SOURCE : "Mizoguchi: Woman as Slave," in The Waves at Genji's Door: Japan Through Its Cinema, Pantheon Books, 1976, pp. 252-69.

[In the following essay, Mellen discusses Mizoguchi's portrayal of women within the confines of traditional Japanese society, arguing that in his best films women rebel—although their efforts are futile—against the system of oppression, usually dying for their cause.]

Those directors protesting against the oppression of the Japanese woman believe that even the failed rebellion is worth the effort. The finest films of Mizoguchi, who of the older directors best understood how the Japanese patriarchy demeans women, are those in which his women fight the hardest against their fate. The men in Mizoguchi's films are always weaker than the women, not because he was unable to characterize men, but because their childishness is meant to be an analogue to moral emptiness. The assertions of women in a patriarchy where they have no power, where they can be summoned as concubines to a daimyo—or sold by parents to a whorehouse—are acts more worthy of representation than those of a bushi participating in his daily willful abuse of the weak.

Mizoguchi's films reveal that it is absurd to speak about the relations between men and women in the context of the social role of the Japanese woman as long as she remains victim of the Confucian obediences to father, husband and son. The implicit argument behind his portrayal of the relations between men and women is that women are forced to sacrifice themselves simply by existing. Revolution against one's condition as a slave, which also demands sacrifices, is then infinitely preferable to passive submission to an enslaving fate. Osan, in his Story from Chikamatsu, riding off to her crucifixion (the punishment for a woman's adultery during the Tokugawa period), achieves a level of humanity she could never have enjoyed as the acquiescent wife of the merchant Ishun. In White Threads of the Waterfall (Taki no Shiraito, 1933) Mizoguchi bitterly satirizes the utter hostility of Meiji society toward women who, day after day, were sacrificing themselves to its prosperity. He scorns the entire Meiji concept of success. The society in which Kinya, the young man the heroine Taki puts through school, rises to prominence is unworthy of Taki's sacrifice because it is incapable of showing her mercy. Reduced to whoredom and then murder by the superhuman task she has undertaken, Taki finally has no recourse but suicide. Through his treatment of women Mizoguchi very early makes the same point directors like Imamura would later make for Koreans, burakumin, pollution victims, and others whose lives have been sacrificed to Japan's postwar development. Japan emerges strong after the Restoration, according to Mizoguchi, only by using and then discarding those who mistakenly sacrifice themselves in the belief that to be successful in the new society and to dedicate oneself to its economic growth is worth any effort.

In 1936 Mizoguchi made his most brilliant pre-war film, Osaka Elegy (Naniwa Hika), shot in twenty days and banned after 1940 for "decadent tendencies," a euphemism barely concealing the military government's fear of the radicalism of Mizoguchi's satire of the ruthless, all-pervasive Osaka capitalism. In this film the mature Mizoguchi style emerges for the first time as he creates, entirely through visual means, a balance between the fate of the heroine Ayako and the corrupt, degenerate values of Osaka. The plot concerns the seduction of Ayako, a switchboard operator, by her boss. In the background, however, is an equally important theme: the destruction of the individual by the greed of a boundless laissez-faire capitalism and its hostility toward anyone too weak to compete in the jungle of Social Darwinism that was Osaka—and Japan. Rhetoric about the dawning of an era of "freedom" fills the air, and Ayako even reads an article about "women's liberation." Mizoguchi reveals both to be a sham in this Osaka where money rules all and "freedom" is the province only of die businessmen frantically attempting to build mini-, if not authentic, zaibatsu.

Ayako is corrupted (she becomes a prostitute) not only by her boss but also by her family's need for money, the symbol of Osaka. As a woman, her role is to sacrifice herself to the needs of her family. The twentieth century has brought no amelioration of the traditional function of the Japanese woman. At first, Ayako tries to borrow from a weak and spineless fiance, a typical Osaka companyman-to-be. He refuses her. Behind them in the shot is a construction site, bespeaking the rapid progress that is Osaka's raison d'être. At home, money is the main topic of conversation; Ayako's brother, having lost all connection with the traditional Japanese value of austerity, is obsessed by greed, a passion difficult to satisfy in the fiercely competitve society of die thirties.

