Azumi

Azumi (あずみ, Azumi?) is a Japanese manga series created by Yu Koyama. It concerns the title character, a young woman brought up as part of a team of assassins, charged with killing three warlords that threaten Feudal Japan with an agenda of war and bloodshed. It received an Excellence Prize at the 1997 Japan Media Arts Festival and the Shogakukan Manga Award in 1998.

Azumi was adapted into a popular and extremely violent action film by Ryuhei Kitamura in 2003. A sequel, Azumi 2: Death or Love, directed by Shusuke Kaneko, followed in 2005.

The movie was produced by Mataichiro Yamamoto, and has been distributed to the US by his company, Urban Vision Entertainment, on their label AsiaVision. The film was given a limited nationwide theatrical release beginning in July 2006 with a DVD released November 21, 2006. Azumi has been broadcast on television in the UK, on the Film4 channel.



Plot

After the Battle of Sekigahara, a samurai is tasked by the Tokugawa shogunate to raise a band of assassins to finish off Toyotomi's allies and other ambitious warlords, to prevent another civil war.
Azumi, played by Aya Ueto, is discovered as a 7-8 year old girl kneeling without visible emotion next to the body of her dead mother by the samurai master Gessai, played by Yoshio Harada, and his entourage of young students. Azumi is raised in the martial skills of samurai and shinobi sword fighting, and the art of assassination. Azumi and her fellow classmates, now at young adult age, are constantly being told about a "mission" they must accomplish, though they have no idea what this mission is yet.

Prior to setting out on their mission, their master orders his students to "pair up" with each others' best friend and proceed to kill each other, thus out of 10 students only five will remain to proceed with the mission. Questions and internal conflicts begin to arise amongst Azumi and her comrades as it seems their mission even prevents them from saving a village of mostly women and children from being massacred at the hands of a group of bandits, as their primary mission is to kill the warlords Asano Nagamasa, Masayuki Sanada and Kiyomasa Kato. Aside from the warlords, Azumi must also deal with a narcissistic mercenary, Bijomaru Mogami, whose sword has no handguards as he claims to never have had to defend against attacks. He is very feminine in appearance, seen wearing makeup, having long hair and always carries around a rose. He kills one of Azumi's friends and is the final villain that Azumi has to fight in the movie. Azumi and Bijomaru fight to a standstill when Bijomaru, already insane, snaps. He becomes reckless and Azumi decapitates him.

(off topic,lol,this is how a picture should be posted)

Cast

Aya Ueto .... Azumi
Shun Oguri .... Nachi
Hiroki Narimiya .... Ukiha
Kenji Kohashi .... Hyuga
Takatoshi Kaneko .... Amagi
Yuma Ishigaki .... Nagara
Yasutaka Sano .... Yura
Shinji Suzuki .... Awa
Eita Nagayama .... Hiei
Shogo Yamaguchi .... Komoru
Kazuki Kitamura .... Inoue, Kanbe'e
Kenichi Endo .... Sajiki Isshin
Kazuya Shimizu .... Sajiki Nisai
Ryo Osowareru .... Haha-Oya
Yoshio Harada .... Gessai
Masatō Ibu .... Nagamasa Asano
Minoru Matsumoto .... Saru
Jô Odagiri .... Bijomaru Mogami
Aya Okamoto .... Yae
Hideo Sakaki .... Nagato
Naoto Takenaka .... Kiyomasa Kato

Azumi 2: Death or love

Immediately after the final events of the first film, Azumi and her remaining friend Nagara are stalked by the men of a warlord she recently assassinated. Upon escaping, they are out-numbered and "out-gunned" and must join forces with a local resistance and a group of ragtag freedom fighters in order to kill the remaining warlord and bring peace to Japan. To make things even more complicated for Azumi, she must also confront her emotions in regards to a fighter who bears a scary resemblance to her deceased schoolmate and friend Nachi.

