Tag Archives: Ichikawa Raizo film

Destiny’s Son (斬る)

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  • 斬る (Destiny’s Son)

12/27/24 (Fri)

Misumi Kenji’s 1962 chambara flick inconveniently has the same Japanese title Kiru (meaning slash to death) as Okamoto Kihachi’s wild 1968 work, which managed to beat the earlier film to the obvious English choice Kill.

The film opens with a dynamic sequence in which a maidservant sneaks in and stabs the lord’s mistress to death “for the sake of the clan”. Skipping forward a year, we learn that the man chosen to execute her has fallen in love with her, and it is only after their son is born that he duly cuts her head off. He entrusts the child to a low-ranking samurai and becomes a monk, shutting himself off from the world entirely.

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Conflagration (炎上)

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  • 炎上 (Conflagration), 1/23/11 (Sun), Tokyo

Ichikawa Kon’s 1958 film version of Mishima’s then-recent novel Kinkakuji (The Golden Pavilion), a fictionalization of the notorious incident just a few years earlier when a crazed monk burned down the centuries-old structure. The novel is filled with ruminations about the nature of beauty versus reality by a narrator isolated from society by his own insecurities over his crippling stutter. His image of Kinkakuji (called here by a different name), described by his father as almost other-worldly, sets him up for a devastating letdown when he encounters the actual dilapidated structure. The temple in his mind represents an ideal that, when violated, prompts him to destroy the former to protect the latter.

The film can’t begin to compete at that level, but it is a dutiful recounting of the main events and is highly effective on its own terms. Continue reading →