Scabbard Samurai

Kanjuro Nomi is a samurai on the run and he has no sword; all he carries at his waist is an empty scabbard. Wandering the roads with his daughter Tae, he is caught and given an unusual sentence: he has thirty days to make the young lord, who has not laughed since losing his mother, laugh. If he fails he must kill himself. Every day he will attempt a trick and every evening he will come back having failed. Hitoshi Matsumoto was known in Japan for many years as a comedian, and his films are always built on taking one joke all the way. Here the pattern repeats thirty times, and as the repetition goes on what is funny slowly turns into something else. There is no professional actor in the lead; Takaaki Nomi had never acted before. The last section drops the comedy entirely, and that is where it becomes clear that what the film is really about is the distance between a father and his daughter.