The vast majority of the commercial films made by Kinugasa in the 1920s have, like almost all Japanese films of the period, been lost. Even a fragmentary survival such as Oni azami is to be celebrated – the more so since the film marked the first of many appearances by popular star Chojiro Hayashi (1908-84) in Kinugasa films. Nineteen years old at the time of filming, Hayashi was already emerging as a matinee idol with a star persona that, as Daisuke Miyao notes, was defined as much by “sweetness and even vulnerability” as by swordsmanship. Among his other collaborations with the director were Yukinojo henge, Daibutsu kaigen and Jigokumon. He made the latter two under his birth name of Kazuo Hasegawa, to which he reverted following a notorious incident in which his face was slashed by a gangster – this was after he left Shochiku for Toho in 1937.
The original story of Oni azami is credited to Fred Niblo, the American director of Blood and Sand (1922) and Ben-Hur (1925). It derives from The Red Lily (1924), a Ramón Novarro vehicle that had been a great success on its release in Japan. Niblo had both directed and coscripted this melodrama about a young couple who fall into crime and prostitution after eloping to Paris.