenes is at the heart of this aesthetics, which celebrates the co-existence of life and death. Nowhere have I seen this life-and-death aesthetics better expressed in Renzaburo Shibata's novels; and nowhere is Shibata's theme more prefectly realized in this movie.
While everyone acknowledges the extreme (and deliberately constructed) beauty of the cinematography --- indeed, each frame is perfectly composed, some criticize the episodic structure of the plot and nihilistic mood. Indeed, these are features not bugs. The Nemuri Kyoshiro novels (although I have read only the first series) are built on a series of independent but interconnected short stories. Characters may burst into a chapter and gets killed off or disappear forever within a few pages; or they may leave and return some chapters later. Like Camus' Sisiphus, Kyoshiro is both immersed in and detached from the absurdity of life and the inevitability of death. Presented as episodes of love and death, Shibata heightens drama and mood with few sentences, permeating each chapter with katana-sharp tension. Therefore, the short format is necessary to maintain this tension, while Shibata has an endless bag of plots to personify his view of life, which is essentially "short and meaningless."
The movie's plot gently subverts genre tropes, such as honor and revenge. While the hero remains undefeated in all the swordfights, he is defeated again and again by petty villains and powerful conspirators, finally swept away in the tide of times. In the novels, Shibata frequently resorts to the term "nihilism" to describe the hero's state of mind, but only this movie is fully able to interpret it on screen, particularly in the hero's father, who spends his final years as a monk by his wife's tomb, and the woman who rushes into death as naked as the day she was born. Perhaps, as the generation that lived through WWII and Japan's defeat, Shibata and Misumi have a shared understanding of nihilism that we can only taste in their works.
Of particular note is the fight choreography (宫内昌平) and filming style. Chanbara movies had not reached the camp level of bloodshed of the 1970s, but one of the duel scenes foreshadows the later outlandish violence. An earlier brawl, on the other hand, is the earliest one-shot fight scene I have ever seen in this genre. These exquisit fights echo the overall extremely Japanese visual style throughout the movie and elevates it to the height of the beautiful annihilation.
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