Kenki, aka Sword Devil (Kenji Misumi, 1965)

Cast: Raizo Ichikawa, Michiko Sugata, Kei Sato, Ryutaro Gomi, Goro Mutsumi, Rokko Toura, Kentaro Kudo, Asao Uchida, Ryuzo Shimada, Koichi Mizuhara, Saburo Date, Akihisa Toda, Ryosuke Kagawa. Screenplay: Seiji Hoshikawa, based on a novel by Renzaburo Shibata. Cinematography: Chikashi Makiura. Film editing: Kanji Suganuma. Music: Hajime Kaburagi. 

Ken (Kenji Misumi, 1964)

Raizo Ichikawa in Ken

Cast: Raizo Ichikawa, Yusuke Kawazu, Hisaya Morishigi, Akio Hasegawa, Noriko Sengoku, Keiju Kobayashi, Yuko Konno, Junko Kozakura, Yoshio Inaba, Rieko Sumi, Kuniichi Takami. Screenplay: Kazuo Funahashi, based on a novel by Yukio Mishima. Cinematography: Chikashi Makiura. Art direction: Akira Naito. Film editing: Kanji Sukanuma. Music: Sei Ikeno. 

Kenji Misumi's Ken, also known as The Sword, is based on a novel by Yukio Mishima and shares that author's intense focus on Japanese tradition. It centers on Jiro Kokubun (Raizo Ichikawa), the captain of his university's kendo club, which is preparing for a tournament against a rival university. Kendo is swordplay, performed with bamboo swords, and Kokubun is obsessively devoted to the sport -- so much so, in fact, that he almost loses out on the captaincy because his coach fears he's a little too intense. His chief rival for the position, Kagawa (Yusuke Kawazu), is equally proficient, but not so obsessive. Eventually this leads to a conflict between the two young men, especially after Kokubun punishes Kagawa for a minor infraction, using him to set an example of complete devotion to the sport. Kagawa retaliates by asking a pretty classmate, Kiuchi (Noriko Sengoku), to try to seduce the chaste and ascetic Kokubun. But the real crisis comes when the club goes on a training retreat in which Kokubun tries to instill the same devotion to the sport in the rest of the team. It takes place in a seaside town, but Kokubun prohibits swimming in the ocean even though the trainees suffer from the intense heat of summer. Kagawa seizes another opportunity to undermine Kokubun, with terrible consequences. The film sympathizes with Kokubun, turning him into a tragic figure, while at the same time suggesting that his intense virtue, analogous to the bushido code of the samurai, is out of place in a modern context. Handsomely photographed and superbly acted, Ken is the middle film in Misumi's Sword Trilogy, which includes Kiru (1962) and Kenki (1965).  

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. 

Conflagration (Kon Ichikawa, 1958)

Tatsuya Nakadai and Raizo Ichikawa in Conflagration 

Goichi Mizoguchi: Raizo Ichikawa
Tokari: Tatsuya Nakadai
Tayama Dosen: Ganjiro Nakamura
Tsurukawa: Yoichi Funaki
Goichi's Mother: Tanie Kitabayashi
Goichi's Father: Jun Hamamura

Director: Kon Ichikawa
Screenplay: Keiji Hasebe, Kon Ichikawa, Notto Wada
Based on a novel by Yukio Mishima
Cinematography: Kazuo Miyagawa
Music: Toshiro Mayuzumi

I haven't read the Yukio Mishima novel, The Temple of the Golden Pavilion, on which Conflagration is based, but the film has the earmarks of an adaptation from a novel, including incidents, such as Goichi's vandalizing the sword of a naval cadet who mocked him, and such secondary characters as Tsurukawa, the fellow acolyte who befriends him, whose treatment feels truncated, as if their narrative and symbolic weight was greater in the book than Kon Ichikawa was able to give them in the film. But the fine performances of Raizo Ichikawa, Ganjiro Nakamura, and Tatsuya Nakadai help Conflagration succeed on its own. Ichikawa plays a young Buddhist acolyte, Goichi, whose stammer has made him an outcast, and whose troubled childhood only worsens his sense of alienation. Nakamura plays the head priest at a temple, who studied with Goichi's father and takes the young man in out of a sense of duty, eventually paying his way to the university. There, Goichi meets another outcast, Tokari, whose deformed leg has caused him to become bitter and cynical. Although Goichi retains his shyness and naïveté, the two bond as outcasts, with Tokari's darkly rebellious philosophy eventually infecting the young acolyte, provoking him to the destructive act that gives the film its title. Nakadai's intensity in the role gives the sometimes plodding narrative, with its flashbacks within flashbacks, a needed jolt.

Watched on Turner Classic Movies