Writer: Eizaburo Shiba

Eizaburo Shiba wrote for Japanese studio cinema during the peak of the samurai film, working with Hideo Gosha on Three Outlaw Samurai and Sword of the Beast.

Both scripts concentrate on men who have broken with their clan and have no standing left, which was a marked departure from the honor-bound protagonists the genre usually offered. The moral position in them is genuinely uncertain.

He worked primarily within the studio system on assignment, which was the standard arrangement for Japanese screenwriters of the period and has left his individual contribution harder to trace than it deserves.