Kinnosuke Takamatsu

Ryunosuke, a gifted swordsman plying his trade during the turbulent final days of Shogunate rule, has no moral code and kills without remorse. It’s a way of life that leads to madness.

In this first episode, we are introduced to Takezo, what Musashi used to be before he became the man of legend. His beginning are not exactly auspicious. He sides with the Toyotomi at Sekigahara, and as a result finds himself on the losing side of the historic battle. He and his friend Matahachi manage to escape the slaughter although the latter is wounded in his leg. They stumble across the young Akemi who makes her living with her mother Oko by robbing corpses of their armor and anything else they can sell. Oko takes it into her head to seduce Matahachi, which she does first by skillfully sucking the gangrene from his blood, and then just by sucking.

In late 19th-century Tokyo, Kikunosuke Onoue, the adopted son of a legendary actor, himself an actor specializing in female roles, discovers that the praise he receives is only due to his status as his father's heir. Devastated, he turns to Otoku, a servant of his family, for comfort, and they fall in love. Kikunosuke becomes determined to leave home and develop as an actor on his own merits, and Otoku faithfully joins him.

An elderly man visits his mentally ill wife in a psychiatric hospital. Years earlier, she had tried to drown their child and then take her own life. Crushed by guilt and powerless to change what has happened, he stays on at the clinic as a janitor. Soon, their daughter comes to tell him she is getting married, and with her arrival come painful memories and tormenting visions.

A successful textile industrialist from the provinces, who is beloved by his employees for his kindness, cannot find a wife because of a disfiguring birthmark on his face. Even the courtesans in Yoshiwara refuse to entertain him, until an indentured peasant prostitute, Tamarazu, takes the unsavoury assignment and treats him with brash tenderness.

In this gritty tale of gamblers battling in the samurai era, Okawa Hashizo gives perhaps his greatest performance as a gambler returning to his home town. Swearing allegiance to his fiancée’s father, a decent boss, he had taken to the road after a gang fight until things cooled down. While honing his sword skills in his travels, everything in the town had changed and he descended into a virtual hell of violence. Opponents were being slaughtered by a former samurai ‘Bodyguard’ played by Tanba Tetsuro at the height of his amazing career. While these two master swordsmen are fated to meet, before that can even happen they must survive one of the longest, bloodiest swordfights in movie history!

A sadistic Daimyo (feudal lord) rapes a woman and murders both her and her husband, but even when one of his own vassals commits suicide to bring attention to the crime, the matter is quickly hushed up. Not only will there be no punishment, but because the Daimyo is the Shogun's younger brother, he will soon be appointed to a high political position from which he could wreak even more havoc. Convinced that the fate of the Shogunate hangs in the balance, a plot is hatched to assassinate the Daimyo. The two most brilliant strategic minds of their generation find themselves pitted against each other; one is tasked to defend a man he despises, and has a small army at his disposal. The other is given a suicide mission, and has 12 brave men. They are the 13 Assassins.

In Osaka during the Edo period, ruler Sanada Yukimura was in losing position, fearing Toyotomi's blood descendents would end, he impregnates one of five Shinano female ninja with the seed of Toyotomi Hideyoshi in hopes of continuing the bloodline. Princess Sen and the five female ninja escape from Osaka castle by blending in with the handmaidens. Lord Tokugawa Ieyasu who was supposed to rule all under the heavens was informed of this secret. So Ieyasu orders five samurai of the Iga Ninja clan (brought by Hattori Hanzo) to stop the Toyotomi bloodline by killing the Kunoichi ninja. An attack of ninja magic arts unfolds in a battle of the sexes.