“A man should live any way he wants,” comments samurai Kiyokawa (the charismatic Tanba Tetsuro); “what else is there?” Assassination resembles Pale Flower: both films map out a strange and fascinating transitional territory between traditional genre cinema and a more critical, free-wheeling mode. The storytelling of Assassination is baroque, using numerous flashbacks from various characters’ points of view. The effect is to deny the viewer the ability to identify with Kiyokawa, who functions less as the sympathetic and heroic protagonist of a straightforward goal-oriented action drama than as a chiseled central image amid a swirl of restless motion. Shinoda celebrates Kiyokawa above all for reasons peripheral to the main plot: his loyalty to his mistress (Iwashita Shima) and his ability to improvise a poem that he writes on a fan to be read to his followers, who applaud with delight.