And now, the true craziness of the fall season kicks in.  Even as the top tier of series start to splash, I’m in travel mode for the next several days (I’m on a night bus to Tokyo in fact, my first ever, as I type this).  As if that weren’t bad enough Kanto looks set to be directly hit by the season’s biggest typhoon, so who even knows what the internet situation might be like this weekend.  I’ll write where and when I can, but it’s not going to be business as usual by any stretch of the imagination.

So, even though this was a(nother) multi-episode premiere, for now I’ve just seen the first ep of Mugen no Juunin: Immortal.  I confess I know Samura Hiroaki’s manga (started way back in 1994) only by reputation, but it’s a hell of one.  This series has had multiple live and animated adaptations over the past 25 years but none of them seem to have satisfied the fans.  Will this one, by veteran director Hamasaki Hiroshi and LIDENFILMS, manage to?  I’ve no idea, but it’s off to a nice start.

In the first place this take on Blade of the Immortal looks great.  It’s not lavishly budgeted – there are a lot of still shots – but the backgrounds, character designs and cinematography are all top-notch.  And when it does need to splash on animation for the big moments, it’s fluid and easy on the eye.  As for casting, it’s fine – though if I’m absolutely honest I’m starting to burn out a little on Tsuda Kenjirou.  Seriously – I would swear he’s in close to have the shows I’ve written on these last two seasons.  He’s a good actor even if his range is somewhat limited, and Manji pretty much falls inside it – but he’s so omnipresent at lately hearing him takes me out of the moment a hair.

Make no mistake about it, this is a very dark and very violent story.  Brutal murder and rape are its stock and trade, though Hamasaki is judicious in how graphic he chooses to be (for budgetary reasons or artistic, who knows).  Manji is a swordsman who’s been cursed for his life of blood by having his mortality taken away from him, and must kill 1,000 evil men to atone for the lives he’s taken.  In the premiere he teams up with a young woman whose father was killed and mother raped and abducted in a feud between dojos, directed his way by an old (800 years at least) nun at the cemetery where her father lies.

Manji is world-weary, bleak, caustic – but he’s clearly not incapable of empathy.  What’s also clear is that his curse has forced him to learn more about the nature of humanity than anyone should be forced to know, and one of those lessons is that good and evil tend to be in the eye of the beholder.  That’s obviously a crucial distinction for him, but even if he has good reason to be cynical – and is – Manji also seems willing to take a new situation on its own terms.  The potential here is obvious – a classic and mature premise, a stylish visual palette – but this franchise has defied capture before, so there’s obviously something about it that’s hard for a director to pin down.  We’ll see if the 2019 can bring out that potential.