There are well over 30 retellings of the story of Zatoichi, the blind masseur who wanders from town to town righting wrongs and generally cutting up the place and though interesting in parts this doesn't stick out as one of the greats.
Pingu-Pongu director Fumihiko Sori puts his own twist to the tale by making Ichi a Goze, one of the visually-impaired female musicians of the Edo period. There are some nice performances, most notably from the very beautiful Haruka Ayase as Ichi and Takao Ohsawa as Touma, a name that when said in Japenese sounds almost the same as the word for idiot, but Shidô Nakamura, whom you may know from Letters from Iwa Jima and Pingu-Pongu, does such an absurd turn as the Yakuza baddie that it really lets both it and him down. Added to that the Japanese unwillingness to give us a fully happy ending meant that I was left rather annoyed at the curtain.
It may be traditional but after so many remakes the story is starting to get tired and a change of gender can't really save it.
Stick to the classic The Tale of Zatoichi (1962) or the fun Zatôichi (2003).
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1060256/
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