Shôtarô Ikenami

Shôtarô Ikenami was born on Jan 25, 1923 in Japan. Shôtarô Ikenami's big-screen debut came with Hissatsu shikakenin: Baian ari jigoku directed by Yûsuke Watanabe in 1973. Shôtarô Ikenami is known for The Last Samurai directed by Kenji Misumi, Hideki Takahashi stars as Sugi Toranosuke and Ken Ogata as Nakamura Hanjiro. The upcoming new movie Shôtarô Ikenami plays is Hunter in the Dark which will be released on Jun 17, 1979.

Before World War II, he worked as a stock broker in a Tokyo company. Later, he was a pupil of the Shin Hasegawa theatre script studio, and finally he decided to become a novelist. He was a very prolific writer, and in the 1950s, some of his novels and stories begin to be converted into movies, the first of them being "Fighting Spirit Tear of Nayoroiwa" in 1956. His most important work was the novel-river "Sanada Taihei-ki", firstly serialized from 1974 to 1983 in the "Weekly Asahi". Later, he created the "Ikenami Shotaro Sanada Taiheiki Museum," located in the center of Ueda City, which exhibits books and manuscripts related to Ikenami. But the most famous novel by Ikenami without any doubt was "Koroshi no yonin" (Master Assassin), better known as "Hissatsu shikake-nin". Firstly, it was converted into an ABC TV series from 1972, directed by, amongst others,