Lone Wolf & Cub TV Series

This mustn’t be confused with the movie series (Shogun Assassin is the most often found DVD). I saw one episode (the final one, I’m pretty sure) of this on a Channel Four Japanese night or week many years ago, and I was thrilled when I found out that these were coming out on DVD. There are poorer value double-DVDs with 4 or 5 episodes on each, but there are 6-DVD sets with 13 episodes (so the first two complete season 1 of 3 – I hope the rest will come, but I have no info on this). Episodes are 45 minutes each. Warning: the picture and sound quality are not fantastic, but they aren’t at all bad for a TV show nearly 40 years old.

In the movies, Tomisaburo Wakayama is tubby and aggressive, and I never felt I was watching the Itto Ogami I knew. Kinnosuke Yorozuya (that’s the name on the DVDs, but it says Kinnosuke Nakamura on IMDB) in the TV show is another matter: he is calm and controlled, perfectly capable of extreme violence (though this is never anything like as gleefully gory as the movies), but there is a powerful sense of the discipline, dignity, focus and strength of purpose from the magnificent comic series. Takumi Sato as Daigoro is perfect too, though being an actual kid, they avoid asking as much of him as some of the comic stories would demand. There are still come uncomfortable scenes, I should admit.

Many will prefer the violent parts in the movies: they are more spectacular as well as bloodier (though there is nonetheless a ton of killing in every episode here). I’m not so sure – the relish for the nastier side of it all in the films seemed inappropriate to me when depicting a character that showed no sign of taking any pleasure in fighting and killing. Kinnosuke was not the swordsman that Wakayama was, but they get around it with the usual TV show cutting, plus making fights short and to the point: very few movements, and those there are tend to be completely decisive. For me, this fits.

The other advantage of 78 episodes, each half the length of a movie, is the breadth and depth. The movies don’t give you an awful lot of the sense of a complex, functioning society that the comics gave us, the depiction of Edo culture. It’s a shame that the nature of the story means we don’t see Edo itself, as for me that city, then, is among the most interesting times and places in world history, a society like no other. The rest of the country was less affected by the astonishing Tokugawa Shogunate methods, rural fiefs remaining mostly kind of medieval and largely unchanged. Nonetheless, if you are interested in old Japanese culture, this is a great show to watch. It even includes some of the beautifully precise small details that I loved in the comic (its writer Kazuo Koike is renowned in Japan for the quality and depth of his research).

I love this, but I can imagine better. They keep much of the quality of the writing, but the fights could certainly be more spectacular, and the show does look kind of cheap. I guess their budget was consumed by settings and cannon fodder, so that was unavoidable. But the comics were not just superbly written by Kazuo Koike, they were drawn by one of the most exciting comic artists ever. Goseki Kojima gave us dynamism, energetic rendering and a sense of pace and sometimes even scenery and composition comparable to Kurosawa, as well as an intensity of expression that is hard to match with real people – in particular, one shot of Daigoro’s eyes, at the moment an armed samurai recoils from him in fear, could never be approached by any child actor. Sadly, since Kurosawa is dead, and obviously would never have spent ages directing a moderately funded TV series, we’ll never get the show the comic deserves.

Though there is a newer series, by the way, which ran from 2002-04. I’ve seen none of this, and it doesn’t seem to be out on DVD. If anyone has seen it, I’d be interested to know how it compares.