The Paths of Zatoichi

The blind swordsman is one of the most iconic and significant tropes in global popular cinema, and this new volume is the most comprehensive account to date of the transnational influence of Zatoichi on these representations. Jonathan Wroot’s book expertly charts the impact of the character within US genre films like Blind Fury (1989), across the exploitation cycles of blind swordsman films produced in Taiwan and Indonesia, and even demonstrates the continued memetic influence of the character in blockbuster franchises like Daredevil (2015-) and Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016). Highly recommended.

-- Iain Smith, King’s College London

Jonathan Wroot offers a rich and compelling history of the Zatoichi phenomenon from the early 1960s to the twenty-first century—a phenomenon that includes not only hundreds of films, TV episodes, spin-offs, and remakes in Japan, but also a host of imitations, appropriations, and crossovers from Taiwan, Indonesia, and even Hollywood studios. Painstakingly researched and written in plain, lucid language, this excellent study is an important contribution to scholarship on the action genre as well as on transnational flows of popular film and culture.

-- Man-Fung Yip, University of Oklahoma

This important and expansive work shows how a film franchise like the immensely popular Zatoichi series of films and TV programs should not be understood as simply structurally contained in itself, representing a single culture or ideology, but like the wandering and sightless Zatoichi himself, as taking a myriad of paths in both time and space, changing as Japan transforms, while also flowing beyond borders to affect filmmaking from East and Southeast Asia to Hollywood. Here is where the significance of Zatoichi—and any franchise–lies.

-- Aaron Gerow, Yale Univer