Kiru (Kenji Misumi, 1962)

Raizo Ichikawa in Kiru

Cast: Raizo Ichikawa, Shiho Fujimura, Mayumi Nagisa, Masayo Banri, Jun'ichiro Narita, Matasaburo Niwa, Teru Tomota, Eijiro Yanagi, Shigeru Amachi, Yoshio Inaba. Screenplay: Kaneto Shindo, based on a novel by Renzaburo Shibata. Cinematography: Shozo Honda. Film editing: Kanji Suganuma. Music: Ichiro Saito. 

I knew Kenji Misumi's work mostly from the Lone Wolf and Cub series, which is fairly unabashed in its bloodletting, so I was surprised by the almost meditative tone of Kiru, which is also known as Destiny's Son. It's the story of Shingo Takakura (Raizo Ichikawa) and his search for a father figure. When he comes of age, Shingo asks the man he thinks is his father for permission to go on what you might call walkabout: to spend a year wandering in 19th century Japan. He returns home with a secret: He has learned a mastery of an indefensible sword technique. Unfortunately, this mastery inspires an attack on his home, in which his supposed father is killed, but not before revealing to Shingo his true parentage. That sends Shingo on another pilgrimage in which he meets his biological father and eventually a father figure, Matsudaira (Eijiro Yanagi), the head of a powerful clan whom Shingo serves as a samurai. It's a film full of stylized combat and astonishing scenes that proceeds at a contemplative pace which belies its relative brevity (71 minutes): One tense scene, for example, has no background sound other than the intermittent call of a bird.