Beset by the prevailing family pressure for her to help them, Ayako accepts the liaison with her boss and is transformed into a "moga" or modern girl. Her entire personality undergoes a change, as Mizoguchi portrays the psychic price a woman must inevitably pay for selling herself. Ayako now smokes, listens to Western music, and files her fingernails à la Mae West. Temporarily, the camera assumes die point of view of her boss climbing the stairs, ending outside the curtained window of the room where Ayako awaits him. Later, Ayako and her boss attend a performance of Double Suicide at the Bunraku Puppet Theater, where me traditions of the play and the strong passion of Jihei and Koharu for each other contrast with the loveless relationship between Ayako and her lover, and with the deflated mock-heroics of life in the present. The boss's wife discovers them, and intercut with a tumultuous Bunraku scene is her expression of rage, an indecorous fury which, by its very disruptiveness, provides a further judgment on the destructiveness of Ayako's affair.

Ayako nevertheless pursues this relationship with her boss because of unrelenting family pressures. Brother and sister conspire against her, a sister pleading diat the older brother needs money while the camera tracks behind Ayako's back until she is left standing, alone and frightened, on subway stairs. A shot of the empty stairs after she has gone is followed by a low-angle shot of the tall buildings and speeding cars of Osaka, the city that will overwhelm her. In a fine, three-layered, deep-focus shot Mizoguchi reveals three family members occupying different levels of being, die need for money having so alienated them that, although they are in the same room, it is as if they occupy wholly separate universes. The indolent older brodier lies in bed, drinking tea, in the left foreground of the shot. The father is in the background, the period of his influence having ceased. Ayako is in the right foreground, now the only means by which the family can still compete in the struggle for financial survival in die new Japan.

In die climactic scene Ayako blames her callow and weak boyfriend for not having given her the money so that she need not have sold herself to her boss. Mizoguchi accepts this assessment. In die society of her time Ayako has had no choice but to become a "moga." A second lover, finding her witii this cowardly fiancé, demands the return of die money he had given Ayako. Bravely, she suggests that she and her boyfriend work hard to pay him back. Encouraged by the possibility that she can do something about her fate, she begins to whistle. Disconsolate, her fiancé looks on. A moment later, Ayako is being arrested for having stolen the money, the camera tracking back and forth from her to the boyfriend, who is accused of using her to get money for himself. His wish not to become involved has resulted only in his being implicated, the thing he feared most.

At the end, Ayako returns home from the police station, still cheerful and glad to see her family: "It's a long time since we've eaten together." But rather man with welcome, she is greeted only with recriminations. Even her younger sister whines that she will no longer go to school, so humiliated is she by the "disgrace." Ayako walks out alone and stands on a bridge, while debris floats to the surface of the water below, as aimless as herself. The doctor of her boss passes by, but he, as a representative of this society, has no answer to her question: "What can you do for a woman who has turned into something like this?" Like the society which condemned Taki, Ayako's Osaka treats her as human debris. The doctor walks one way, Ayako the other. Prostitution is her final fate.

In the last shot of Osaka Elegy Ayako walks full into the camera in the film's only close-up; it suggests her heroism but also a hopelessness shared by the director, as overwhelmed as she by the values of this Osaka. Except for this last shot, Ayako has always been portrayed in relation to otiiers, reflecting Mizoguchi's judgment that her "choices" have all been die result of pressures from without. Through his shot compositions in which Ayako has always been seen with boss, father, brother, or boy-friend, Mizoguchi has revealed, paradoxically, her profound isolation and total inability to locate an avenue for resistance, let alone rebellion.

Throughout his career Mizoguchi saw in his country of the double standard the prostitute as symbol of the oppressed Japanese woman. His married women sell tmem-selves as well, and he certainly would have lamented the fate of Ozu's independent-minded Noriko in Early Summer. At twenty-eight Noriko, who has said that she would prefer to remain single, finally yields to family pressure and marries a neighboring widower about to take up work in cold, rural Akita. A theoretical opponent of marriage, Noriko consents to marry this man, whom she clearly does not love, because she is needed and can build a life with him. He is acceptable primarily because he was the best friend of her younger brother who died in the war, as well as being a colleague of her elder brother who is a doctor; a family bond already exists between them. Passion between these two seems inconceivable; Noriko herself seems to choose this man precisely because she, disliking what she clearly recognizes as the serfdom of marriage, will be more secure in an arrangement between friends rather than lovers.

