It is an event of sudden, unexpected violence. At a Noh performance in a castle courtyard, the samurai retainer Kanemi (Etsushi Toyokawa) fatally stabs his lord’s concubine Lady Renko (Megumi Seki). The master-stroke in Hideyuki Hirayama’s movie Sword of Desperation (2010) is that the viewer is left as baffled as the bystanders at this seemingly unprovoked act. Like the most iconic stabbing in samurai history, that sudden fight in the Shogun’s palace that kicks off the vendetta of the 47 Ronin, it initially makes no sense. Kanemi’s motivation is only revealed gradually, in flashbacks, but there is already another mystery unfolding. Why does he receive such a light punishment for the murder? It turns out that he is part of someone else’s master plan, a pawn in intricate samurai politics, who might have only one single move of his own with which to resist his destiny.

Sword of Desperation is a tantalising obscurity in the world of Japanese period dramas. It was, for example, one of a tiny handful of appearances by the actor Etsushi Toyokawa in a samurai film – despite dozens of movies to his credit, Toyokawa remains oddly distant from period movies, and would not appear in another until the comedy Flea-Picking Samurai eight years later.

The film was based on a short story by Shuhei Fujisawa (1927-97), a best-selling author who only found success after a series of character-building hardships in his own life. Fujisawa chiefly wrote about the Edo period, the 250+ years in which the descendants of Tokugawa Ieyasu fervently tried to keep Japan at peace, in an increasingly complex and tense game of politics and underhand diplomacies. His interest was that of the samurai themselves, once a warrior elite, now effectively left with nobody to fight, drifting into idleness, melancholy and vendettas. Of the Fujisawa tales made into films, the best known is The Twilight Samurai (2002), in which widowed dad Hiroyuki Sanada struggles to make ends meet in the 1860s as a low-level bureaucrat and a carer for a disabled parent, while still being a samurai. It was one of a “Twilight” series, which its hero shared with a dozen other down-trodden figures in 19th-century Japan, scrabbling to make their way in an uncaring world.

Fujisawa’s obsession with the dying samurai era was also a cunning sublimation of his own experiences, having grown up in a Japan on a permanent war footing, only to be told that it was all for nothing. He was 18 years old when he was summoned to the village office, the only place with a radio, to hear what turned out to be Hirohito’s surrender address. “I felt neither joy nor sorrow, but a vast sense of emptiness,” he wrote. “After a while, I wondered what would happen next, but I also knew that no one could answer that question.”

Despite plans hopes of becoming a teacher, Fujisawa drifted into industrial journalism, working for a while as a reporter for that scandal-ridden gossip rag, the Japan Food Processing Newspaper. His area of specialty was ham and sausages, and even as editor-in-chief, he wrote a column called “Sweet & Spicy”, which frequently called out declining food safety standards.

Widowed at 36, he moved back in with his ailing mother, and cared for her while trying to raise his daughter. Eight years later, he married his second wife, who took over the household chores and bought him vital time to write fiction. He began winning literary prizes in 1971, and in 1974 quit the turbid world of food processing newsletters to become a full-time novelist.

“When I reread my novels from that time,” he wrote, “many of them are so dark that I feel a little pain. Love between men and women ends in separation, and stories end with the death of samurai. I couldn’t write happy endings.”

His “Hidden Sword” series of short stories, published between 1976 and 1980 derived its name from an occult martial arts technique. It is, in effect, the technique that is the protagonist, with each story featuring a different character, somehow acquiring it and applying it to fight their way out of their personal troubles. The original basis for Sword of Desperation was the fourth of the Hidden Sword tales, “Desperate Sword, Catching Bird,” set in the fictional domain of Unasaka, the location for many of Fujisawa’s samurai stories. Yoji Yamada’s earlier movie Hidden Blade (2004) is actually based on the next story in the same sequence, which makes it a distaff sequel. Yamada’s Love and Honor (2006) was also based on a Hidden Sword story, making them something of a “hidden” series of related storylines, tucked away amidst the samurai movies of the early 21st century.

Jonathan Clements is the author of A Brief History of the Martial Arts. Sword of Desperation is available in the US from Animeigo.

Available at MediaOCD:
Sword of Desperation – Blu-ray / DVD