When the Last Sword is Drawn

One night in the Tokyo winter of 1899, as Dr Chiaki Ono (Takehiro Murata) and his wife are packing to move their surgery to Manchuria, they are visited by an elderly man with an ill grandson. Amidst the chaos of packing crates, the man, Hajime Saito (Koich Sato), spots an old photograph of a samurai, Kanichiro Yoshimura (Kiichi Nakai), whom he recognises from about thirty years earlier. The photo triggers in both Ono and Saito a Proustian series of complex and often contradictory memories of Yoshimura - memories that at first pull apart, and then put back together again, Yoshimura's status as the embodiment of the samurai's heroic code at a time when such a code was fast becoming an irrelevant detail of history.