"Who is Shūhei Fujisawa?" you might ask. Fujisawa was a prolific author of historical fiction, whose stories gained new life as movie adaptations after his death (in 1997). Yōji Yamada's hugely successful The Twilight Samurai – a loose adaptation of the short story The Bamboo Sword – made Fujisawa a hot ticket, and patient, slow-burning jidaigeki once again became an unlikely movie trend. Yamada himself followed up his initial success with further two adaptations, and five other directors have so far followed in his wake.

Here is my take on the Fujisawa adaptations so far. Only the most recent – Ogawa no hotori – is absent, simply because I haven't seen it yet.