CUTTING THROUGH THE CHANBARA FILM Takashi Miike’s Blade of the Immortal

Blade of the Immortal (2017) marks the 100th feature film by Takashi Miike. This number may be uncommon among his cinematic peers, but he breezed past it with no apparent effort – the film is, in fact, one of two that he completed last year, the other being JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure: Diamond Is Unbreakable – Chapter 1. A triple-digit filmography seems like an achievement more likely to be reached by a director with half a century (or more) of experience under their belt, or perhaps by an experimenter or maker of shorts, distributing their work to a bespoke audience through some obscure online platform. But Miike has only been working since the early 1990s and, though he cut his teeth in the wild frontiers of Japan’s quick and cheap direct-to-video market, he is by no means a private tinkerer. His films have increased in budget and logistical complexity since his younger days. He now regularly works with high-profile source material, international financiers and major stars. And he seems, more than ever, to register a cultural impact outside his native Japan.

Blade played out of competition at the 2017 Cannes Film Festival, the fourth of his films to screen there over the past decade (with two others also having screened in the Directors’ Fortnight sidebar). Being feted on the