Meiji, Taishō, Shōwa: Ryōki Onna Hanzaishi

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Movie
Original title Meiji, Taishō, Shōwa: Ryōki Onna Hanzaishi
Country of production Japan
original language Japanese
Publishing year 1969
Rod
Director Teruo Ishii
script Teruo Ishii
Masahiro Kakefuda
Shizuo Nonami
production Shigeru Okada
music Masao Yagi
camera Motoya Washio
cut Tadao Kanda
occupation
"Tōyōkaku case"
"Sada Abe"
"Yoshio Kodaira"
"Oden Takahashi"

Meiji, Taishō, Shōwa: Ryōki Onna Hanzaishi ( Japanese 明治 大 正 昭和 猟 奇 女 犯罪 史 , German " Meiji , Taishō , Shōwa : peculiar women's crime stories"; international title Love and Crime ) is a Japanese film by Teruo Ishii , which appeared in 1969 by Tōei . The episode film tells of several murder cases based on historical facts.

action

Framework story

A man whose wife cheated on him and then committed suicide tries to find out why. To this end, he studies historical criminal cases in which women were involved.

Toyokaku case

The first episode takes place in 1957. The main character Kinue Munakata , together with her lover Shibuya, kills the owner of a hotel and her husband, and thus takes the hotel into their possession. Finally, she also gets rid of Shibuyas, who is cheating on her. The hotel catches fire. Kinue survives but is arrested soon after.

Sada Abe

The second episode is based on the story of Sada Abe , a former geisha who worked in a restaurant in 1936, where she began a love affair with her married boss Kichizō Ishida . The couple rents in hotels, where they often don't leave the room for days. At his request, she eventually strangles her lover. Then she removes his penis because she doesn't want Kichizō's wife to have another chance to touch him.

This is followed by two short sequences of murders in 1936 relating to Sada Abe's case. A man named Susumu is attacked by his older partner, Torah , but survives. Another man named Eiji is with his lover when his wife surprises the couple and castrates them with scissors .

Yoshio Kodaira

This is followed by an episode about the serial killer Yoshio Kodaira . In 1945 and 1946 he gained the trust of several women by giving them food that was scarce in Japan at the time. He also promises them that he will continue to provide them with food that he can allegedly obtain from relatives or the American army in large quantities. Instead, he takes the women to lonely patches of forest, where he rapes and murdered them. In 1946 he meets Ryūko Midorikawa , whom, deviating from his previous approach, he does not kill on the first day of their acquaintance. Instead, he gets to know Ryūko's mother and neighbor. When he finally murders the girl, the police get on his trail. He was arrested soon after and executed in 1949.

Oden Takahashi

The last episode, again relatively short at 12 minutes, is about Oden Takahashi . In the 19th century she flees from her leprosy husband Naminosuke , to whom she was forcibly married at the age of sixteen and whom she finds repulsive due to his illness. She kills Naminosuke together with her lover Tomakichi , who then sells her to a brothel. There she falls in love with a customer named Ishi who helps her murder Tomakichi. On the run from the police, the couple commit a robbery for lack of money. Eventually Oden was arrested, convicted, and beheaded as the last woman in Japan in 1879 .

style

The narration within the individual episodes is - apart from the short sequences after Sada Abe and the episode Yoshio Kodaira - not chronological. For example, the episode Oden Takahashi begins with an attempted escape from Oden shortly before her execution. This is followed by a leap into the past. The story of Oden's life from her marriage to her arrest is told. Her execution is scheduled for the end of the episode.

As a further stylistic device, black and white film is used in the episode Yoshio Kodaira , while the other episodes are shot in color.

Some passages are performed by a narrator, as is usual in documentaries . Another element of documentaries are interviews. The first episode begins with an interview with a hotel employee. Sada Abe, whose story is told in the second episode, appears as an interviewee at the beginning and end of the episode. The clear and sometimes very bloody depictions of violence, on the other hand, are atypical for documentaries.

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