Shintaro Katsu played Zatoichi through twenty-six movies and a long running television series and the blind swordsman was revived by actor-director-comedian “Beat” Takeshi Kitano in 2003. Now this beloved character has been given a gender switch. Whereas Zatoichi was a masseur, the new Ichi (Haruka Ayase) is a beautiful, samisen-strumming minstrel first seen wandering forlornly through the snow with doors repeatedly slammed in her face. An innkeeper tries to rape the blind beauty, but loses his fingers to her lethal sword skills. Fate brings Ichi together with Toma Fujiyama (Takao Ohsawa), a kind-hearted samurai seemingly too cowardly to draw his sword, and they arrive in a small town besieged by a violent yakuza gang. When Ichi kills a bunch of yakuza, Toma is mistaken for a hero and hired by young Toraji Shirakawa (Yôsuke Kubozuka) to safeguard his father, the town magistrate. Ichi and friends are soon pitted against an unstoppable force led by swaggering, one-eyed yakuza boss Banki (Shidô Nakamura).
Blind swordswomen are nothing new in martial arts cinema. Back in the late Sixties, actress Yoko Matsuyama starred in Crimson Bat, Blind Swordswoman (1969) and three sequels based on a manga created by her husband Teruo Tanashita. Recently Ziyi Zhang played a sightless swordswoman in House of Flying Daggers (2004). What makes Ichi so interesting is that the heroine suffers triple prejudice of being blind, a “goze” minstrel (allegedly willing to have sex for money) and a rape victim amidst a culture that stigmatizes the victim. Screenwriter Taeko Asano crafts the potent theme of a “fallen woman” rising again and rediscovering her self worth, surmised in a poetic line about Ichi finding the light to walk her path.
Gorgeous lead Haruka Ayase is a little too remote and lacks Katsu’s tragicomic skill, yet remains affecting as the downtrodden heroine who erupts into fits of balletically choreographed bloodshed. Her romance with Toma is well drawn, with Takao Ohsawa giving a fine performance as the samurai eager to do the right thing but comically unable to draw his sword, and the film features interesting, atypical characters. Things get very funny indeed as the hapless Toma finds himself increasingly out of his depth. Anime auteur Fumihiko Sori, who made the sci-fi CGI anime Vexille (2008), opts for a style less flashy than Kitano’s, but the photography during the snow-swept sequences is striking. However, his curious editing quirks fumble several punch lines.
Arguably truer in spirit of the Zatoichi series than Kitano’s larky effort, the script reworks the old Yojimbo (1961) plot into a light comedy and hits all the familiar notes: Ichi’s supernatural senses help Toma win big at the gambling table, she defends children (though she claims to hate them) and damsels in distress, and finally faces a super skilled opponent in Banki. He shrewdly deduces her sword technique relies on sound and claims he once saw a man who fought like that. Sori drops strong hints that Ichi is the original Zatoichi’s daughter. Besides being prone to the same sagely, self-deprecating one-liners, she also croons Katsu’s old theme song, which adds a pleasing sense of circularity. Lisa Gerrard, of Gladiator (2000) fame, composed the beautifully sorrowful main theme.
