REVIEW BY ADRIAN SMITH
Lexington
Books
202
Pages
6
x 9 inches
Hardback
ISBN:
978-1-7936-0121-6
October
2021
RRP:
$95/£73.00
A
blind masseur, Zatoichi would wander from village to village in Feudal Japan
hoping for employment to maintain his meagre existence. Hidden within his cane
was a sword which he would frequently be required to use against an assortment
of yakuza, villains, assassins and ronin. Zatoichi was a legendary blind
swordsman whose adventures were charted across an initial run of twenty-six
feature films and a hundred television episodes all starring Shintaro Katsu
between 1962 and 1979, with a return to the character one last time for the
film Zatoichi in 1989. Katsu was
something of a legend in Japan, and he came from a showbusiness family: his
elder brother was TomisaburÅ Wakayama, star of the Lone Wolf and Cub series. This in-depth new book from academic
Jonathan Wroot takes in not only Katsu’s incredible run, but also looks at
other Zatoichi films such as the 2003 reboot directed by and starring Takeshi
Kitano. Known primarily as a comedian and TV presenter in his native Japan
(remember Takeshi’s Castle?),
Kitano’s ZatÅichi won dozens of
awards including the Silver Lion at the Venice Film Festival. Another Zatoichi
film was made as recently as 2010, suggesting that this is a character, so
ingrained in Japanese culture, that we have not seen the last of just yet.
Wroot
charts the influence of Zatoichi across other countries as well, with Taiwanese
and Indonesian cinema both producing variations of the blind swordsman back in
the 1970s, whilst Zatoichi himself occasionally crossed over into other
cultures (Zatoichi Meets the One-Armed
Swordsman in 1971 saw him cross paths with one of Hong Kong cinema’s most
popular disabled fighters, played by Jimmy Wang-Yu). In American cinema, Rutger
Hauer played a variation of the character as a blinded Vietnam vet in 1989’s Blind Fury, a remake of 1967’s Zatoichi Challenged, and in the Star Wars film Rogue One (2016), Hong Kong actor Donnie Yen played a blind warrior
skilled with a staff, which, as Wroot points out, is a further connection
between the Star Wars universe and
Japanese cinema (Akira Kurosawa’s The Hidden Fortress (1958) is often cited as
a key influence). In terms of pop culture, perhaps most significantly, there is
Marvel’s Daredevil, given the Netflix
treatment across three series (2015-2018, plus The Defenders series in 2017), in which a blind lawyer with second
sight fights the criminal underworld using his training in martial arts from
the Samurai-style warrior known as Stick, who was also blind.
Jonathan
Wroot’s has packed The Paths of Zatoichi
with information and analysis of this significant long-running character who goes
across such a huge area of Japanese film history, and the book also has much to
say about franchises, remakes and adaptations within global popular culture.
Highly recommended.
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