Mizoguchi, however, would have viewed Noriko's decision as a sacrifice and would have challenged the association between marriage and service as if these terms were identical. Ozu accepts as natural a dutiful marriage based upon a mild feeling of companionship between two people. Mizoguchi always views the relations between men and women as invariably involving the man's using the woman as an object to satisfy his needs—a practice he deems absolutely indefensible. He would liberate the Japanese woman from the duplicitous contract wherein, in exchange for sacrificing her abilities and her very identity, she gains "control" of a household. Taken as a whole, Mizoguchi's body of films about women subtly equates the traditional wife with the prostitute. Each sacrifices all that she has, all that she is. The life of the Japanese woman, for Mizoguchi, is symbolized by a prostitution of the spirit.

Mizoguchi depicted a group of prostitutes in his last film, RedLight District (Aleasen Chitai, 1956), mistakenly translated in the American version as Street of Shame, with inappropriate pejorative and moralistic connotations. The setting is a seedy, desperate, run-down Yoshiwara (prostitute quarter) at the moment in 1956 when prostitution is about to be outlawed in Japan. The "heroine" is the prostitute, represented by five very different women, all of whom are portrayed as valuable human beings whose suffering would only be exacerbated by the outlawing of their "profession."

In die last scene, the young maid of the house is about to lose her virginity. Her mother's frequent demands for money, after a mining accident suffered by the father, have left her no choice. As she passively succumbs, her face is powdered. "Discard it with good grace," advises a rebellious Mizoguchi heroine, offering a tidbit to sweeten the pain. When this child ventures a glance outside, the street is filled with soliciting women. A whistling, eerie music merges with their cries. Barely able to speak, she hides behind a post in a brief, temporary respite. The final slow fade spares us and Mizoguchi the agonies of viewing her final fall.

In A Picture of Madame Yuki (Yuki Fujin Ezu, 1950) Mizoguchi offers an analysis of the psychology of a woman he could not achieve in films like Utamaro And His Five Women, Women of the Night (Yoru no Onnatachi, 1948), or Red-Light District—films primarily concerned with a group of women within a social context that was of equal concern to the director. Mizoguchi made Madame Yuki for Shintoho Takimura Productions on the condition that the producer Takimura would then permit him to do a film based on the stories of Saikaku. The Life of Oharu (Saikaku Ichidai Onna) was indeed made in 1952, but for another company, Daiei.

Mizoguchi's theme in Madame Yuki is the prostitution of the wife, a role often no less redolent of degradation than that of the whore. Yuki (Michiyo Kogure) is a woman of great beauty, her room filled with the aura of incense and mystery. Yet she remains enslaved to a vulgar, loutish husband. Yuki is forever prey to this man's sensuality. Even when he brings home his cabaret-singer mistress, whose dark lipstick bespeaks her vulgarity, Yuki can still yield to him. A koto player who is a neighbor (Ken Uehara) admires Yuki but, passive and unmanly as he is, Yuki cannot view him as man enough to free her of her husband. Instead, he hovers in the background of her life. Yuki does go so far as actively to consider divorce, but she always succumbs to her husband's advances. In one scene the maid, surprised, comes in upon the husband reposing in Yuki's room. Yuki's fallen kimono lies in view, a symbol of the collapse of her will to resist him, as is her obi buckle with a Noh mask imprinted on it. "A devil lives inside woman," says Yuki. It is the same devil tormenting Luis Bunuel's Belle du Jour, a woman who could be aroused only by the perverse, and never by her gentle, considerate husband.

At the end, Yuki kills herself, lacking the strength to overcome the indecision and humiliation which are the alternatives to a frightening struggle for freedom. Uehara tells her that to be saved she must solve the problem for herself, something a Japanese woman of gentility who has been conditioned to passivity simply cannot do. Uehara plays modern music on the piano, as if Mizoguchi were saying that we must find the means to cope with the postwar world as it is, instead of living among idle dreams.

