Gozu / Gokudo kyofu dai-gekijo: Gozu* (2003)

In the very first scene of Gozu, the yakuza Ozaki tells his boss that everything he is going to say is a joke, and what follows is an off-kilter, odd-ball shaggy dog story. Minami is a low-level yakuza who is having a very bad couple of days. Told to take his mentor Ozaki “to the …

Akame 48 Waterfalls / Akame shijuya taki shinju misui* (2003)

The story of a man left with nowhere to go is common in literature and movies the world over, and certainly in Japan the story has long been a staple in the form of the wandering ronin. Ikushima is no ronin, since we are very clearly in the contemporary world, but he seems to be …

An Adolescent / Shojo/ Shoujyo (2001)

Shojo is one of the most passionate love stories to come from Japan since Manji, but at the same time it is one of the most disturbing movies of an era that produced many disturbing movies. Its story is simple – Yoko is a young woman who propositions Tomokowa like a prostitute but she refuses …

Heat Wave / Kagero (1991)

As the modern yakuza were returning to the big screen around 1990, the period yakuza also re-appeared in Kagero. Rin saw her gambler father murdered after he was caught cheating. She is adopted by the Kosugi family, who run a large “restaurant,” as the subtitles have it, and who have just given birth to a …

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 …

Woman Gambler / Showa onna bakuto (1972)

One of the most popular of all the many film series of the sixties was Kyoko Enami’s Woman Gambler, reaching 16 features at Daei. After Raizo Ichikawa’s death and Shintaro Katsu’s move to independent production, the Woman Gambler was practically Daiei’s only dependable money maker, but it was not enough to keep the studio out …

Tattoo / Irezumi (1966)

Irezumi introduces one of the great man-eaters of film. Another fascinating picture by Masumura with Ayako Wakao, it can be seen as a horror story of a woman gradually becoming possessed by her urge for revenge, symbolized by the female spider tattooed across her back. Like so many young women we have seen in Japanese …

A Man’s Crest / Emblem of a Man / Otoko no monsho (1963)

By the early sixties, Japanese chanbara were beginning to question the "honorable man" aspects of the samurai, but there was still a large audience looking for an honorable hero they could admire. They found it in the most unexpected of places, the yakuza. Initially, the ninkyo or chivalrous yakuza had been a sub-genre of the …

Wicked Woman / Dokufu Takahashi Oden (1958)

Wicked women have been a standby of world film-making almost from the beginning, but usually they are femme fatales, which is the usual translation of dokufu. They are the kind of women who use their sexual lures to lead men to destruction. From Theda Bara to Garbo's Mata Hari to Jane Greer in Out of …

Five Women Around Utamaro / Utamaro and His Five Women (1946)

Perhaps no single movie brings together all the difficulties a non-Japanese viewer faces in the jidai-geki in general and the films of Mizoguchi in particular like Five Women Around Utamaro. Let's start with the title: Utamaro and his Five Women, as it is most commonly listed,  suggests his own love affairs, while Five Women Around …