The Elusive Samurai

Episode 11

I don't think there are going to be many people out there who claim “Samurais Who Are Eager to Die & an Elusive Samurai” as their favorite episode of this show. That's okay; every anime needs to take a break for some table setting, now and again. The main difference between this week's setup for future conflicts and previous ones is that we don't have a brand new member of the cast - good or evil – to make the whole experience feel fresh. Shinano-no-Kami and his droogs are your run-of-the-mill Elusive Samurai villains, which is to say that they're a bunch of unhinged lunatics whose campy vibes are only matched by their willingness to exploit and kill any of the poor commoners who get in their way. Like I said, though: This show has done psycho clown bureaucrats plenty of times before, and these guys don't even have any disturbing body-horror appendage powers to wield against Tokiyuki and the gang.

What the episode does well, however, is provide a soft thematic conflict between Tokiyuki and the band of suicidal Suwa samurai led by Yasaburo Hoshina. These dudes are the stereotypical “It's a Good Day to Die!!!” type of warriors who care more about a gloriously badass final stand against the enemy than the tactics and strategy that are necessary to win a war. That's all well and good for men who care more about mythmaking than genuinely serving the common good…except, as our narrator handily points out, Tokiyuki's whole clan got wiped out by dying “graceful” and honorable deaths, and all it amounted to was a hill of bodies and blood. As it happens, the common folk generally don't care whether some random soldier in a battle they've never heard of got shot by a bunch of arrows or lived to fight another day. For every King Leonidas, there are a hundred million everyday people whose most lasting contribution to public memory came from serving as fertilizer for the soil they were buried in.

Plus, Hoshina's men are a bunch of drunken Dang-Ass Freaks. Not only does this give Tokiyuki the moral high ground upon which to stand and scold these feckless weirdos, but it also leads to the episode's greatest jokes. You all know I'm here for the goofy-looking son-of-a-bitch who ends up being a very dedicated cannibal whose dream is to slither out of a man's chest by crawling up his rectal cavity. Even funnier is the climax of the episode, where poor little Tokiyuki gets drunk himself by being splashed with a little bit of sake and mercilessly pummels Hoshina into submission with his supernaturally fast ass-cheeks. What else is there to say? Our hero just whooped a grown man and his ragtag army into shape with booze-fueled supersonic butt bounces. It's genius.

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The Elusive Samurai is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.

James is a writer with many thoughts and feelings about anime and other pop-culture, which can also be found on Twitter, his blog, and his podcast.