Ishihara

This five-CD box of studio material was originally released in Japan on the tiny Atlas label. Until now it has never been available in the United States. Impeccably recorded between 1979 and 1982, the year Art Pepper's horn was silenced – at least as a mortal – these sides were the brainchild of Yasuyuki Ishihara.

At the center of "Pale Flower" stands a very quiet man, closed within himself, a professional killer. He works for a gang in the Yakuza, the Japanese Mafia, and as the film begins he has returned to Tokyo after serving a prison sentence for murder. He did the prison time as the price to be paid for committing a murder, but although we see his gang boss several times, even in a dentist's chair, there is no effort to make him seem worthy of such loyalty. He is an ordinary older man. Muraki (Ryo Ikebe), the yakuza, seems loyal more to the ideal of loyalty, a version of the samurai code. It is his fate to be a soldier and follow orders, and he is the instrument of that destiny. He thinks his crime was "stupid," but he is observing, not complaining.

At the center of "Pale Flower" stands a very quiet man, closed within himself, a professional killer. He works for a gang in the Yakuza, the Japanese Mafia, and as the film begins he has returned to Tokyo after serving a prison sentence for murder. He did the prison time as the price to be paid for committing a murder, but although we see his gang boss several times, even in a dentist's chair, there is no effort to make him seem worthy of such loyalty. He is an ordinary older man. Muraki (Ryo Ikebe), the yakuza, seems loyal more to the ideal of loyalty, a version of the samurai code. It is his fate to be a soldier and follow orders, and he is the instrument of that destiny. He thinks his crime was "stupid," but he is observing, not complaining.