Satan's Sword

Ryunosuke Tsukue is a master of the sword. He attaches himself to nobody and kills without separating the good from the bad. The film opens with him killing an old man travelling over the Daibosatsu pass. Then a woman comes to him and asks that a coming duel be lost on purpose. Her reason is that her husband should be able to rise within the clan. Behind the account runs the struggle between those loyal to the shogun and those against him. The story is set in the last years of the Tokugawa period. It comes from Kaizan Nakazato’s unfinished series of forty one novels. Raizo Ichikawa takes the lead in Kenji Misumi’s Japanese film of 1960.