Lady Snowblood: Still a Demon at 50

When Kazuo Koike died in 2019, the world lost one of the most important writers of manga in the history of the medium. The man who created the Lone Wolf and Cub and Lady Snowblood series is responsible for almost as vast a stretch of our imaginations as Akira Kurosawa when it comes to the samurai period piece. His heroes have been informed by and have in turn informed archetypes like the wandering loner, the hyper-competent slayer of bad guys, the vagabond hero, the singularly obsessed revenant. So many creators, from the East and the West, have been inspired by the juxtaposition between Ogami Itto’s cold-blooded murder-for-hire and his tender love for his son Daigoro—we wouldn’t have The Mandalorian without it, for just one recent example.

There’s more that united Itto and Lady Snowblood AKA Shurayuki-hime than just their unique premises and ability to dismember anyone foolhardy enough to stand in their way. (“Shurayuki-hime,” the character’s Japanese moniker and the Japanese title of the work, translates more accurately to “Princess Snow Demon,” a play on “Shirayuki,” which is the Japanese name for the character Snow White). At the beginning of Lone Wolf and Cub, Itto coldly informs his son that as they embark upon their quest for revenge, they are now apart from humanity—they are demons on a path to hell. That same sentiment is echoed in Lady Snowblood as the young girl Yuki’s trainer tells her that she is not a human, but shura, a term in Japanese that can be translated as a slaughter or carnage, or as akin to the demonic Buddhist asuras. The rules of humanity don’t apply to her, and they will not constrain her as she dedicates her life to her enemies’ total ruin.

That’s the fascinating aspect underlying both characters: The plain assertion that you are watching people who have knowingly and willingly abandoned their humanity—those whom the abyss has already claimed, as Nietzsche would have it. Lady Snowblood is something other than human, and she is liable to do whatever it takes. On the 50th anniversary of the film adaptation’s U.S. release, Lady Snowblood remains a bit lesser known than Koike’s Lone Wolf and Cub characters, but it’s still a stylish, ruthless, near-flawless ballet of blood.

An inmate serving a life sentence in a women’s prison gives birth to a child and, before her premature death, entrusts her to a fellow inmate. The mother, convicted of stabbing a man to death, conceived this baby by seducing prison guards. This friend takes the daughter, Yuki, to the brutal priest Dokai, who trains her for one purpose: Her mother was put in prison for killing one of her four rapists, who also killed Yuki’s father and half-brother. Now, Yuki must walk the path of shura and put the other three in the ground.

Lady Snowblood is a truncation of the manga, following the adult Yuki (Meiko Kaji) as she performs hits and trades for information leading her to her real targets. With a sword hidden in her umbrella, Yuki turns killing into an art form. Even when her targets aren’t taken in by her immaculate beauty, they haven’t really got a chance. The movie follows her from brutal assassination to brutal assassination, even as her quest for revenge is threatened to be derailed by human sentiment—pity for the daughter of one of her father’s killers, who has become a pathetic gambling addict; blossoming romance toward a pulp writer interested in her tale of revenge.

But of course, Yuki isn’t going to let that mushy stuff stop her from ripping and tearing until it is done. Lady Snowblood features some righteous dismemberment.

It’s also a movie whose every chapter heading and soundtrack title seems designed to get a coliseum crowd to bay for blood: “THE PLEASURE PALACE, FINAL SCENE OF CARNAGE” is one chapter name, and the song you recognize from Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill, “Shura no Hana” (sung by Kaji herself!) translates to “Flower of Carnage.” Yuki is here for one thing and one thing only.

Koike says he wrote Lady Snowblood without much worry about whether it would sell, and incorporated concepts from his observances of Buddhism and Shintoism, and his knowledge of swords and the martial arts. For the film, director Toshiya Fujita (whose other films—mostly juvenile delinquent pictures—are nothing at all like this one and its sequel) captured those mystical qualities while stylizing the film with hallmarks of ‘70s Japanese cinema, including the killer soundtrack. Those familiar with the Kill Bill movies will recognize visual and musical cues lifted directly from Lady Snowblood. Wanting to know what inspired Uma Thurman’s own revenge rampage is as good a reason as any for film fans to dive into this one.

Koike was, for his part, extremely conscious of the power dynamics of samurai period pieces, likening samurai-era Japan’s caste system to a form of slavery, where those in power abused those beneath them and left no recourse for writing wrongs—exactly the kind of society where, he said, vendettas flourish. Reflecting on his ideas for Lady Snowblood in a 2015 interview (included with the Criterion edition of the film), he said he was trying to tell a tale of a woman’s vengeance in the context of Japan’s Meiji era—a historical period at the end of the 19th century marked by the rise of Japan’s emperor, the end of the samurai, and an opening of Japan to Western influences.

“I had created lots of assassins,” said Koike (who also wrote for Golgo 13), “but there wasn’t a single woman among them. I wanted to create a demonic woman. Japan was a strong country when the story took place, but women didn’t yet have the right to vote. I wanted to create a strong and beautiful woman in that world … who turns cutting people down into an art.”

It’s a shame Lady Snowblood, and its best-subtitle-of-all-time sequel Lady Snowblood: Love Song of Vengeance, are not as well-known—in this era suffused with female-led, revenge-fueled action cinema—as other movies from the era, especially considering how much Tarantino’s late-era run of success and acclaim owes to its influence.

It’s easy to see how, inspired by this movie, Tarantino wrote a scene where a woman literally punches her way out of a grave. In Snowblood’s last scene, we believe, for a moment, that Yuki’s revenge has claimed her life—that, as demonic as her fury is, she is mortal after all. But no, she’s not done yet. She will never be done, never give in. A human would be unable to go on. She’s something else entirely.

Kenneth Lowe is a regular contributor to Paste Movies. You can follow him on Twitter @IllusiveKen until it collapses, on Bluesky @illusiveken.bsky.social, and read more at his blog.

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