Story of a Prostitute

Harumi sends herself to the Manchurian front; the man she loved has left her and she has nowhere else to go. She joins the women who serve the soldiers there. On the front she is counted as the property of Lieutenant Narita, who beats and humiliates her regularly. She attaches herself to Mikami, Narita's orderly. Mikami is so given over to the military hierarchy that he cannot even conceive of answering back. Seijun Suzuki directs. Yumiko Nogawa plays Harumi. The source is a novel by Taijiro Tamura. It was made for the commercial programme of the Nikkatsu studio, and Suzuki turns it into work against war. The army here is not a field of heroism but an order that shows what obedience makes of a person. The visual style is harsh and experimental: extreme contrast, sudden cuts, sound separated from image, passages of dream. Suzuki was working with such formal games inside the studio, and a few years later he was dismissed for it. The woman at the centre is not built as a victim; Harumi makes her own decisions, and that is the strongest thing in the narrative. The subject stayed covered over in Japanese cinema for a long time, and the film takes it up directly in 1965. Who it is for: viewers who follow Japanese cinema, Suzuki, and formally harsh war films. Who it is not for: the scenes of violence and humiliation are heavy, the pacing is irregular, and the narrative gives no relief anywhere.