Yoshiwara: The Pleasure Quarter

A glorious melodrama written by Mizoguchi collaborator Yoda Yoshikata, Yoshiwara: The Pleasure Quarter ranks with Uchida’s finest post-war films. A successful textile industrialist from the provinces is beloved by his employees for his kindness, but cannot find a wife because of a disfiguring birthmark on his face. Even the Yoshiwara courtesans refuse to entertain him, until an indentured peasant prostitute, Tamarazu, takes the unsavory 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. When faced with her betrayal and his own financial ruin, the man takes revenge, turning the lavish ceremony to mark Tamarazu’s ascension to courtesan into a slashing spectacle. The script’s taut determinism, with its interlocked rise (hers) and fall (his), and teeming social detail; the dynamism of the scope cinematography; and the remarkably ambiguous characters of the besotted businessman and the grasping whore – in her earthiness and ambition she reminds one of Imamura’s enterprising insect women – make Yoshiwara seem like some kind of lost classic. (JQ)