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HISTORICA SPECIAL
One Day in January
A double-award-winning piece from the Onihei Gaiden series. Ken Matsudaira’s passionate performance shines in this Onihei Hankachō spin-off.
Sanadaya is a small soba noodle restaurant in Makurabashi, Honjo. Every fourth of January, the couple who runs the shop only serves Sanada soba from Shinshū. The extremely pungent soba is ill-received from the guests, and despite its usual popularity, the shop is always empty on this specific day. However, one year, a man who looks like a wealthy merchant tries the soba, says he missed this specific flavor, and promises to come back next year. While being a chronicle of a soba restaurant, this masterpiece is also a melancholic and humane story of two men’s lives intersecting. The film is worth a watch even just for the rich-as-wine performance of Ken Matsudaira and Akira Emoto.
Director Akira Inoue
Actor Ken Matsudaira, Akira Emoto, Yoshie Ichige, Toru Masuoka, Jundai Yamada, Sei Hiraizumi
Japan｜ 2012｜ 77min｜ ｜
- Human drama
director
Akira Inoue [Film Director]
Inoue was born in 1928 in Kyoto Prefecture. After working as an assistant director for Kenji Mizoguchi and Kazuo Mori, he started directing his own films such as Zatoichi's Revenge (1965) and Sleepy Eyes of Death: The Mask of the Princess (1966). He also worked on a total of eight jidaigeki pieces for Samurai dorama Channel, namely the four installments of the Onihei Gaiden series starting with Code of the Bandits (2011), Belated Bliss (2015), A Winter’s Day (2015), and finally Mizzling Rain (2017) from the Hashi-Monogatari anthology. Known as a distinguished master of filmmaking, he is an essential figure in the history of jidaigeki.
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