Yoshiwara Fire / Tokyo Bordello / Yoshiwara Enjo (1987)

Yoshiwara Fire gives us our most complete look at the life inside a pleasure house since World of Geisha, and the most detailed look at the individuals inside them since Street of Shame. It is also a fabulously lush film, glorying in its reds, purples, and golds of the women’s formal wear, contrasted with the drab colors worn when the women are off duty. Set in the fabled Yoshiwara district of Edo/Tokyo, it also chronicles the end of an era, ending with a massive burning of the set re-enacting the great fire that destroyed the district which, though rebuilt, never quite retained its old glory.*

Primary attention is given to Hisano (Yuko Natori), sold to the most expensive brothel at age 18 even though she had finished high school, when her businessman father went broke and needed extra money to pay off his debts. We follow her introduction to the brothel and to the #1 woman Kiku, who acts as her instructor, all the way through to the moment she reaches the #1 position herself and is bought out by a rich man who intends to marry her, the fire breaking out behind her as she is leaving. But this is not a pinku film. Despite a number of bare breasts, the only sustained sex scene comes when Kiku introduces her to lesbian sex and a real orgasm.

Hisano’s story is interwoven with that of the three top women in the house: Kiku (originally known as Kokone), Kobano, and Yoshizato. Kobano contracts TB, is sent away, and comes back to die as she is demanding that they find her a customer. Yoshizato goes mad, threatens everyone with a razor, accidentally kills a man on the street and then cuts her own throat. Kokone is offered marriage by a student, which she laughs off, but then buys herself out. She suddenly reappears, married to a carpenter who leaves her for a younger woman, after which she returns to Yoshiwara, selling herself to one of the cheapest brothels.

Hisano tries to run away from her first customer and Shinsuke, a leader of the Salvation Army band that regularly parades the streets of Yoshiwara, tries and fails to free her from her pursuers. She goes to work, taking any customer, including her old boy friend to whom she had lost her virginity who sees her in the window, but eventually works her way up to richer men. Along the way, she becomes pregnant and manages to force a miscarriage with a herbal remedy. Shinsuke suddenly reappears, no longer in the Salvation Army but in his real guise as the son of one of Japan’s richest men, and becomes her patron. Though he spends many nights with her, he refuses to actually have sex with her. His parents disown him because of the time he spends in Yoshiwara, but he offers Hisano the last of his money to pay off her debt. She uses it instead to finance her tayu parade. Another rich man follows and she accepts his marriage proposal, but again only after she has had her parade. Shinsuke moves into a room at Kiku’s brothel, where he falls in love with a young girl who looks very much like Hisano did when he first saw her, and it is their lovemaking that knocks over the oil lamp that starts the fire.

As with so many movies about this social level, the subtitles often lead to confusion, perhaps because they were translated from the French DVD rather than from the original Japanese. Kokone and later Hisano herself are referred to as the “Great Geisha,” though I never heard the word Geisha on the soundtrack. We never see her training in singing, instrumental, or dancing arts, as we saw with the women in Killing in Yoshiwara, Gion Bayashi, or Gosha’s own earlier Geisha. The dancers and singers we see are brought in from outside the house, and even include males. Hisano earns her promotions by her beauty and her bedroom skills, though we do not see her actually providing them as we would in a true pinku version of this story. She is actually an oiran, but her title is not really important. The parade she insists on having is the traditional walk given by a tayu, a woman officially recognized as an oiran who is the very best, so highly regarded and expensive that she gets to choose her clients. It is her proof to herself that she has not wasted the previous years of her life, more important to her than true love or wealthy marriage. As Shinsuke says to her on their last night together, she has progressed from the gentle but intelligent woman she was when she was sold to the house into someone who now has “the soul of a prostitute.”

Hisano’s brothel is expensive and lush, with stained glass windows, multiple floors, and a very Edwardian facade, and the production design has gotten every ounce of effect from red, orange, and purple.

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Almost every scene is visually striking, none more so than Kobano’s death coughing up blood in the storage closet full of red futons. As Hisano moves up the hierarchy, she gets a series of new names and more futons; the rooms of the three top women in the house have futons piled up higher than a western bed, something I have not seen in any other period films. The twenty-odd other women who are not allowed to choose their customers go on display in the window facing the street in two arresting rows of red robes and painted faces that make them look so similar it is hard to know how any man makes a selection. Even so, there is so much competition in the district that there is still a hawker outside trying to lure the passing men inside. Each day begins with all the women gathered for a daily prayer for men to bring them money, followed by the traditional striking of flint to provide good luck for all the women.

The first people Hisano meets are in fact policemen, who officially register them and tell them that they cannot leave Yoshiwara, even for a day’s outing, without proof that their contract has been paid off, with an unexpected cameo from Ken Ogata as a policeman who tells Hisano that she must learn to fake her orgasms. There are regular inspections by a gynecologist, looking primarily for venereal disease. (The first woman we see on the street has been thrown out of her house for syphilis and is being ridiculed by a group of children.) The house manufactures its own “lube,” to help the women be ready for the men at any time. Women who die, from disease or without savings, are buried in mass, unmarked graves. Constantly they are told that they have no purpose other than to provide sexual pleasure for the men who come through.

If nothing else, the movie is a feast for the eyes, and another of Masaru Sato’s fine scores contributes a cross-section of period songs and emotionally apt modern orchestral music. It is also a sympathetic rather than salacious look at the lives of the young women so continually and often casually sacrificed to the “entertainment” system that grew up in the Tokugawa era. The similarity of make-up and hairstyles and the constantly changing professional names of the principals sometimes makes it difficult to keep up with who is who at any particular moment, but not so often as to make the central story of Hisano herself confused. It can stand comparison with the movies of Mizoguchi and Naruse on similar subjects.

* The subtitles give this fire date as 1911, but it actually occurred in 1913. Yoshiwara was again destroyed in the 1923 earthquake but was rebuilt into a more modern style red-light district until brothels were fully outlawed in 1958.