But Yuki is a woman whose personality has been shaped by centuries of conditioning which taught the Japanese girl from childhood on that she must accept the conditions of her life. Although Mizoguchi sees the need for the Japanese woman to change radically, he is also very aware of how difficult this will be. Speaking for the director, Uehara becomes impatient with Yuki's passivity: "You never try to struggle against your suffering. You're a human being. You must have the confidence to live as a human being. Become strong!" Yet Mizoguchi also believes in the truth of Yuki's reply: "Yo u tell me to do what I cannot."

Yuki disappears. Her clothes once more lie discarded on the floor. The camera tracks with the husband as he searches for her. But she is already in the misty woods, small against the landscape. When Yuki' s body is found (she has drowned herself), the maid who had admired her so much throws Yuki' s obi and the buckle with the No h mask into the lake in anger. "Yo u coward, you coward," she screams as Mizoguchi dollies down for his final shot, to the lake waters rippling and moving. The maid speaks for the angry Mizoguchi, as if he had been finally betrayed by a character so unworthy of his passionate anger over the oppression of the Japanese woman. The heroine of The Life of Oharu will not so disappoint him.

After A Story from Chikamatsu, The Life of Oharu is Mizoguchi's greatest film. It opens as an aged prostitute recalls for her friends the history of her life, a story that embodies the fate of all women in feudal Japan. Huddled in the cold beside a fire under a bridge are Oharu and her fellow prostitutes, all well past fifty and suffering hard times. A priest unfeelingly objects to their illegal lighting of a fire in the vicinity of the temple, while in the background we hear monks chanting Zen sutras, of little solace or relevance to these abandoned women.

Organized religion emerges in this film as one of the most sinister oppressors of the Japanese woman. As the camera tracks, following die wizened Oharu moving away from the scene, die chanting grows louder and louder. The camera increases its motion, as if in competition with the chanting voices. By contrasting camera movement with sound, Mizoguchi seems to be presenting two forces at eternal war: suffering women and institutionalized religion, which turns a deaf ear to their cries of pain.

Oharu enters a Buddhist Temple of the Rakans, filled with statues of life-sized monks, each with a unique and individualized visage. Mizoguchi pans these figures until Oharu's eyes focus on one face, which dissolves to that of the actor Toshiro Mifune, meant to remind Oharu of the first man who loved her. A flashback now removes us to 1686, when Oharu's story properly begins, and she is a very young woman attached to the court. The irony is that once we enter the flashback, the young man who loves Oharu, a page at the Old Imperial Palace, is not played by Mifune at all. Many years later she remembers him as a man much more handsome, vital, and energetic than he really was, one of the tricks life plays on lonely women. Her error is recorded by the camera without comment and in the understated manner that has made Mizoguchi one of the greatest directors in the history of world cinema.

Another dissolve takes us to the court, where Oharu's troubles begin when she accepts the advances of this man of lower rank than herself. O bedient to the norms upholding a rigid class structure, she is at first outraged when he sends her a poem declaring his love. In order to meet her at all, so bound by convention are those chosen to serve at court, he must use deception and pretend to be delivering a message from their superior.

"Who would read a letter from a mere page?" says Oharu when they meet in the graveyard. Katsunosuke's reply teaches her the meaning of life as Mizoguchi would have us see it. There are values that transcend those defined as giri or obligation by the class society. "I' m loyal and sincere," says this page, Katsunosuke, "you can despise my low rank, but you can't ignore my devotion." He asks who among the nobility would care enough to marry Oharu and make her happy: "a woman can be happy only if she marries for true love."

Within the context of the feudal society of the time, this is an outrageous, revolutionary idea, one that requires the breaking of laws, the punishment for which is death for the rebel. The class boundaries of Japanese society as a whole would have to be broken were marriage to be based upon love. For no matter how much Oharu and Katsunosuke care for each other, neither the Imperial Court nor her father would ever permit them to marry.

