2009 is poised to be an excellent year for once-prominent, long absent Japanese directors returning to the big screen. We wrote about the imminent return of Blue Spring's Toshiaki Toyoda last week and now it seems that Samurai Fiction helmer Hiroyuki Nakano is ready to return as well. Nakano won fans the world over with Samurai Fiction - a film that honors the traditions of samurai film while simultaneously updating them - a film that would eventually be 'borrowed' from quite liberally by Quentin Tarantino in Kill Bill but he has been quiet for quite some time. Samurai Fiction launched his SF Project series that also yielded feature film Stereo Future - also excellent - a short film collection titled simply Short Films and a photo book titled Sweet Female. At the peak of this run it seemed Nakano could do no wrong but then he did, his ninja film Red Shadow costing a fortune to make and flopping badly at the box office. Since then Nakano has retreated largely back into still photography, his motion picture output limited to a few short films and a remake of Akira Kurosawa's Seven Samurai that uses only Rolling Stones songs on the soundtrack and can only be seen on certain pachinko machines.
But no more!
Nakano has a new feature film slated for a September release. Titled Tajomaru it is built around a character from Ryonosuke Akutagawa (yes, the guy the literary prize is named after) short story In The Grove, the same character Toshiro Mifune played in Akira Kurosawa's Rashomon. Tajomaru is apparently neither a straight adaptation fo the story nor a remake of the Kurosawa film so I think it's fair to expect a similar tribute / update approach as was used in Samurai Fiction, something made even more likely by the presence of Oguri Shun - arguably the biggest young actor in Japan right now - in the lead role.
hallelujah!
Yeah Red Shadow was , meh, but Samurai Fiction was amazing. This is good news. Well probably get this in North America in 2021 :(