Who Are the Eight Devils of Kimon?

Eight ninja, eight powers, one employer: the Shogun of the Dark.

The plot that assembles them is a gold story. The Yamashiro clan mines gold in secret for the Toyotomi heir who calls himself the Shogun of the Dark; when a shipment runs aground near the village of Shimoda, the Eight Devils of Kimon exterminate the village to keep the secret. A Koga ninja team sent to investigate is wiped out, its sole survivor Kagero captured by the Devil Tessai, until a wandering swordsman named Jubei intervenes.

Jubei has history with their leader. Five years earlier, Himuro Gemma ordered his own Yamashiro team to murder each other to bury the location of the gold mine. Jubei survived, killed his comrades to do it, and beheaded Gemma, who simply reincarnated: his Devil’s gift is immortality. Blackmailed by the Tokugawa spy Dakuan, who poisons him and holds the antidote, Jubei walks the film as a checklist of duels, one Devil at a time.

THE EIGHT DEVILS

Kimon Hachinin-shū, the Eight of the Demon Gate

Himuro Gemma · the immortal

The leader, and the only Devil with no interest in the Shogun of the Dark’s cause: he means to take the gold and the country for himself. Death cannot keep him; Jubei has already beheaded him once.

Tessai · the stone skin

A giant whose flesh hardens to rock, the first Devil on screen and the first to fall: Jubei kills him, a duel Jubei survives because Kagero’s poisoned body had already done its work on Tessai.

Benisato · the snakes

A serpent charmer whose snakes strike from sleeves and shadows. Captured and about to talk, she is executed from a distance by Yurimaru’s wire: the Devils police their own.

Shijima · the shadow

A fighter who moves through shadow itself and reaches out of the dark with a clawed, extending arm. The Devil who comes closest to killing Jubei by proxy, wearing other people’s shapes.

Yurimaru · the wires

Gemma’s right hand, a killer with near-invisible electrified wires strung between his fingers. The Devils’ internal executioner, and the coldest presence in the film.

Zakuro · the explosives

The demolition artist, who turns even a dead comrade’s body into a bomb. Her duel with Jubei is fought in a bamboo grove rigged to burn.

Mushizo · the hornets

A hunchback whose hump houses a swarm of hornets. Jubei kills him at the river, in the film’s most miserable duel, fought half underwater.

Utsutsu Mujuro · the blind sword

A blind swordsman who reads a fight by sound and scent, and needs no eyes to be the finest blade among the eight. Jubei kills him among the bamboo.

AGAINST THEM

The three who walk the film

Kibagami Jubei

A masterless swordsman for hire, cynical, funny and principled in that order until the film reverses it. His slashes cut at a distance, on the wind of the stroke.

Kagero

The Mochizuki clan’s food taster, a kunoichi whose body is saturated with poison: anyone who kisses her dies. The film’s tragic centre, and its bravest character.

Dakuan

A Tokugawa spymaster travelling as a harmless old monk, who recruits Jubei with poison and paperwork. Every plot turn in the film is one of his arrangements.

The Making A Sequel?

Who Are the Eight Devils of Kimon?

THE EIGHT DEVILS

AGAINST THEM

THE FIRST WORD