Still in the graveyard, Oharu embraces Katsunosuke, with Mizoguchi employing a variation on his famous one-shot, one-scene technique, in which an entire scene is conveyed in one shot with no cuts to vary the angle or change the point of view. Mizoguchi employs this technique at the most intense psychological moments in his films, even at times photographing a scene for five minutes from a single point of view. "During the course of filming a scene, if an increasing psychological sympathy begins to develop," he has said, "I cannot cut into this without regret. I try rather to intensify and prolong the scene as long as possible." This take between Oharu and Katsunosuke in the graveyard is very long, a sign that Katsunosuke's words have been experienced by Oharu as truth.

As she falls to the ground in passion, amidst the dying autumn leaves, Katsunosuke lifts and carries her out of the frame. The camera, remaining, tilts down ever so slightly to reveal two graves side by side, a foreshadowing of the fate of this forbidden love. Another long take focuses on the scene now empty of human beings, the length of the shot expressing the power of an environment that cares nothing for the feelings of people. The long take which Mizoguchi uses so frequently often asserts a problem admitting of no easy resolution. It is the cinematic opposite of rapid cutting which suggests change, hope, progress, and development, and which characterizes the film style of Kurosawa. The long take, in Mizoguchi's hands, bespeaks the recalcitrance of the outside world, the difficulty of change, the spuriousness of optimism.

At the inn where they have gone to be alone, the police burst in upon Oharu, the daughter of a samurai, and Katsunosuke, a mere retainer. A rapid fade-in and fadeout at once removes us to a long shot in which Oharu is being sentenced for her crime. Her parents are simultaneously punished; she is an extension of them and not a separate individual, the very term an anachronism in feudal Japan. According to Tokugawa justice, the parents are as guilty as she.

As we view the scene in long shot, Oharu's "crime" is read out loud. She is guilty of misconduct with a person of low rank. To emphasize their powerlessness, Mizoguchi stubbornly reveals only the backs of their heads as she and her parents are told that they are to be exiled from Kyoto. They bow in obedience. To debate the question would constitute a further crime.

A dissolve within the scene to the crowd waiting outside is employed not to indicate the passage of time (the more frequent use of this technique), but to express the shame of this family before those who know them, as much a part of the punishment as the exile itself. The camera remains at a very low angle as Oharu and her parents cross a bridge into the next phase of their lives. From under the bridge, in extreme long shot, Mizoguchi shoots three tiny figures on the horizon. They are indeed insignificant. Before the fade ending the sequence, on a sloping horizon remain one bare tree and three tiny silhouettes. The shot composition itself contains a protest against feudalism.

In exile, Oharu is upbraided by her father for destroying family honor and causing them to live in shame. She replies with the truth she has by now fully assimilated: "Why is it immoral if a man and woman love each other?" But the high angle looking down at Oharu is from the point of view of her father, and reinforces only her powerlessness, despite her growing awareness.

Oharu and her family suffer the pain of exile. But Katsunosuke, a male, and an inferior who violated the laws governing rank, must be executed. He sends Oharu a message she will find it very difficult to fulfill: "Please find a good man. Be sure to marry only where there is mutual love." He hopes for a time when there will be no such thing as social rank and people can marry for love. The steel of the sword raised over his head glints in the sun. We are permitted to see the sword in close-up, but not the death blow, because Mizoguchi wishes us to remember Katsunosuke in his strength. Unlike Kurosawa, Mizoguchi, in a much more traditionally Japanese approach to characterization, rarely uses facial expressions to reveal personality. A kimono obscures Oharu's face when she learns of Katsunosuke's death. Her emotions are revealed, instead, in the next action she takes. She makes an unsuccessful attempt at suicide.

Oharu now begins her descent, a plunge unapparent because there is first a seeming rise in her fortunes. The retainer of Lord Matsudaira arrives in town bearing a scroll painting of the ideal woman whose likeness is to be approximated by the concubine he will select for his Lord. Lady Matsudaira is barren and the clan will be ruined unless a woman is found to bear Matsudaira a child.

