Since it is also based on a story by Shuhei Fujisawa, Love and Honor is naturally compared to Twilight Samurai and Hidden Blade, Yoji Yamada’s two previous films adapted from the same author. Though like those other two movies it includes a sword duel, it is really about a husband and wife and the world in which they find themselves, which turns out not to be as glorious as it seems to be.
In an unspecified clan at an unspecified date during the peaceful Tokugawa era, Mimura goes to the castle every day to work as one of five food tasters for the daimyo. His wife Kayo is very impressed by this, but it is a job only given to the poorest of the samurai and he never even sees the lord. One day Mimura is poisoned. There is chaos in the castle in search of a plot to poison the lord, until it is determined that he had been served some out of season shellfish. Mimura soon recovers but is permanently blinded.
There is considerable concern among his aunts and uncles, since without the job, he may lose his stipend. They send Kayo to seek the influence of the high ranking samurai Shimada who remembers her from her childhood, and miraculously the stipend is maintained. Shimada, however, has demanded something predictable in return from Kayo, and when Mimura finds out, he divorces her. Only later does he find out that Shimada’s influence had nothing to do with the lord’s gratitude and prepares himself to duel the famous swordsman even though he is blind.
Over the years, we have seen many blind swordspeople, Zatoichi of course being the most popular. However, those fights were always spectacular and entertaining because they were impossible yet made to look plausible. Yamada (and his untranslated fight arranger) opt to be as realistic as possible, with Mimura receiving instruction from his old sensei to prepare himself. Mimura wins not because he has become the better swordsman but because Shimada cheats,
which befits his character but exposes him to a devastating (but not deadly) wound that leads him to eventually commit suicide in humiliation. (I don’t consider this a spoiler, since any audience member knows that once the duel is planned, Mimura will win – what is the point of making a movie about a blind man who is cut down without a chance?)
Thus, though the duel is the one action highlight, the movie is not about the duel but the marriage. Unlike Hidden Blade, Twilight Samurai, or Sword of Desperation, also based on a Fujisawa story, the movie does not end with the duel. At the fight, we finally understand that Mimura is fighting not for his honor but for that of his absent wife, who has been betrayed by a man using his position to effectively rape her. The marriage itself is quiet and traditional. Kayo was an orphan raised by Mimura’s family and has loved him since a child. She is a naif, leaving their home only to shop for food, and content to cook and care for her husband. He in turn is gentle and finds her naiveté humorous. 
Before his injury, we see the couple in only the most traditional of situations and may even initially think she is a servant, since she serves him food and tea while waiting behind him rather than sharing the meal with him. Their only physical contact comes when she must give him his medicine by transferring it from her mouth to his. Yet there is no doubt that this is one of the most sincerely loving couples to be found in samurai movies. Such a depiction requires special sensitivity from the director and from the principal performers in order to avoid becoming cloying, and Yamada and his unfamiliar cast walk that tightrope with great subtlety.
Despite 15 years in television, often as a leading man, this was Takuya Kimura’s first Japanese theatrical film. As Mimura, he is subtle and gentle in his teasing of Kayo and believable as a disillusioned blind man and husband, without ever flying into the rages we might expect to see. Kayo is played by Rei Dan, in her first movie despite being 35, after years in the popular all-female Takarazuka musical theater company. In general, Yamada directs as he usually does – surreptitiously, without bring notice to his own work yet always ending up with the right shot. Though never looking for a beautiful composition for its own sake, makes a beautiful movie as well, in the best studio manner of Ozu, Mizoguchi, and Kato, among so many other earlier masters, including much use of the low camera position. We see considerable detail about the home, daily life for a poor samurai, and his boring yet dangerous job. Even after Mimura goes blind, a remarkable number of critical scenes are played with people not facing each other, and often with backs to the camera as well, a long tradition in Japanese films.
Given the quality of the many films made from Fujisawa’s works it is odd that they were never adapted to the screen until after his death. From his fifty-odd novels or story collections, none were adapted even when they were new in the sixties when chanbara ruled the roost at several of the studios or in the seventies and eighties when the genre moved to television. Yamada’s “trilogy” is uniformly superb, though most people I have read seem to think the best one was the first one they saw. That was certainly true for me; I saw Love and Honor first, and even on a second view find that its quiet love story makes it seem the best of the three. It was certainly the movie that made me look at Yamada in a completely different light, which has led to the discovery of the many remarkable movies he made in a long career outside the Tora-san series.
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