

She's the deadliest sword in Kyoto and she's coughing up her heart for a man who hates the smell of blood.
In the last days of the Tokugawa shogunate, there was a cute warrior, Souji Okita, who belonged to the armed police of the shogunate in Kyoto. Very few knew that Souji was not a boy, but a woman. Souji loved the vice-leader of the armed police, Toshizou Hijikata. Souji suffered from pulmonary tuberculosis and coughed up blood during a battle. Toshizou helped her but said that he did not care for the girl with a smell of blood. Souji had a real talent for swordsmanship and no one but Ryouma Sakamoto could compete with her. Ryouma was a liberal intellectual and tried to carry out a revolution without blood. However, the bloody Meiji Restoration broke out and Souji killed Ryouma who lost his dream. Because a friendship had sprung up between Toshizou and Ryouma, Toshizou got angry and slashed at Souji with a sword. Unwillingly, she unsheathed her sword and thought that she might get love if she was killed by the man she loved.
Acting
Riho Makise's lethal fragility—killing men while dying beautifully.
Costume
The shinsengumi blues hiding a woman's body in plain sight.
Writing
The cruel irony: she only wins at swords, loses at love.
Director
Mitsuyuki Yakushiji
Trivia, insights & behind the scenes
The real Okita Sōji was male, but tuberculosis rumors and androgynous beauty made gender-bending retellings irresistible in 1990s Japanese cinema.
Ken Watanabe's Ryouma is written as the ideological opposite of the Shinsengumi—his death marks the film's pivot from comedy to tragedy.
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