盲目の十手

対象:一般向け ／ 時間:60〜70分

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見えぬ目が、罪を見抜く。

縛るのは縄か、血の情か。

A sightless eye sees through the crime.

Is it the rope that binds—or blood and compassion?

【あらすじ】

雪深い山中。

捕り方たちが追う盗人騒ぎの只中、盲目の按摩となった庄太郎が、目明し親分・勘蔵と再会する。かつて“早縄の庄太郎”と呼ばれた凄腕に、勘蔵は「もう一度十手を」と頭を下げる。狙う下手人は、山形屋の蔵破り——そして名を聞いた瞬間、庄太郎は悟る。盗人・庄吉は、血を分けた弟だった。

妹・お光を抱え、貧しさと過去の傷を背負う庄太郎。追われる弟にも、守りたい家族がある。正義か、血の情か。見えぬ目で“人の心”を測りながら、庄太郎は弟と向き合う。

雪の闇に響くのは縄の擦れる音か、赦しを乞う声か——「盲目の十手」が試される人情捕物帖。

Deep in a snowbound mountain pass, constables scour the woods for a thief.

In the midst of the search, they collide with Shōtarō—now a blind masseur. The boss-constable Kanzō recognizes him at once. Shōtarō was once famed as “Fast-Rope Shōtarō,” a master of jitte and arrest cord, but blindness forced him out of the life.

Kanzō comes to his home with a plea: take up the jitte again—just once. A warehouse burglary at Yamagataya has shaken the district, and the culprit must be caught within a month or the magistrate will be dismissed. As Kanzō recites the thief’s details, Shōtarō freezes. The name is Shōkichi—his own younger brother.

Shōtarō lives with his sister, Omitsu, whose mind remains childlike after old trauma. Their poverty is real, their past heavy. Yet the fugitive brother, too, is running for the sake of a wife and child. Law and blood, duty and compassion—Shōtarō must weigh them all without sight, reading footsteps, breath, and truth with his ears.

As the net tightens in the falling snow, brothers face each other at last. A rope must be tied, but how tightly—and by whose hands? In this human drama of pursuit and forgiveness, the “blind jitte” is tested not by what it can see, but by what it can bear.