Company Funeral / Shaso (1989)

Shaso opens with a title card translated as “Newspapers are written with intelligence but are sold by gangsters.” This is immediately followed by salesmen for two competing papers forging subscriptions and fighting with each other. But we soon turn to boardroom machinations as the President Okabe, whose father founded the paper, squeezes out the CEO …

Spirit of Tattoo / Irezumi: Sekka tomuraizashi (1982)

Unrelated to the earlier Irezumi, Takabayashi’s Spirit of Tattoo is as its title suggests a meditation on the tattoo as both an art and a mystical experience. The situation is simple: Akane, now in her thirties, is the secretary and apparently long-time lover of Fujieda, a forty-ish librarian with a fetish about tattoos and women’s …

As a Wife, As a Woman / Poignant Story / Tsuma to shite onna to shite (1961)

Few Japanese movies illustrate the status of the Japanese mistress as clearly as does Naruse’s As a Wife, As a Woman. Miho (Hideko Takamine) has been the mistress of Professor Kouno for almost 20 years and has run the bar he owns in the Ginza for the last ten, but she is not getting any …

Stolen Pleasure / Tadare (1962)

Made just after Temple of the Wild Geese, Tadare once again places Ayako Wakao in the role of a mistress, but here she is a mistress who will fight for her man. Whether he is worth it, however, is a different question. Wakao is currently the mistress of Asai, played by the epitome of the …

Most Dangerous Game / Games of Maximum Risk / Mottomo kiken na yugi (1978)

In The Most Dangerous Game, the action movie is reduced to its pure essence – action with hardly a break except for our hero to get drunk while he recovers absurdly quickly from a gunshot wound. Barring that brief pause, we have beatings, gun battles, rape, lots of running, some more gun battles, the most …

Wet Sand in August / Hachigatsu no nureta suna (1971)

Wet Sand in August is a fascinating and disturbing contribution to the “What I Did on my Summer Vacation” genre in which an apparently nice teenager begins by helping a girl who has been raped and ends the movie as a rapist himself. Kiyoshi lives with his older brother, who owns a grocery shop in …

Zatoichi Goes to the Fire Festival / Zatoichi abare-himatsuri (1970)

In 1968-69, Shintaro Katsu seemed to be making a major change of direction. He finished both the Bad Reputation and the Hoodlum Soldier series and appeared to be closing down Zatoichi as well. This hardly means Katsu took a break from filming, appearing in half a dozen or so other movies every year. He had …

House in the Quarter / Gobancho yugiriro (1963)

The House in the Quarter is a brothel in Kyoto where we follow the young Yuko from her first days to her last. The setting thus gives us a cross between Street of Shame and Woman of Rumor, but concentrated on one single character, like Women Are Born Twice or Twilight Story. There is no …

Scent of Incense / Koge – Ichibu: Waremoko no sho & Koge – Nibu: Mitsumata no sho (1964)

Kinoshita’s last major movie,* at least until 1983's Children of Nagasaki, The Scent of Incense is a domestic epic that spans sixty years in the life of a geisha and her mother. Released in two parts on the same day, the two halves total almost 3½ hours in length and against the background of Japan’s …

Women Are Born Twice / Onna wa nido umareru (1961)

Ayako Wakao is the woman who is born twice, though it might be fairer to say she is born four, maybe five or even six, times before the movie reaches its enigmatic conclusion. Wakao is Tomoko, known mostly by her business name of Koen, and when we meet her, the business is prostitution. There is …