Celebrated Japanese film director Seijun Suzuki, best known for cult 1960s yakuza films Tokyo Drifter and Branded to Kill, has died at the age of 93. Suzuki died on 13 February, with the cause given as chronic obstructive pulmonary disease in a statement from Nikkatsu film studios.

Born in 1923, Suzuki served in Japan’s meteorological corps in the second world war, and then in 1948 joined the Shochiku studio as an assistant director. Despite spending his time there as “a melancholy drunk”, as he described it, he was hired by the newly reopened Nikkatsu in 1954, again as an assistant director. Two years later he graduated to the director’s chair with Victory Is Mine, a pop-song movie credited under his given name, Seitaro Suzuki.

For the next decade Suzuki was assigned to a string of B-movies and programme fillers, largely genre material which he sought to enliven through elaborate design (supplied by regular collaborator Takeo Kimura) and surreal, colourful imagery. However, his instincts did not prove popular at the cost-conscious Nikkatsu, and Suzuki was continually ordered to tone things down. Tokyo Drifter, released in 1966, combined pop art visuals with a dreamy, off-kilter study of a yakuza hitman. Branded to Kill, a year later, was another yakuza story, this time rendered in beautiful black and white.

However, Branded to Kill proved the last straw for Nikkatsu, and Suzuki was fired in 1968. He launched an action for unfair dismissal and won a settlement, but was effectively blacklisted for a decade. “They said my film was incomprehensible,” Suzuki told the Guardian in 2006. “It didn’t matter whether I thought it was a good film. I couldn’t disagree. I just had to take it. And once Nikkatsu sacked me, none of the other film companies would hire me.”

Suzuki engineered a return to film-making in 1977 with Shochiku’s A Tale of Sorrow and Sadness, before making a trilogy of surreal ghost stories set in the early 20th century Taishō period: Zigeunerweisen (1980), Kagero-za (1981) and Yumeji (1991).

In the early 90s, Suzuki’s reputation began to climb after a touring film season, entitled Branded to Thrill, and associated book and DVD releases, brought his films to an international audience. His cult status was established immediately, with directors such as Quentin Tarantino, Baz Luhrmann and Jim Jarmusch vocal in their praise.

Though in increasingly failing health, he released a Branded to Kill remake called Pistol Opera in 2001, and in 2005, at the age of 82, he made the oddball musical Princess Raccoon, featuring Chinese actor Zhang Ziyi (House of Flying Daggers).

This turned out to be his final project, telling the Guardian on its release: “Making films is all about vitality. You have to be very healthy and at the moment my health is not good.” However, summing up his approach to film-making he was pragmatic: “Making films for me is just about earning money, it’s not fun at all. It’s just a profession.”