

User Score
9 votes
Oichi the Blind helps a woman escape the clutches of a high government official to go off with the man she loves. The official puts a reward on her head of fifty gold pieces and soon a menagerie of bounty hunters are after her skin. Three of them band together to accomplish this, one an expert swordsman, another a huge judo master and the third is deadly with a chain. To escape, she heads for the fishing town of Itso but soon comes face to face with Sankuro, the swordsman...
Status
Released
Original Language
JA

In an alternate version of 1949 Japan in which World War II never happened, the Japanese capital of Teito is home to both an ultra rich upper class and the dirt poor masses. The city is thrown into a state of panic when a phantom thief called “The Kaijin (Fiend) with 20 Faces” (K-20 for short) begins to use his mysterious abilities to steal from the rich and give to the poor. One day a circus acrobat named Heikichi Endo (Takeshi Kaneshiro) is framed for K-20’s crimes and becomes determined to clear his name. He teams up with K-20’s next target, a wealthy duchess named Yoko Hashiba (Takako Matsu) and her detective fiancé (Toru Nakamura), to take K-20 down once and for all.

Older, wiser but still a wandering loner, the blind, peace-loving masseur Ichi seeks a peaceful life in a rural village. When he's caught in the middle of a power struggle between two rival Yakuza clans, his reputation as a deadly defender of the innocent is put to the ultimate test in a series of sword-slashing showdowns.