Mizoguchi satirizes the prevailing standards of beauty. The ears of this paradigm must not stand out; her feet can be only twenty-one or twenty-two centimeters long; she must have neither odor nor moles. The camera tracks down the line of assembled beauties, as if they were cattle at auction, while the fat retainer, ruler in hand, examines them for imperfections. A deep-focus shot reveals the whole line reaching back into oblivion, as if all women in Japan were every day being subjected to the inhumanity of such scrutiny, reduced to sexual objects. None pleases him until he discovers Oharu at dancing school. Somehow she had escaped the public inspection, a further hint of her rebellious nature and unwillingness to be humiliated. Before she can say a word, Matsudaira's retainer rushes in on the scene and announces to all, "I'll buy her!"

Oharu's parents, particularly her father, are delighted by the opportunity to sell their daughter. The father promises no longer to curse her for their exile. But Oharu's rebellion continues. She now announces that she doesn't wish to be a concubine: "Katsunosuke won't permit me to." But physical violence will be employed against any woman who defies the wishes of her superiors—lord, father, or husband. Oharu's father throws her brutally to the ground. In the next sequence she is in a sedan, arriving at Edo to become Matsudaira's concubine.

Lady Matsudaira, whom Oharu very much resembles, is told to subordinate her own feelings "for the sake of the clan." Women are set against each other in a society where each day marks a struggle for survival. In deep focus, a performance of the Bunraku at court finds the puppets acting out Oharu's arrival and the jealousy it engenders. The play is a means by which those sympathetic to Lady Matsudaira are to be reconciled to the change in her circumstances. With such subtlety, harmony is enforced without public dissension and malcontents are silently ordered to conform.

When Oharu bears a son, she is told that she has not "borne" a child, but that she has been "caused to bear" one. The child is immediately removed to be nursed by someone else, and, of course, belongs—as did all male children at the time, regardless of class—to the father and his family. While Oharu's father is profligately buying silk in the hope of becoming a merchant, she is banished because Lord Matsudaira loved her so much that he was expending all his energy on their relationship. In the clan system, even the powers of an individual lord are limited. Oharu, as a woman, cannot please whether she is deemed adequate or inadequate. She is given five ryo for her trouble, an incredibly paltry sum, but a measure of a woman's worth. In anger, her father hurls her against the sedan in which she arrives home.

Oharu is next sold as a courtesan to the Shimabara whorehouse, where her rebelliousness, ever endorsed by Mizoguchi, expresses itself as she flings the money of an arrogant customer back into his face. "I' m not a beggar," she proudly asserts, a forehadowing of her final fate. "But you are no different from a fish," she is told, "we can prepare and dispose of you as we wish." As her merchant customer is unmasked as a counterfeiter, Oharu stands in one of the finest deep-focus shots in the film, a small, lonely figure on a balcony observing the chaos of the man's apprehension in the courtyard below. She is almost unnoticed by us, just as her rebellion is temporarily overlooked by her superiors in the urgency of the moment.

Rapidly descending the social scale, Oharu becomes servant to a merchant. As soon as the man discovers that she has been at Shimabara, he attempts to seduce her. The religious satire enters the film once more as the merchant begins his approach to Oharu while pretending to be engaged in Buddhist prayers. Meanwhile, his jealous wife torments Oharu, who achieves her revenge by sending a cat late at night to pluck off the woman's wig to which Oharu, as the woman's hairdresser, has applied an appropriate odor. Thus is the wife's baldness revealed to her husband, a revelation that she has feared would ensure his leaving her. Women who might be natural allies destroy each other, while men are aided in the oppression of women by the competition among them for men, their only means of survival.

Only once does Oharu marry. Her husband is a fan-maker who is devoted to her. In a rather crude manipulation of plot, Mizoguchi has him attacked by thieves and murdered. In his final moment he is shown holding an obi, a gift destined for Oharu. Although he loved her for herself, the world separated them anyway. Oharu becomes a nun, but when the merchant of the bald wife pursues her at the temple and she rebels, she is condemned by the head nun for licentiousness in a brilliant satire on the hypocrisy of religious orders.

The merchant arrives at the temple, demanding the cloth she has not yet paid for. Oharu insists that she has already converted it into a kimono and begins stripping herself as if to return the goods. The nun, viewing the kimono on the floor (an image of sexual relations, as in A Portrait of Madame Yuki) and the naked Oharu, immediately casts her out. But die nun is angry, not because of Oharu's violation of the rules of the Buddhist order, but because she herself has been sexually aroused. "D o you provide me with a visual demonstration, hoping I would join you?" she demands of Oharu, indicating a barely concealed desire to do just that: "I can't be tempted by a whore like you." Oharu is now punished for the nun's own repressed feelings. Religious orders offer no refuge for the oppressed but, rather, cooperate in their oppression.

