Yoshiko Tanaka

For his latest film, Yoshida turned once more to melodrama as a means of sensitively engaging a difficult political issue, here the devastating legacy of the Hiroshima bombing. Mariko Okada stars, in her 154th film, as the eldest of three women trying to uncover the hidden family ties that may or may not bind them together. A shared memory of the Hiroshima disaster draws the three generations together in a search back to the very site of the atomic trauma that unites them, with Hiroshima standing in as a figure for the limit point of the national imagination. Among Yoshida’s more classical films, Women in the Mirror is an assuredly stylish late work that carefully balances the three women’s stories as interlocking pieces of a complex psychological and historiographic puzzle.Read More »

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A somber, visually distilled, and deeply affecting portrait of the human toll and uncalculated tragedy of nuclear holocaust. In contrast to Shohei Imamura’s characteristically unrefined, primitivistic, and subversively bawdy cinema, the film is shot in high contrast black and white, creating a spare and tonally muted chronicle of dignity, survival, community, and human resilience. Through recurring literal and figurative images of regression, Imamura conveys a dual meaning, not only in the community’s noble attempt to rebuild Hiroshima and return to a semblance of normal life after the annihilating bombing but also in their collective gradual and systematic erasure from Japanese society through long-term effects of radiation sickness, infertility, cultural (and geographic) isolation, and social stigmatization.Read More »