E-Mail This Article to a Friend Pleasure and business Fun and games with The Blind Swordsman: Zatoichi BY CHRIS FUJIWARA
	The Blind Swordsman: Zatoichi Directed by Takeshi Kitano. Written by Takeshi Kitano, based on a short story by Kan Shimozawa. With Beat Takeshi, Tadanobu Asano, Michiyo Okusu, Yui Natsukawa. In Japanese with English subtitles. A Miramax release (116 minutes). At the Coolidge Corner.
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Calling it a revisionist genre exercise is missing the point. Takeshi Kitano is a genre all by himself, and if he chooses to revive this old warhorse, this Zatoichi (a familiar figure in Japanese pop culture, the hero of 26 films from 1962 to 1989), he can do nothing but reinvent the character while also approaching him as if he had never existed. For Kitano, Zatoichi is just there, a fact of nature. That’s how the character (played by Kitano under his acting name, Beat Takeshi) appears at the beginning of The Blind Swordsman: Zatoichi (as Miramax has renamed it; in Japan the hit film is called merely Zatoichi), sitting in a rural clearing on the outskirts of nowhere, his purpose unexplained, like someone in a Budd Boetticher Western. Takeshi treats Zatoichi not as a mythical figure but as a question mark, a being who doesn’t belong to the world and who has no obvious role to play.

The story that Kitano has devised for this adventure is a double one: first, the saga of a crime boss who takes over a town from its previous bosses; second, the tale of a young brother and sister seeking revenge for the killing of their parents. Over the elliptical course of the narrative, Zatoichi finds his place in these stories and also finds out how they fit together. Genre has no other meaning for Kitano than this: finding your place. In Zatoichi, this quest involves characters who stand outside the power system and are merely onlookers to its struggles — in particular, a woman vegetable seller and her nephew, Shinkichi, an unsuccessful gambler. The space apart from the struggle has always interested Kitano, and his insistence on dwelling within this space, usually at the expense of narrative momentum and to the point of absurdity, has distinguished his yakuza films (such as 1993’s Sonatine and 1997’s Hana-bi) from traditional entries in that genre.

Here this insistence takes a celebratory form. Zatoichi is only incidentally a film in which a wandering swordsman uses his prowess to help the poor peasants and petty entrepreneurs of a small village. Kitano does everything possible to keep Zatoichi out of the foreground of the film, to make him, if not an irrelevance, at least a side attraction. Conversely, the musical interludes that give Zatoichi its strange punctuation (farmers tilling a field, peasants dancing in the mud) seem at first like distractions, but they prove central when, in the film’s ebullient last section, Kitano fulfills their promise by turning Zatoichi into a musical. As it progresses, Zatoichi becomes more and more a film about community, which is defined as what’s left when those who are preoccupied with power and death have knocked one another off.

The character in Zatoichi who embodies what’s most alien to the community is Hattori (played by heartthrob Tadanobu Asano), an unemployed samurai who hires himself out to the crime lord. Hattori does what, under capitalism, almost everyone does: sells himself to whomever can pay most. He follows the logic of his choice to its nihilistic end, killing not just his designated targets but any of their employees who happen to be nearby.

The pretext for Hattori’s atrocious labors is the medical expenses of his sick wife. This character (seen in one crucial shot applying the finishing touches to her hair in a small round mirror) incarnates the link between violence and the feminine that’s crucial to the film. Kitano expands the role of the feminine, first by making the avenging brother a transvestite, then by having Shinkichi become impressed enough with the brother’s geisha get-up to imitate it, with ludicrous results. The richness of Zatoichi lies in such arbitrary mingling of pleasure with business.

Zatoichi has Kitano’s usual dry visual firmness: everything seems to be shown clearly, but everything shown is only a screen, an image, a disguise. The narrative is riddled with flashbacks, each placed with a casualness that teases and lures the viewer in a way reminiscent of Buñuel. Zatoichi himself is a remarkable creation. With his dry laugh and cocked head, Kitano makes him a kind of clown — an ideal choice for a film so concerned with fun, games, and performing.