The only kindness shown Oharu in her long travail is by the old prostitutes of the first sequence; as the most demeaned of women, they have known the same pain. And they have learned that "whatever we do, it doesn't make any difference to the world." Oharu joins them and, unfortunately, is selected by a pilgrim in Mizoguchi's final thrust at organized religion for its failure to offer compassion to the suffering. This pilgrim drags Oharu into the light, where he uses her as a means of convincing his followers to renounce the evil of sexual intercourse. "Take a good look at this witch," he leers, "do you still want to lie down with a woman?" Oharu becomes an example of the sinner. In bitterness she protests, "you'll always be able to remember you came face to face with a real witch!" But her rebellion now falls short because she has no choice; she must retrieve from the floor the coins they have thrown her way.

Religious hypocrisy is paralleled by that of the political structure. The Matsudaira clan would accept her back, except that, by becoming a courtesan, she has not kept her loyalty to those pompous and cruel "descendants of Ieyasu Tokugawa," as they term themselves. Mizoguchi now offers his full contempt for class superiority, and for those who claim to be valuable on the ground of family connection. In her last rebellion, Oharu breaks free of the clan elders to have one look at her stuffed-shirt of a son. As he passes with his entourage, his face bespeaks what he is—an adolescent, callow and empty, a scion of those who have long ceased to have any claim to humane emotion, an emblem of a dying aristocracy.

In the last sequence, an aged Oharu, now a beggar, seeks alms. In a house where a woman holds a baby, she is treated kindly; at another, a man waves her away, a symbol of his sex's treatment of women. Oharu looks toward a pagoda in the distance; raising her eyes in prayer, she walks out of the frame. And the camera is left in this last shot to focus on the pagoda, as if Mizoguchi were blaming it for her suffering. Only Yuki, a woman of modern Japan, but never Oharu, is told by the director that she ought to have shown greater strength. In this, perhaps the finest film ever made in any country about the oppression of women, die director, shunning didactic moralizing, can only echo her pain.

One "mistake," even when it is based purely on a misunderstanding, can ruin a woman forever, a fact equally true for Ayako of the 1930s in Osaka Elegy and Osan of Mizoguchi's A Story from Chikamatsu in Tokugawa Japan. At first Osan is only grateful to Mohei, her husband's worker, for standing by her. She neither loves nor desires him. Rather, they are brought together only by the circumstance of having to flee through mud and swamps, fugitives like runaway slaves in the American South. Should they be caught, the punishment would be crucifixion, with no one stopping to inquire whether or not they had in fact been lovers. Osan "belongs" to her husband as a serf would to a feudal lord. Only extremes of social chaos, brought on by the merchant's rapid ascent to power, have led her to such impropriety, to what she calls so "strange" a fate.

From choosing death through suicide on ironically calm Lake Biwa, Osan moves, for the sake of an authentic love, to a willingness to defy the society's highest laws defining a woman's behavior. In four cuts Mizoguchi develops her emotions. Lake Biwa appears with a solitary temple in long shot against the sky. The boat from which Osan and Mohei plan to drown themselves then rows into the frame, still in long shot. A dissolve next brings the edge of die boat close to us but in very shallow focus. A closer shot reveals Mohei tying Osan's legs together, readying her for the suicide.

Mizoguchi then turns to his characteristic one-shot, one-scene technique. The long take in the beautiful Lake Biwa scene begins as Mohei declares his love for Osan. The rowboat in which the two have been drifting is now anchored firmly in the center of the shot. When Osan's feelings become impossible to contain and she announces to Mohei "your confession [that he loves her] has made me change my mind. I don't want to die," both are standing in the precariously rocking boat. It is a moment of extreme transcendence, perhaps the first in Osan's life in which she has expressed what she feels as a unique, separate human being. She grabs Mohei and the boat begins to move, the camera remaining static, as if fully endorsing Osan's choice of ninjo, or, rather, of a higher giri, a duty to the growing love between herself and Mohei. Mizoguchi at last need not intervene. He dissolves to the empty boat on the lake, now interpolating a very short take. His woman has achieved her humanity, defined always for Mizoguchi in terms of an act of rebellion against feudal norms.

