Destiny’s Son/Kiru is the third of Japan Society’s “Double-Edged Sword” series of sword-fighting movies super-starring Shintaro Katsu or Raizo Ichikawa. Together, the nine films overview the 1960s chambara genre, of which Akira Kurosawa was the most internationally acclaimed master, and incidentally make manifest an influence on the modern-day Western and on directors such as Quentin Tarantino, who himself takes the part of a gunslinger in Miike’s Sukiyaki Western Django and has declared Katsu’s Zatoichi on the Road: Fighting Journey “my most favorite.”

That same year, 1962, that he directed the first of the lengthy, popular Zatoichi series, Kenji Misumi became famous in his homeland with Destiny’s Son, also a highlight for “Japanese James Dean” Ichikawa, dead at thirty-eight just seven years later. The film is minimalist; in fact, at seventy-one minutes, the whole is so streamlined as to be confusing to those unfamiliar with the national novel from which the script derived.

Zen in restraint, pacing and dialogue, the “Daiei [Studios] makes movies” release comes near to being anti-samurai code of Bushido in intimating the fruitlessness of that way of the warrior. Indeed, few frames are devoted to combat, screen blood is scarce, and the climax, traditionally a major shootout, is silent aside from an unseen nightingale and solitary except for the hero padding down dark hallways to enter light rooms.

SPOILER ALERT

Shingo Takakura (Ichikawa) lives a peaceful rural life with his widowed retired lower-tier samurai father and younger sister Yoshio. It is 1857, fully four years after the country’s forced opening but might as well be centuries earlier, what with daimyo warlords and their armed clans. To be cleared up much later is the connection with an opening 1833-34 sequence in which kimonoed Fujiko stabs to death Lord Lida’s wicked mistress Wakayama and is subsequently beheaded with a smile.

Requesting and receiving permission, Shingo travels for three years, during which the mild young man learns the Shamisen style of bringing opponents to their knees, Adam’s apples bobbing, by his mere fighting pose and steely glance. So unbellicose is he, and the film, that he considers this unstoppable power an evil breach of manly etiquette from which only death can release him; and beyond one or two early manifestations, the story simply shies away from it.

Shingo acquires local celebrity for thus staring down Mito Province’s formidable fencer Shoji but in doing so incurs the envy of neighbor Ikebe, whose son has been eyeing Yoshio. First disseminating a rumor that Shingo is adopted, the neighbors kill the father and sister and are at once slain by him in a bizarre burnt-tree landscape.

Now a ronin wanderer for years, Shingo seeks his birth parents and witnesses the slaughter of a woman whose naked body and naked sword had covered the retreat of her brother Mondo.

Celibate with three dead women occupying his thoughts -- mother, sister and the nude Amazon -- he becomes the protector-companion of the Edo Shogun’s Inspector, who offers the young man his daughter’s hand while trying to rein in the rebellious armies of Mito which have sacked the British Embassy. The father-and-son-like two are betrayed while on a diplomatic mission, and the hero must face nemesis Shoji and the vengeful Mondo.

The resolution comes unexpected but completes the circle with honor rather than retaliation. Covering some three decades, the plot is confusing, but the stripped-down protagonist is well served by stoic, handsome Ichikawa. Too much is packed into the lean film and hardly any characters are developed, but lead actor and director engage the audience in this visually virtuoso tale of integrity and search, of “a child of fate” who sets his own destiny at the end.