Blade is in a sense a sequel, or maybe a companion, to Yoji Yamada’s The Twilight Samurai. That movie was set in the same time period—the 1860s, when Japan was opening up to Western influences in a precarious and turbulent way—deals with many of the same social implications, and even has a parallel plot device which I will go into later. For me, though, Blade is a better movie in some ways: it uses some of the same ideas but extrapolates on them further, and examines them with less preachy sentiment. It also features one of my current favorite Japanese actors: Nagase was in Gojoe, the Maiku Hama movies and many others I’ve looked at here that I’ve taken close to heart. Here, he plays a somewhat glum Everysamurai for whom the samurai code and its attendant honor and glory seem more like distasteful burdens than ideals to aspire to.
Caste and responsibility separate Munezo, the samurai, and Kie, the maidservant,
from being closer. But there are other things, too, like the mutual calls of duty.
Munezo has a number of reasons not to find samurai life inspiring. His father committed seppuku when he was blamed for the failure of a bridge construction project, and the bustle of Edo life is a bit much for his country blood. There is something else that unfolds over the first hour or so of the film that he is forced to swallow with a great deal of dismay: Kie (Takako Mutsu, of 9 Souls and April Story), a farm girl that is brought into their household to serve as a maid, and whom is married off to a merchant family. When he learns that Kie’s new family thinks nothing of her and is inclined to let her grow ill and weak in a filthy back room, he takes the first of many steps towards remaking his existence: he barges into their house, demands to see her, orders her husband to write out a notice of divorce, and lugs her bodily back to his house.
Munezo is fond of Kie, but is essentially forbidden to act on his feelings—he is a samurai, she is a servant girl, and that is the end of it. As long as they are doing no more than simply fulfilling their roles, all will be well; the mere fact that he essentially stole her back from her new family was enough to raise eyebrows all around town. Then there comes another incident that forces even more of a wedge between them: Munezo has an old friend, Yaichiro (Yukiyoshi Ozawa), who was caught attempting to foment insurrection against the Shogun and has been imprisoned by his clan. Yaichiro has escaped and is now holding hostages in a farm house, and Munezo has been charged with the task of either killing him or compelling him to kill himself.
Munezo is called upon by his masters to put a fellow samurai to death -- or at the very least
compel the man to kill himself, a plot element also in director Yamada's Twilight Samurai.
This is the plot element I mentioned that parallels Twilight Samurai, but Blade handles it very differently. There is indeed a showdown between Munezo and Yaichiro, but it does not end the film—it simply opens the door to how the film will end, and forces Munezo to take the final steps towards remaking his life that he has been edging towards bit by bit for some time now. The two men studied under the same sword-master—the title is a reference to a technique that their sensei was to have handed down to them—but, again, these elements are not used in the way we would expect. Instead of being an excuse to give us a thrill ride, they supply ironic commentary on the very lives these people lead.
The Meiji Restoration, or the opening of Japan to the West in the 1860s, is one of those staple periods that gets reused endlessly throughout Japanese cinema and popular culture: Eijanaika, Ronin-gai, the Rurouni Kenshin anime and manga, and any of the productions about the Shinsengumi all come to mind. Most of them focused on the outward turbulence and chaos of the times, but both Twilight Samurai and Hidden Blade dealt with it by turning down the volume and focusing on specific people affected by the period instead of dealing with the whole canvas. Eijanaika, in particular, couldn’t decide if it was about one person or everyone, and suffered from a corresponding lack of focus.
Hidden Blade wisely eschews broad panoramas of the chaos of a transitional era
in favor of focusing on the stories of a few people who have been changed by it.
Yamada has been behind the camera for two of Japan’s biggest film franchises: the Tora-san films (all forty-eight of them!) and the seventeen Free and Easy / Diary of a Fishing Nut movies (adapted from an equally long-running manga). He’s not a flashy director, but his modest and reserved approach worked well for Twilight Samurai, and it’s equally well-suited to the material here. One of the standard themes in almost every Meiji Restoration film seems to be the opening of Japan not only to Western technology but to Western values like the importance of the individual; here, it’s put front and center, and the rest of the film is quiet and disciplined enough that said theme is impossible to miss.
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