Ryunosuke is a sociopathic samurai without compassion or scruples. When he is scheduled for an exhibition match at his fencing school, the wife of his opponent begs Ryunosuke to throw the match, offering her own virtue in trade. Ryunosuke accepts her offer, but kills her husband in the match. Over time, Ryunosuke is pursued by the brother of the man he killed. The brother trains with the master fencer Shimada. In the meantime, however, Ryunosuke earns the enmity of the band of assassins he runs with, and it becomes a question of who shall face him in final conflict.
As I said before when I wargame a period in history I try and get some eye candy through movies of the period, some are easier to find than others and some period movies are less accurate than others.This is a great movie but a bloody grim movie about our anti-hero Ryunosuke who kills a man in a competition duel after his opponent learns that Ryunosuke slept with his wife, he kills more of his friends and escapes the town with his opponents ex-wife (who he treats terribly) joins a semi official police force that carry out murders ans assassinations for the Tokugawa Shogunate.
The younger brother of the man killed in the duel at the beginning trains to fight our anti-hero and challenges him to a duel but in the meantime Ryunosuke confidence is shattered by a botched assassination attempd on a master swordsman Shimada Toranosuke (Toshire Mifune in an amazing scene of swordplay) and an attempt by his mistress to kill him. Anyway after all this and other things he rejoins the assassins and ends up in a haunted room and starts to see the ghosts of all his victims and starts lashing out at the rest of the assassins and we get 7 mins of amazing sword fighting that never really ends (if you get a chance to see it you will understand), there were supposed to be 2 more movies but they never happened. There is nothing to like about Ryonosuke at all and a grim, bleak movie awaits you but a magnificent movie for characters and action to watch especially if you love the Samurai period.