It's the 1870s, and the chaos of the Meiji Restoration has turned everyone's life upside down. Katsuko Wakasugi has divorced her first husband, although she occasionally gives him money for their daughter. He spends it on booze. She is married to a samurai. He is ill. He accuses her of prostitution. She is married to another man, a Yakuza, for whom she gets young girls for a prostitution ring he runs. She also is having an affair with a young police officer. She hates this life, the violence, the crimes, the obsession these men all have with her. So she determines to go away with her daughter and live a decent life, far away where none of these men can find her.
Japanese cinema seems to have a split personality when it comes to women. In many of the films of the more revered directors, like Naruse and Mizoguchi, they are oppressed creatures, unwilling playthings for uncaring men. Then there are some directors, like Kurosawa, whose films portray them as demons. Of course, western movies have these extremes, but they are extremes. Only Ozu strikes a consistent balance among the best known Japanese auteurs. In this one, director Nobuo Nakagawa accepts the extremes, and shows how people create their own demons, out of desires for sheer survival and, when that is unavailable, revenge.
