Lone Wolf and Cub: Surprisingly Not Furry

Released between 1970 and 1976, the Lone Wolf and Cub manga by Kazuo Koike and Goseki Kojima has unleashed a range of spin-offs, and perhaps the most famous is the series of six movies put out by Toho. Four of the six were released in 1972 alone, with an annual release in 1973 and 1974 before the sequence petered out; the series was initially produced by Shintaro Katsu, star of the long-running Zatoichi series which habitually put out several instalments in a year, and on his part it seems to have been his bid to craft a similar regular gig for his elder brother, Tomisaburo Wakayama, who took on the lead role of Itto, the Lone Wolf.

Whereas the Zatoichi sequence ran for over a decade, Lone Wolf and Cub was over within a few years – then again, in the same general timespan Zatoichi also petered to a halt, so perhaps the market was shifting. Either way, it’s the Lone Wolf and Cub movies which have gained more recognition with Western audiences, for reasons I’ll get into towards the end of this article; the Criterion Collection has put out a compilation of Lone Wolf and Cub, in particular. For this review, I’m going to review all seven movies in the six-part series – no, that’s not a typo, you’ll understand by the end…

Oh, and rape is a frequent feature of these stories, so content warning for discussion of that below here.

Sword of Vengeance

We open with Itto Ogami (Tomisaburo Wakayama) attending to some business with the lord of a noble house, who has been denounced as a traitor. The lord is, alas, a small child – but such are the draconian measures the Tokugawa Shogunate are turning to, along with a network of ninja spies and assassins. Officially, Ogami’s role in the state apparatus is to act as the second of nobles who are performing seppuku, to ensure they can do it properly or to perform the act himself if they cannot (as is the case with this small child). In practice, everyone knows and admits that he is the Shogun’s executioner.

There are those, however, who have decided his usefulness is at an end – shadowy forces gathering power to themselves within the bureaucracy who realise that Ogami is unlikely to be recruitable for their schemes, but is eminently replaceable – simply engineer an incident at his home to prompt an investigation, plant incriminating evidence to conprehensively discredit him, and you open up his position to be co-opted. So it is that ninjas infiltrate his household and kill Ogami’s wife Azami (Keiko Fujita), family, and servants, and soon after Inspector General Bizen Yagyu (Fumio Watanabe) – a senior agent of the conspiracy – shows up to frame Ogami as a traitor intending to assassinate the Shogun.

By the end of the gambit, the Ogami clan is near extinct; only Itto himself and his tiny son Daigoro (Akihiro Tomikawa) have survived, Itto having slain the Inspector. Now the former executioner journeys through the land as a dishevelled ronin, toting Daigoro in a baby cart…