The authorial stamp on a Takeshi Kitano movie can generally be found in the editing, where specific decisions create moments that are tragic, comic, or fraught with a stubborn tension between the two. One of the clearest examples of the style can be found in Kikujiro: after the cranky title character has mouthed off in too-close proximity to some actual tough guys, the scene showing him being beaten to the ground is elided. Instead, Kitano cuts directly to the aftermath, with Kikujiro sprawled in comic fashion on the ground. The shot is made funny by the edit, but the subtitle — "Mister Fell Down the Stairs" — simultaneously underlines the joke and undermines it with a sense of minor tragedy. So unrewarding is this man's life that his crotchety attempts to seize the day only whirl back around to get him.

I don't think Zatoichi is quite as lyrical as Kikujiro, but it's still full of mighty beauties and wryly observed ironies. And the dry editorial wit is well in evidence. Kitano himself plays the swordsman Zatoichi, ostensibly a blind masseur, who ends up holed up with a woman who’s being squeezed by local gangsters. For reasons that are not fully explained (actually, Kitano has described it as an homage to Kurosawa’s Dodeska-den), a neighbor is in the habit of making circles around her property, running at full tilt while wielding a sword and pretending to be a samurai. (Presumably he's a small man dreaming big.) What's important, of course, is not the explanation of his activities so much as Zatoichi's reaction to it. He’s having none of it. And so, at the end of a scene that has the aging samurai chopping lumber in the yard, he picks up a newly cut block of wood, cocks his head a little, and then quickly chucks it over his shoulder. We hear the impact, but we don't see it. Instead, Kitano holds the shot on the impassive Zatoichi, then cuts to the image of the poor guy sprawled on the ground, bloodied and hapless. (He gets up and starts running again.) Again, the joke is funny twice, but the second shot, the one that puts the punchline home, actually has the whiff of the cosmic about it.

It's that rigorous eye for mythmaking that makes Zatoichi worthwhile, despite its status as lightweight fare that even the director characterizes as an exercise in check-cashing. In the film’s opening sequences, Kitano deftly introduces the cast of enigmatic characters, including a ronin bodyguard, a variety of thugs and a pair of geishas with backstory to spare. This has been generally hailed as a return to form for Kitano, whose last great film was the almost unbearably emotional Hana-bi, but I actually found the gentleness of Kikujiro and the reflectiveness of Brother to be more indicative of Kitano’s recurring thematic concerns than anything in Zatoichi. Instead, the new film plays in the mode of a spaghetti western, with Kitano’s tics serving the same function as a squint and a toothpick wielded by Clint Eastwood’s Man With No Name.

The action sequences are surprisingly sparse — typically, Kitano plays them for atmosphere, which makes the inevitable bursts of actual violence come across with the abruptness of gunshots. Scenes where Zatoichi faces down his opponents have been bleached of most color and given a blue-grey cast that visually complements the impending metallic combat. One, in which he seems almost to be ignoring a small mob of enemies as they approach him, swords drawn, in the rain, goes almost purple. In fact, so much of Zatoichi is so well calculated that the decision to rely on half-baked CG work instead of practical effects for the bloodshed comes off as an amateur move. Kitano has experimented with CGI in the past, with the violent Brother getting a gruesome spatter of animated blood that came across as just a little visual cheese to go along with the overheated gangsta storyline. (The violence was minimized for the U.S. release, but the Asian version, available on Japanese DVDs, includes some striking bloodwork.) In Zatoichi, as they would in any movie that relied on the physical interplay of human beings in motion, the plainly unreal effects undercut what would be the film's visceral pay-outs. Kitano says that’s partly by design — he went for blossoms of digital blood because he feared the movie, which is geared to a mass audience, would otherwise be intolerably violent — but I think it’s a mistake. Wire work and plainly fanciful acrobatics that involve real people soaring through the air can be thrilling, but seeing an actor get run clean through by an obviously cartoon blade is about as viscerally affecting as watching your roommate get taken down by a Ninja Gaiden boss for the umpteenth time. It’s disconcerting to think that Quentin Tarantino might have a better eye for this kind of business than Kitano.

Fortunately, unlike the significantly more energetic Kill Bill Vol. 1, Zatoichi doesn’t live and die by the sword alone. Despite my significant cavils, it’s at base level just a gorgeous and evocative piece of entertainment that takes a deliberately playful approach to its genre. Shots depicting the everyday life of the Japanese countryside — farming, or carpentry — are made rhythmic by the understated use of visual rhythms and sound effects that suggest dance choreography. The narrative is held together not just in the editing, but also by Kitano’s compositions — his eye for landscape, and a methodology for placing characters in the frame that could be described as a knack for portraiture. And at the climax of the film, he stages a mammoth musical number (!) that makes breathtakingly explicit the longstanding connections between martial arts pictures and movie musicals. It's a big gamble that's bound to turn off as many viewers as it charms; me, I found it simultaneously jaw-dropping and invigorating, a brazen and slap-happy bid for sui generis status.