Azumi(Manga) + manga plot

The manga Azumi, like the movie, focuses upon the life of the female assassin Azumi. The manga begins an indeterminate number of years after the Battle of Sekigahara, but as the Azumi begins her assassination missions, the manga introduces the characters into mainstream history. Many of the early assassination missions that Azumi undertakes are the assassinations of the prominent supporters and generals of the Toyotomi Clan, against whom the Toyotomi Clan expected to again go to war. The manga 'reveals' that many of the Toyotomi leaders who conveniently died of diesease or accidents prior to the final confrontation between the Toyotomi and Tokugawa were actually victims of assassinations by Azumi and her comrades, thus indicating to the reader when the events were taking place.

Azumi is raised by an old man known as "Jii" (grandfather), who's name is later revealed to be Gensai Obata, as the only girl among eleven other small boys. They are secluded from the rest of society in a tiny valley called "Kiridani" (Fog Valley) to such an extent that they do not know the difference between men and women, what a baby is, or customs like marriage. Early in the manga, as part of their training, Azumi and her comrades are allowed to go to a small community of ninjas to learn the basics of ninjutsu.

The manga sets a chilling tone early on. The 12 "erabareta senshi" (chosen warriors), who are all young children (Azumi has her first period well after her first missions, so she appears to be somewhere between 10-12 years of age at the onset of the manga) are told by Jii that they have completed their training. For their first mission, they are to form a pair with whomever among the 12 that they feel the closest. Azumi pairs with Natchi, and all ten others pair with their closest friends. Having formed the pairs, Jii tells them their first mission is to kill their partner--whoever is too weak to kill their partner is too weak to fulfil their life's missions, and without any means of independant survival, there is no way to live other than to kill their partner. The twelve children each fight their respective duels, and Azumi slays Natchi, an event which appears to deeply traumatize Azumi, but she hides her feelings, as do the others.

Then, their second mission was to slay every person in the ninja commune, including women, children, babies, and their longtime teacher. Azumi hesistates, and is unable to kill a baby, a task which one of her comrades quickly accomplishes for her telling her "i'll keep this secret from Jii" but with a reprimanding glare.

The remaining six warriors proceed to go on assassination missions of the various important supporters of the Toyotomi Faction. Azumi gradually begins to feel doubts about the morality of killing, but is repeatedly told, quite truthfully, that if her targets remained alive, the coming war between the Toyotomi and Tokugawa will be that much more horrible and result in even more innocent deaths.

Themes of the manga

As the manga proceeds, the manga evokes various moral concepts such as the morality of assassinations (and killing in general), the dehumanization effect of politics, as well as leading the reader to question basic assumptions of right and wrong. For example, throughout much of the early to middle volumes of Azumi (Vol. 8-19), Azumi frequently fights and kills many bandits--many of whom are depicted robbing, murdering, and raping innocent victims. Azumi does not question that her killing such bandits is right, and few readers probably question her righteousness. Later on in the manga, the political background to the reason for the banditry is revealed. The Tokugawa ruling family deposed and ended many previously prominent Daimyo (warlords) who opposed them leaving the samurai and mercenaries in their employ without work or any means to live--therefore they resorted to banditry. Azumi questions whether it was right for her to have killed so many men who had been driven to banditry not by their own choice.

A consistent recurring theme is the contrast between Azumi and other prominent characters. Azumi is compared to a bodhisatvha--a kind of enlightened being. This is indicative of the theme in Azumi where characters around Azumi are motivated by a variety of obscessions. Some are motivated by a kind of blind idealism, others by religion, others by a lust for battle, greed, or even normally sancitified motivations like honor. Not all the forces (particularly those motivated by more noble incentives, like a pair of ninja assassins whom Azumi kills, who are participating in the planning of a revolt as the only way for a ninja community to survive) are depicted as if their singleminded drive towards their goals are somehow evil. However, nonetheless, in each case, those who are attached intensely to something in the world are killed by Azumi, while Azumi, who seemingly has little attachment to the earthly world and few personal desires, survives. This theme clearly evokes the Japanese view of buddhism.