While Tom Cruise's The Last Samurai was still in production, Yoji Yamada's The Twilight Samurai, (Tasogare Seibei) swept the Japanese Academy Awards, winning in 12 categories including the 2002 best picture, best director, best actor and best actress awards.
Yamada is best known for his It's Touch Being a Man (Otoko wa Tsurai Yo) series. Affectionately called the "Tora-san" series, after the name of the main character who was played by the late Kiyoshi Atsumi, 48 movies were made from 1969 until 1996 when Atsumi died at 68. Tora was lovable humble peddler who often fell in love, but never got the girl.
The 71-year-old Yamada directed all but two of the Tora-san movies. But he's also known internationally on the festival circuit. His 1980 A Distant Cry from Spring (Harukanaru Yama no Yobigoe) won a special jury prize at the Montreal film festival and his 1998 The New Voyage won a best director award at the Shanghai film festival.
The Twilight Samurai was nominated for a foreign film Academy Awards, losing out to the Canadian The Barbarian Invasions.
Twilight Samurai tells the story of, Seibei, a recently widowed, low-ranking samurai who has two young daughters and an aging mother to support. Seibei is a clerk in his clan's warehouse. After work he hurries home to take care of his household so his fellow samurai teasingly call him "Twilight Seibei."
When his childhood sweetheart, Tomoe (Rie Miyazawa), divorces her husband and returns to her brother's house, he renews their acquaintance. They accidentally meet her angry and drunk ex-husband who attempts to reclaim her. Seibei defends her, winning a duel with only a wooden sword and gaining people's respect. But Seibei is too ashamed to propose to Tomoe because of her family's higher-ranking. Yet when he must battle another samurai (master Butoh dancer Min Tanaka in his first movie role), he asks to see her one last time.
Director Yamada, with his thick gray hair cut in a modified Beatles mop-top and wearing fashionable heavy black framed glasses, leaned back in his chair and spoke through an interpreter, saying he wanted to make a different kind of samurai movie--not like Sanjiro and Yojimbo where the samurai were heroic and high-class and not like the depictions shown in television movies. "On Japanese television," he explained, "all the women wear beautiful, colorful kimonos and look like they just stepped out of beauty parlor with their hair just perfect. They actually weren't allowed to wear such bright kimonos (because of class restrictions)."
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