Zatoichi at Large

On the road Ichi comes across a woman who has been robbed and badly wounded. She is pregnant; Ichi delivers the baby and the woman dies. He takes the child and sets out to find its father. The trail leads him to a town, where he finds the baby's aunt and learns that she is being forced to work in a brothel because a payment the dead mother was bringing never arrived. Ichi makes that debt, and the people enforcing it, his own business. This is one of the later links in the series and the mould is again in place: Ichi takes on an obligation, the order of the town gathers against him, and in the end the sword speaks. What is different here is that Ichi is carrying a baby on his back and the fight scenes are built around it. Strong actors like Rentaro Mikuni and Hisaya Morishige weight the cast. The director, Kazuo Mori, returned to the series several times.