But the rebellion of one individual does not a revolution make. The moment of Osan's greatest happiness is rapidly followed by a descent leading to her crucifixion. Mohei, knowing that this is the fate awaiting them, would send her back to "the Master." It is she who becomes the stronger of the two, insisting that she cannot live without Mohei. The first taste of freedom strengthens one's character. It transforms us from passive acceptance to active insistence upon controlling our own destinies. And it is at such triumphant moments in their development that Mizoguchi loves his women best.

Class differences recede, as if a liberation for women in Japan would mean a simultaneous social emancipation for all. "You're no longer my servant," Osan tells Mohei, "you're my beloved husband, my master." That she calls Mohei, the man she has chosen, her "master" in no way invalidates Osan's achievement. Choosing whom to love, in the context of the life of a woman under feudalism, constitutes the highest degree of revolutionary struggle.

The world, of course, conspires against Mohei and Osan. It could not do otherwise. Her brother, outraged at her persistent refusal to return to Ishun, says that Osan should be "cut to pieces." It is he who turns her in to the police at the house of her mother, where Mohei, inspired by Osan's own resilience, had claimed her. Their destinies are finally resolved in a last one-shot, one-scene in which a slowly panning camera reveals to us Osan and Mohei tied together, riding off to be crucified. Osan looks serene, Mohei cheerful. The camera remains still as they ride off into long shot, as if satisfied at having told a story so full of nobility. Each camera setup has seemed determined by Osan's movements on her path to liberation, as if guided by the magnificence of a Japanese wife triumphantly escaping her bondage. Death is a small enough price to pay for spiritual transcendence. It has awaited all revolutionaries. Mizoguchi would urge us, finally, that it need not be feared.

As a coda to his films about the oppression of women, Mizoguchi made his first color film, The Princess Yang Kwei Fei (Yokihi), in 1955, the year before his death. The story is not properly that of a woman, but of the Emperor Hui Sung, who falls in love with a scullery maid named Kwei Fei, and then loses her in an execution necessitated by political upheaval over which he has no control. It is a testament to the undying love aroused by Kwei Fei and of the capacity for such love in a man. The Princess Yang is thus a paean to the feelings between men and women that should be possible, but which the world rarely permits. It is a much weaker film than A Story from Chikamatsu, which immediately preceded it, perhaps because Mizoguchi is at his best when he is absorbed in a struggle against oppression. In The Princess Yang, when forces separate the lovers, rebellion is assumed to be impossible, despite the man's being an Emperor!

The Emperor finally comes to the close of his troubled life. He calls the dead Kwei Fei's name, and in a meta-physical moment that becomes Mizoguchi's argument for a Buddhist-oriented renunciation of the possibility of happiness in this world, she replies, having waited faithfully in the next world for his arrival: "I've come to take you. I have been waiting for this moment for years. Give me your hand. Let me guide you … no one will ever disturb us this time." At last Kwei Fei can offer the Emperor a "happiness that has no ending." Together they join in uproarious, joyous, cosmic laughter, as curtains blow in the now empty room, a sign of the presence of the supernatural. It is Mizoguchi meeting the moment of his own death, and welcoming his departure from a world that has offered only grief to woman—and to man as well. Rebellion has achieved little; death and the unchangeable offer the final and only relief.

If in The Life of Oharu Mizoguchi lived inside his heroine, a Flaubert to his personal Madame Bovary, in The Princess Yang Kwei Fei his is the point of view of the besieged, imprisoned Emperor. At the end of a long and distinguished career in which he directed more than eighty films (the exact number is unknown), Mizoguchi experiences a sense of exhaustion. Instead of rebellion against feudal norms, he now prefers communication with a world beyond the tawdry, blemished land of the living. It would remain for younger directors like Susumu Hani to take up with renewed vigor the theme of the oppression of the Japanese woman.