Final Rating: 4/5
In 1461, the Kanshō famine devastated Kyoto, at that time the seat of the ruling Ashikaga shogunate. As thousands starved – it’s said the bodies “dammed the Kamo River” nearby – the shogun did nothing. He was preoccupied building a garden. The ineptness of the shogun would eventually lead to the Ōnin War, the first of a series of civil wars and upheavals that would grip Japan for a hundred years.
Muromachi Outsiders (also known as Samurai Fury), from director Yu Irie, depicts an unnamed rebellion at the start of this period. Drawing influence from westerns, wuxia films, and naturally classic samurai fare, Outsiders is an epic swashbuckler that uses the backdrop of the famine to tell a timeless tale of popular resistance to tyranny.
Outsiders centres around Saizo (Kento Nagao), a spunky orphan and talented staff fighter. After he’s caught stealing by Kyoto’s head of security, he is arrested before being sold to a passing ronin (a masterless samurai), Hasuda Hyoe (Yô Ôizumi). Hyoe agrees to train Saizo, recruiting him into a ragtag group of formidable vagabonds. At the same time, Hyoe promises to help a group of local farmers erase their debts, either through diplomacy, sabotage, or rebellion.
Outsiders is led by three strong performances. Nagao plays Saizo as initially headstrong and arrogant, but also studious and driven. Saizo is both quick to act against anything he sees as unfair, and willing to sit back and listen to elders. He acts as an audience-surrogate, setting the pace of the film as he gets closer to Hyoe and learns about his plans.
Hyoe doesn’t grow as much, but is instantly a joy to watch, Oizumi oozing charisma in every scene. Hyoe fits squarely into a carefree wanderer archetype, though his joviality conceals a grittier history. Oizumi’s greatest strength is his ability to show Hyoe’s unshakable principles and his cunning to act on them. While he has no respect for laws of decorum – certainly no problems with loitering, vandalism, or stealing from guards – Hyoe is passionate when it comes to the plight of the farmers and curbing the corruption of Kyoto’s nobility.
The standout performance comes from Shin’ichi Tsutsumi, playing Kyoto head of security Honekawa Doken. Having begun his career as a vagabond himself, Doken has a history with Hyoe. There’s mutual respect, though Doken resents that his friend remains on the opposite side of the law. Doken seems as if he once had the same outlook as Hyoe but ultimately valued an existing societal order over an idealistic one. As Doken interacts with Hyoe and Saizo, he grapples with a worldview that places him as an enforcer to a monarch he trusts less and less. While Doken and Hyoe remain at odds, Tsutsumi’s performance often hints the rebellion was only months away from being led by him rather than Hyoe.
The fights in Outsiders feel weighty and brutal, gritty but never hard to follow. In the depiction of a peasant uprising, it’s surprising how similar a fight between untrained farmers and skilled swordsmen looks. Both quickly become messy brawls unevenly matching up single combatants against hordes of assailants. Even duels rarely resemble the clean fencing matches of classic Samurai films.
Within that mess, Outsiders is visually spectacular. Kyoto and the surrounding areas are well-laid out, so the audience is always clearly aware of the space. As the camera flits between bouts, the illusion of a massive war is achieved despite the actual uprising involving only dozens of combatants on either side. In individual fights, or during Saizo’s training, Irie makes use of cameras mounted on the weapons themselves, putting the audience directly into the action.
The camera brings the audience directly into the world of the Kyoto peasantry, making the plight of those wronged by the shogun ring true. As Hyoe and Saizo plan their conspiracy, it’s easy to forget there’s a plan at all: their interactions with local fighters and farmers feel grassroots. Meanwhile, rare scenes involving the shogun make the Kyoto nobility seem alien.
When the shogun bemoans the presence of a large, custom-ordered rock sculpture is an eyesore in his garden, it’s as if he is living on a separate planet from his subjects. Even Doken, the liaison between these two worlds, seems less out of place among the citizenry who regard him as a tyrant than among the nobility who hardly regard him at all.
The story of Hyoe, Saizo, and Doken is a story of exploitation of society by an ultra-rich class alienated from their subjects, and the enormous effort it took to resist. Tragically, it’s arguable whether that resistance was even successful, but through Muromachi Outsiders, the 600-year-old Kyoto Rebellion is as relevant as ever.
Muromachi Outsiders was seen during the 2025 Toronto Japanese Film Festival.
