A successful textile industrialist from the provinces, beloved by his employees for his kindness, cannot find a wife because of a disfiguring birthmark on his face. Even the courtesans in Yoshiwara refuse to entertain him, until indentured peasant prostitute Tamarazu, takes the unsavory assignment and treats him with brash tenderness.
The film that led David Shipman to declare Uchida "the equal of Mizoguchi and Kinugasa," KILLING IN YOSHIWARA ranks with Uchida's finest postwar work. A glorious melodrama shot in vivid colour and Scope and written by Mizoguchi collaborator Yoda Yoshikata, it's a feast. A successful textile industrialist from the provinces, who is beloved by his employees for his kindness, cannot find a wife because of a disfiguring birthmark on his face. Even the courtesans in Yoshiwara refuse to entertain him, until an indentured peasant prostitute, Tamarazu, takes the unsavoury assignment and treats him with brash tenderness. "The scar is not on your heart," she scoffs, and the grateful businessman falls madly in love with her, ultimately losing his fortune in the expensive quest to purchase her freedom. The script's taut determinism, with its interlocked rise (hers) and fall (his), and teeming social detail; the dynamism of the widescreen cinematography, equally elegant in interior and exterior space (note the precise crane shots in the final sequence); and the remarkably ambiguous characters of the besotted businessman and bluff, grasping whore - in her earthiness and ambition she reminds one of Imamura's enterprising insect women - make YOSHIWARA look like some kind of lost classic.
