Kubi

A 2023 period drama film in which Takeshi Kitano served as screenwriter, director, editor, and actor. It is based on the novel of the same name that Kitano himself published in 2019, a labor of passion that finally brings to the screen an idea he had nurtured for about 30 years. Centered on the Honnō-ji Incident, long regarded as the greatest mystery of the Sengoku period, the story depicts a power struggle swirling with the machinations and betrayals of Oda Nobunaga (Ryo Kase), Akechi Mitsuhide (Hidetoshi Nishijima), Toyotomi (then Hashiba) Hideyoshi (Takeshi Kitano), and Kuroda Kanbei (Tadanobu Asano), rendered with black humor and unsparing scenes of violence. It had its world premiere in the Cannes Premiere section of the 76th Cannes Film Festival in May 2023, and was released in Japan that November. The sword-fighting scenes, in which samurai wield their blades, are rendered with the dry ellipsis characteristic of Kitano's work and an aesthetic of violence that erupts in an instant, symbolically embodying the theme of how those in power fight to seize their “heads” (kubi). The depiction of Yasuke, a real-life Black samurai, as a character also drew attention. With a total budget of 1.5 billion yen, it is a major production that, by repeatedly showing beheadings and kaishaku with Japanese swords, vividly brings out the value of shukyū (enemy heads taken in battle) in an age of chaos and the survival strategies of the samurai.