‘Last Samurai Standing’ Episode 1 Recap: “Kodoku”

After watching the first episode of Last Samurai Standing, one thing becomes apparent very quickly: This show rules. I mean it is mint. I mean I walked around my apartment after it was over, saying “Holy shit, that was fuckin’ great” to myself, confusing my cat. Gorgeously shot, emotionally written, with serious things to say about the destruction of a way of life and breathless action choreography by producer and star Junichi Okada, it reminded me favorably of modern classics like 13 Assassins, or, strangely, Godzilla Minus One. There’s really no sense in beating around the bush here: I enjoyed the hell out of this episode, and my only hope is that the remaining six are exactly the same.

Okada stars as Shujiro Saga, also known as Kokushu the Manslayer. That gives you an indication of how good this guy is with a sword. Or, rather, was. In an opening flashback, Shujiro leads his forces to victory in battle, personally beheading the enemy commander. But suddenly bullets and cannon-fire rain down on both sides, slaughtering them completely. Shujiro, who spends the massacre screaming “Stop! Enough!”, is, that’s right, the last samurai standing.

The battle was the last gasp of the Boshin War, in which modernizing forces centered around the Meiji Imperial Court defeated the traditionalists of the Tokugawa Shogunate. (That’s just the one-sentence version of a complicated series of sociopolitical and geopolitical events, of course.) Laws passed since the Meiji Restoration have stripped all surviving samurai of their titles and privileges and banned the use of swords. Men like Shujiro, who once bestrode the islands of Japan like colossuses, now struggle to feed their families.

Shujiro in particular is going through a terrible time. Cholera has struck his town, sickening his wife, Shino (Riho Yoshioka) —and, in a bluntly effective scene, killing his sweet daughter, who dies apologizing for her illness. Shujiro himself is sick, too: PTSD from the massacre gives him nightmares, panic attacks, and the shakes whenever he holds his old sword, which has rusted in its scabbard.

Then fate — or an unseen rich sadist, take your pick — makes him an offer he can’t refuse. All over the country, strangers are distributing flyers advertising a martial arts competition with a preposterous 100,000 yen reward for the winner. The sum is so massive it’s hard for even those who decide to participate to believe it really exists. 

Until, that is, they arrive at the temple in Kyoto where the competition is to take place. An astonishing array of former samurai show up, and each one seems uniquely dressed and styled. (Seriously, the work that costume designer Masae Miyamoto does here is among the best I’ve ever seen.) They all bear witness as the emcee of the event — a smug little man in Western-style uniform (as are his legion armed guards) named Enju (Kazunari Ninomiya) — breaks open a huge jar filled with gold. The actual winner’s purse, he promises, dwarfs this paltry amount, which alone is enough to live like a king for a decade. 

It’s when Enju says that if you decide to stay and listen to the rules that you are no longer permitted to leave the game that Shujiro really starts to get worried. 

The game is simple. The 292 assembled samurai must proceed from Kyoto to Tokyo, the new capital, formerly known as Edo. On the way there are seven checkpoints in total, and to move on to the next stage, you must collect a certain number of wooden tags to pass them. The first checkpoint, the gates of the temple, requires two tags. Victory in Tokyo requires 30. 

The tags, of course, are hanging from every contestant’s neck. In other words, just to make it out of the starting gate, everyone there will have to kill at least one person, or be killed themselves. 

All-out chaos breaks out, rivaling the initial battle scene for intensity. Like the opening battle, which is filmed in a three and a half minute continuous shot, this one relies on long takes and fluid camera movement to immerse you in the action along with Shujiro. It’s enhanced by the presence of so many distinctive-looking samurai, who make for excellent minibosses for Shujiro to get past. He’s still unable to draw his sword, you see, and he’s merely fighting to stay alive by using his blade’s sheath as a combination shield and staff. 

Just before Enju kicks off the fight, however, Shujiro spots a young teenage girl amid the crowd, looking terrified and out of place. “What is a child doing here?” he gasps, horrified. He thinks of his own daughter, playing with him in the grass, dying in her bed, burning in her pyre. So he spends the whole rest of the battle fighting to reach and then protect the girl, who tells him her name is Futaba Katsuki. 

As they try to make their escape while dodging one distinctively dressed and armed samurai after another, they are saved by a ninja. (I told you this show rules.) But he’s not the stoic type you might be picturing — rather a cheerful, garrulous, even flamboyant figure. He freely gives Shujiro and Futaba the wooden tag around the neck of the man he killed to protect them, though he warns Shujiro he’s going to have to start killing if he wants to survive. “Hang in there,” he tells them as he departs. “I’m rooting for you!” An odd guy!

There are a lot of those going around. The first man to escape the combat is a cool customer by the name of Ukyo Kikuomi (Hiroshi Tamaki) — evidence, say the game’s audience (about whom more in a moment), of how he earned the nickname the Guardian God of the Court Nobles. I’m so glad cool nicknames are a thing on this show, but they’re no guarantee of survival. Take Ando (Takayuki Yamada), an undercover Kyoto policeman and former samurai named An-Jin the Rushing Gust. The moment he rushes Enju, though, he’s effortlessly beheaded by Sakura (Yasushi Fuchi), Enju’s scarred right-hand man. Icing a character who appears like they’re going to be prominent moving forward is a tried and true trick of contemporary TV for a reason: It works basically every time.

In the end, our heroes power through an angry mob that pulls down a towering torch on which they were hiding, grab a tag from the neck of a man who’d stolen Futaba’s, power past a big galoot (Wataru Ichinose), and make their escape. But as they flee into town they’re confronted by the wild and woolly Bukotsu Kanjiya (Hideaki Ito), a real psycho who kicked off the fighting by killing a man who’d asked to be his ally. Referring to Shujiro by his Kokushu the Manslayer nom de guerre, he attacks the reluctant warrior. The episode ends on this cliffhanger, but not before informing us that of the 292 samurai who entered the temple, only 128 remain.

In the show’s real Squid Game flourish, all of this is being done for the entertainment of a gaggle of rich businessmen, at the invitation of the unseen Organizer. The four besuited men chuckle and titter and make wry comments as they watch what the Organizer has planned to be the last hurrah of the samurai — a final exorcism of these “ghosts” of a bygone era.

But even though I’m sure Squid Game’s success is what got it greenlit, it doesn’t feel like a ripoff. Last Samurai Standing is based on a novel by historical fiction writer by Shogo Imamura, and it pays close attention to the unpleasant vibe of Meiji dominance. Watching uniformed soldiers swaggering around insulting and attacking people in service of the new order their rich paymasters are out to establish is an all too familiar feeling. Gramsci’s much quoted maxim — “The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters” — holds true at the dawn of the Meiji Era just as it holds true now.

Co-writer/direcotr Michihito Fujii and creative director Okada are primarily out to wow you with the action, and that they do. From the opening flashback, where the dirt and smoke of the battle feel ingrained in the image, to the concluding battle, a torchlit charnel house, the samurai stuff delivers. There’s equal attention paid, however, to the framing of character moments: Shujiro trying and failing to draw his sword in his lovely room in the inn, his family and a priest gathered around his daughter’s funeral pyre as his still-sick wife vomits. These images linger.

Keep it up, that’s all I’m saying. Whether Shujiro wins or dies, I think we’ve got a real winner on our hands here.

Sean T. Collins (@seantcollins.com on Bluesky and theseantcollins on Patreon) has written about television for The New York Times, Vulture, Rolling Stone, and elsewhere. He is the author of Pain Don’t Hurt: Meditations on Road House. He lives with his family on Long Island.