Love and Honor

Joseph Luster December 2, 2008

Yoji Yamada’s career is a long and prestigious one that’s been riddled with awards, and this only increased in 2004, when his Oscar-nominated Twilight Samurai served to spread his notoriety even further. Known for incredibly long-running film series such as the 48 Tora-san films (most of which he wrote and directed himself), he’s since been able to branch out into other standalone endeavors.

One of his more recent is Love and Honor (Bushi no Ichibun), a story that follows one of the lord’s tasters, Shinnojo Mimura, showcasing an occupation that manages to be extremely personal while shrouding the faces involved from the man they live to protect. Though the work of Shinnojo and his fellow tasters keeps potentially poisoned food from highly revered mouths, he still holds a lowly status, and lives with his wife Kayo on the annual rice stipend provided and not much more.

It isn’t long, however, before Mimura gets a taste of some poisoned food, and the castle is in absolute uproar. As it turns out, the ill effects were just a result of some off-season sashimi, but therein lies the danger of a taster’s duties. Even though this wasn’t the product of an attempted assassination or some other sinister situation, the ill-effects end up leaving Mimura permanently blind, disabling him physically while taking the biggest toll on his pride and his duty.

Though he is graciously granted continued payment for his troubles, he begins to suspect that this favor may have come about as thanks for some infidelity on behalf of his wife. Combine this with his shattered senses and you have the recipe for a broken man, following a path that ranges from suicidal to vengeful. This path is expertly traveled by Takuya Kimura (2046, Howl’s Moving Castle), who runs the gamut of emotions as Mimura. He quickly transitions from self-pity to rage and back again, and remains a solid force on the screen from beginning to end. This is his movie, for sure, and the unwavering focus on this protagonist is one of the key ingredients to Yoji Yamada’s success here.

Love and Honor is a movie that wears its themes on its sleeve. It uses them as a springboard for Mimura as he first deals with having to live as a blind man, and then figuring out what he could possibly do with that life. What’s here is so about character that it could easily be performed as a stage play, with two or three sets getting the spotlight at max. A lot of this also has to do with its place as a piece of historical fiction, one originally written as a novel by the late Shuhei Fujisawa. This is yet another of his stories to be adapted by Yoji Yamada, the previous two being The Twilight Samurai and The Hidden Blade.

Despite the sometimes languid pacing, Love and Honor doesn’t feel like a movie that passes the two hour mark. Yamada knows well how to keep the audience’s attention, and the story of Shinnojo Mimura’s struggles as a taster driven from his occupation should work like a vice grip on most. Punctuated with a bolt of desperate action and weighted with emotion that never gets too melodramatic, this is definitely a solid release that should satisfy fans of Japanese film, Yoji Yamada in particular.

Studio/Company: FUNimation
Available: Now
Rating: PG-13