Lone Samurai

“Lone Samurai,” a Japanese-language movie written and directed by California-raised filmmaker Josh C. Waller, begins with on-screen text and a Japanese voice-over reading about the 13th-century invasions of Japan led by the Mongolian Kublai Khan, the marauder whose eventual mansion-building skills would centuries later inspire Charles Foster Kane. The point of the anecdote is to clue the viewer in to the origin of the word “kamikaze.” The movie’s protagonist is not seen but instead heard as he and his samurai brethren slaughter the crew of a Korean ship. Yes, even back in the twelfth century, the beef between these two nations was strong. But then: shipwreck. Our lone samurai is washed up on an island with a wooden portion of the ship sticking out of his thigh. That’s gotta hurt, and it does, and our man pulls the sort-of plank out of his flesh and tries to heal up. Once he feels a little better, he determines to end it all. He constructs a makeshift shrine at which he intends to commit seppuku, that is, ritualistic suicide by disemboweling, with one’s sword, of course. But. Praying at that makeshift shrine, he reflects, “Pain kept me alive.” And he gets turned around. But it’s a good thing that what kept him alive was pain, because now he is going to have to endure a lot more of it.