When the Last Sword is Drawn
2002 · Movie · 140 min. · Japan
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.
Direction Yōjirō Takita
Cast Kiichi Nakai · Yui Natsukawa · Miki Nakatani · Koichi Sato · Takehiro Murata · Yuji Miyake · Keisuke Horibe · Hideaki Ito · Ryo Kase · Eugene Nomura
Soundtrack Joe Hisaishi
Screenplay Takehiro Nakajima · Jiro Asada
Cinematography Takeshi Hamada
Original title Mibu gishi den (When the Last Sword Is Drawn)
6.7
931 votes (FilmAffinity)
Add to lists
Share