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Nakadai has explained in interviews that RyunosukeвЂ™s sins are inherited through the laws of reincarnation, but the brilliance of his performance and the film is that neither ever nails the character down. The film is only somewhat less baffling if you know that its source was a 41-volume serialized novel from the early 20th century that illustrated Buddhist ideas of karma. Yet he is profoundly mysterious, evoking awe and spine-chilling fascination, like a snake that hypnotizes its prey. By this point his character, Ryunosuke, has slaughtered a host of people, including his common-law wife and an innocent Buddhist pilgrim he is a vicious, arrogant, heartless psychopath with a gift for exploiting the weakness of others. Then he opens his eyes, lifting the lids as slowly and majestically as a theater curtain, and gazes upward-a breathtaking image. In an ominously quiet scene just before chaos explodes at the end of The Sword of Doom, Nakadai closes his eyes and, in a reverie, describes the winds blowing through the mountains, harking back to the opening scene of the film, set in the Great Bodhisattva Pass ( Daibosatsu toge, the movieвЂ™s original title).

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He has said that while people talked about the expressiveness of his eyes, he actually had no idea what he was doing with them he assumed they were simply windows to what he was feeling. His acting can be stylized, dance-like in its bold physical expressiveness, or coolly restrained, but it always seemed to be fed by some inner wellspring. Perhaps his smooth, resonant bass voice is the most unchanging element of his presence. Two years later in another Okamoto film, the raucous but gentle-hearted action-comedy Kill! (1968), he is lovably scruffy, all quizzical grins and hangdog charm. In The Sword of Doom his sleek face looks cold and dead, eyelids half-lowered, muscles lax except when a cruel twitch pulls his mouth sideways. His features seem to be recast for each role, with KajiвЂ™s soulful, liquid gaze hardening into the vitreous sheen in UnosukeвЂ™s eyes. In Hollywood, such a handsome actor might have struggled more against matinee-idol typecasting, but NakadaiвЂ™s plasticity and mercurial flair meant he was never defined by his huge, lustrous eyes, sculpted cheekbones, and cupidвЂ™s-bow lips.

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It was Kurosawa who first drilled Nakadai in how to stride like a samurai, for his blink-and-you-miss-it walk-on in Seven Samurai (1954), and it was Mifune whose prowess at sword-fighting he practiced tirelessly to match. The same qualities define their pairing in The Sword of Doom. The director cast Nakadai opposite his great star Toshiro Mifune, seeing in them the contrast between silk and cotton, between a snake and a lion: the younger actor supple and enigmatic where the older was gruff and direct. In a demonstration of his range, during the making of this trilogy he took time off to play Unosuke, the rakish, serpentine villain in KurosawaвЂ™s samurai Western Yojimbo (1961). His star-making role was Kaji, the sensitive rebel with a cause in The Human Condition (1959-1961), Masaki KobayashiвЂ™s grueling epic of JapanвЂ™s wartime atrocities and suffering. Trained in modern theater and steeped in Hollywood movies, he was JapanвЂ™s answer to postwar вЂњnew menвЂќ like Montgomery Clift, James Dean, and his hero Marlon Brando, with their raw emotions and troubled, ambivalent masculinity. Make It Real: Form and Void By Eric HynesД«orn in Tokyo in 1932, Nakadai began his film career not long after the end of the American occupation in 1952.

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