Goyokin is the best samurai film I’ve seen yet that was made more or less exclusively for Japan and not intended for a foreign audience. I’ve written before how the DVD format and a general broadening of awareness about samurai films and Japanese culture have made it possible for many of even their more esoteric products to be sold domestically and reach a receptive audience. Even five years ago I’m not sure anyone would have dared to market a box set of all the Battles Without Honor and Humanity films, but we have that now, along with a horde of other good-to-great-to-outstanding movies that might never have been seen in English-speaking territories: Portrait of Hell, Samurai Rebellion, Swords of Vengeance.
Now add Goyokin to that list, a title which even many samurai movie buffs haven’t known about until recently. The title refers to the gold of the shogunate, mined and transported with great difficulty from one of the outlying islands in the Japanese archipelago; to interfere with the gold transport is punishable by death. The film itself opens with a young woman returning to her home village—at the landing point for the gold convoy—to find that everyone there has been massacred. Rather than tell us about the massacre directly from there, the movie chooses instead to back into the rest of the story by flashing ahead a few years and focusing on Magobei (Tatsuya Nakadai), one of the men who was present at the massacre.
