Samurai Champloo

Tempestuous Temperaments

23 min

Fuu is working at a teahouse when Mugen and Jin wreck it fighting each other, and both are arrested and sentenced to die. She gets them out on one condition: that they put their duel aside and travel with her. All she has to go on is that the man she is looking for smells of sunflowers.

Redeye Reprisal

23 min

The three stop in a town where people say an ogre is preying on them, and start looking into it. What is behind the rumour is a trap, set by a man who lost an arm to Mugen and has been waiting for him ever since. The bait is a wretch who has been beaten into playing the part, and the grudge falls on all three of them.

Hellhounds for Hire (Part 1)

23 min

In a post town run by two rival gambling houses, Mugen and Jin are each hired as muscle by opposite sides. Neither knows where the other has ended up, and they are lined up to be used as the blades of enemy houses. Meanwhile Fuu has fallen into the hands of men who traffic women.

Hellhounds for Hire (Part 2)

23 min

To settle the feud, the two houses agree to decide it with a game of dice. The person seated to shake the cup, however, is Fuu, brought there by the men who bought her. The game falls apart into chaos, the three finally find each other, and they leave town with the young heirs seeing them off.

Artistic Anarchy

23 min

Unable to pay even the ferry fare, the three split up to scrape together some money. Fuu is picked out by an ukiyo-e artist to model for him, but there is a trafficking operation hidden behind the work. It tangles with an investigator already hunting the traffickers, and the artist ends up leaving for a country across the sea to pursue his art.

Stranger Searching

23 min

The three enter an eating contest and lose to a strange man calling himself Joji who speaks oddly. He turns out to be a Dutch trader moving through a country that has closed itself to foreigners. Hearing what they are travelling for, he warns Fuu about what looking for the sunflower samurai may cost her.

A Risky Racket

23 min

Chasing the boy who lifted Fuu's purse, they learn he stole it to buy medicine for his sick mother. Fuu takes his side and tries to shield him, but the net is already closing. Cornered with nowhere left to run, the boy is shot down by the authorities, and the medicine never reaches her.

The Art of Altercation

23 min

Word spreads of a swordsman who travels singing and cuts down every samurai he finds wearing glasses. Jin is the man he is after, but he has never seen his face and keeps picking the wrong ones. When the two finally stand in front of each other, it ends far more quietly than anyone expected.

Beatbox Bandits

23 min

To get past a checkpoint, Mugen is saddled with the job of delivering a criminal's head. What stands in his way is a band of rough warrior monks holed up in the mountains. Fuu and Jin, meanwhile, are about to be executed and are saved by a cloud of strange smoke that happens to go up.

Lethal Lunacy

23 min

A man is killing samurai one after another, and he turns out to be a priest's former student who walked away from his teaching. Against a technique that strikes without touching, Mugen cannot land anything at all. He takes instruction, goes back, and finally breaks it under a full moon.

Gamblers and Gallantry

23 min

Stuck in a post town in endless rain, Mugen throws himself into gambling on beetle fights. Jin meanwhile meets a woman sold into a brothel against a debt, who has been enduring a violent husband. He decides to get her out, and in the rain the road he offers and the one she can bring herself to take turn out not to be the same.

The Disorder Diaries

23 min

Mugen helps himself to the travel diary Fuu has been keeping along the way. What is written in it is a set of unsparing observations about the two men and some painfully honest opinions. It also gives away the fact that she has been steering them toward Edo from the very start.

Misguided Miscreants (Part 1)

23 min

Out at the coast, Mugen runs into the outlaws he grew up with on the island he was exiled from. Under the pretence of catching up, a plan to set him up is already in motion. The betrayal ends with the ship Mugen is aboard swallowed by an explosion.

Misguided Miscreants (Part 2)

23 min

It is Jin who finds Mugen alive, and who works out that Koza was behind the whole thing. Mugen settles accounts with the men who betrayed him and finally stands in front of her. He does not raise his sword, and leaves her to the loneliness she has made for herself.

Bogus Booty

23 min

The three come into some money and spend it freely around town, only for it to turn out to be very good counterfeit. A woman calling herself Yatsuha plays Mugen and points him straight at the ring producing it. When it is over she reveals she is a government spy, tells him she will marry him one day, and disappears.

Lullabies of the Lost (Verse 1)

23 min

Arguments about the sunflower samurai finally build up until the three of them separate. On the roads they take alone, both Mugen and Jin walk into situations that could kill them. With no one able to call for help, pursuers close in behind each of them.

Lullabies of the Lost (Verse 2)

23 min

After fighting their way clear of the Matsumae clan's men, the three finally come face to face again. Fuu admits what she has been holding back, that the sunflower samurai is the man who walked out on her and her sick mother. Asked what she means to do when she finds him, she says she is going to make him answer for it.

War of the Words

23 min

Found out for not being able to read, Mugen ends up taking lessons from an alarmingly enthusiastic teacher. Jin meanwhile tries to protect the sons of his late master from a contest fought with graffiti. Both men end up holding a brush instead of a sword, and it settles in a way neither of them planned.

Unholy Union

23 min

Falling in with a village of hidden Christians, the three run into a fraud calling himself Xavier who abducts one of the girls. In the middle of it, the sunflower samurai's name finally surfaces. He is Seizo Kasumi, Fuu's own father, and the three set out for Ikitsuki.

Elegy of Entrapment (Verse 1)

23 min

On the road the three meet Sara, a blind musician, and she falls in with them. Fuu picks Jin to be the one who escorts her onward. That night, on a bridge, it is Jin that Sara turns a blade on.

Elegy of Entrapment (Verse 2)

23 min

What has been driving Sara is her employer's order, held over her with her son as a hostage. The boy has been dead for some time, and she has been fighting with nowhere left to return to. Facing Mugen at the end, she throws a fight she could have won and dies.

Cosmic Collisions

23 min

After eating some strange mushrooms, Mugen and Jin are put to work digging while their heads are full of hallucinations. What they are digging out is the crater of a stone that fell from the sky, and the labourers around them are barely alive. The man leading them has not yet noticed that five hundred years have gone by.

Baseball Blues

23 min

Americans arrive off a black ship and use a game of baseball as cover for strong-arming a village. Lose, and the land is theirs, which leaves the villagers terrified. Mugen is handed a bat and beats them in what amounts to a brawl with bases.

Evanescent Encounter (Part 1)

23 min

Kagetoki, a formidable swordsman acting for the shogunate, is sent to erase the three of them. Fuu slips away alone to reach her father rather than drag the other two any further. Left behind, Mugen and Jin find assassins waiting for them one after another.

Evanescent Encounter (Part 2)

23 min

Mugen goes down badly wounded against Kagetoki's blade. Jin at last comes face to face with the man who killed his master. Meanwhile the assassin who survived the explosion aboard the ship reappears and takes Fuu.

Evanescent Encounter (Part 3)

24 min

What Fuu finally reaches is a father lying ill and close to death. He tells her he disappeared to keep the shogunate from reaching her. Kagetoki cuts him down, Jin avenges him, and with the journey over the three go their separate ways without any fuss.