During the period 1951-1960, Yoshimura realised an impressive sequence of films focusing on working women in Japan’s ancient capital of Kyoto, which used personal dilemmas to explore the quandaries of a nation in the throes of rapid and irreversible change. Taken together, they represent one of the most searching analyses of Japan’s postwar experience.
The first of them, Itsuwareru seiso, is a searing drama that explores the conflict between old and new through the experiences of two sisters, one a geisha in the Gion district, the other employed by the tourist board. Machiko Kyo (19252019), then at the peak of her fame after her career-defining performance the previous year in Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon, is superb in the lead role of the hardheaded yet sympathetic geisha Kimicho.
Shindo’s bleak screenplay had been turned down by Shochiku when he and Yoshimura proposed it to the studio, and the two men decided to move away in pursuit of greater autonomy and creative freedom. They managed to secure the support of Daiei, where Yoshimura was to make most of his 1950s films. In the event, the film was a major critical success, taking third place in that year’s “Kinema Junpo” Best Ten, behind Ozu’s Bakushu (Early Summer) and Naruse’s Meshi (Repast).
“Praised for its exact and realistic creation of the very special Gion atmosphere,” Joseph Anderson and Donald Richie write, “it made Yoshimura something of a rival to Mizoguchi, and established his position as a specialist in films about women.” Indeed, the film is sometimes spoken of as a loose postwar updating of Mizoguchi’s 1936 Gion no kyodai (Sisters of the Gion). Yoshimura’s style, however, is all his own, combining scenes of delicate atmospherics with startling moments of flamboyant camera rhetoric and rapid editing.

Alexander Jacoby e Johan Nordström