The Affair

Yoshishige Yoshida’s film follows Oriko, a woman who spent years judging her widowed mother for openly taking much younger lovers. After the mother dies, Oriko sees how loveless and stalled her own marriage has become, and her encounter with her mother’s lover begins the undoing of that judgement. Yoshida does not offer desire as a solution; there is a hard turn into violence midway through, and the camera keeps its distance even there. The screenplay was written by Toshiro Ishido, Yasuko Ōno and Yoshida from Masaaki Tachihara’s 1965 novel Shiroi keshi. Mariko Okada, in the lead, is the recurring face of the woman-centred films Yoshida made through the sixties. The record places it within the Japanese New Wave, and the weight is not on plot but on how Oriko’s own way of looking changes.