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	Half Empty \| Marty's Notes On "The Life of Oharu"
		She is banished form place to place, finding a home in steadily lower positions until she hits rock bottom, and becomes deathly ill. It is at this point that she is invited to the palace to be rejoined with her son so that the narrative can be seen as completing a full circle.
		Twice Oharu's shaky relationships with the "wives" lead to her banishment, and her pragmatic friendship with the nun is juxtaposed with her acceptance by the prostitutes.
		Oharu is not in positions where she can make active decisions about herself and her life, relying on the judgements of her father and other male figures to decide her path.
	articles.halfempty.com /art/oharu.htm (706 words)

	Bright Lights Film Journal \| The Life of Oharu
		Oharu's refusal to live outside her own moral code, her inability to compromise by following feudal custom that demands total submission from women, is her undoing from the start, and repeats itself in a series of wrenching sequences that see her steadily, systematically decline.
		But Oharu's degradation continues when a man hires the now decrepit whore; he turns out to be a pilgrim who brings her to a group of acolytes for the purpose of ridicule and moral instruction.
		Oharu's status as a helpless submissive to a malevolent world of men is everywhere evident, but perhaps most subtly symbolized during an entertainment where a small Oharu-like hand puppet is manipulated and made to "act" for the amusement of the audience.
	www.brightlightsfilm.com /22/oharu.html (806 words)

	Slant Magazine - Film Review: The Life of Oharu
		Life is Oharu is not a ghost story in the same way that Ugetsu is, but it sure feels like one.
		Mizoguchi's camera captures the young girl's despair with a single unbroken long take—with her mother in pursuit, Oharu attempts to stab herself, and when her knife is taken away, she attempts to jump into a well.
		Unlike everyone around her, Oharu does not kowtow politely before money, but no one—not the men who buy and sell her after she has produced an heir for their master, not the women who refuse to let her breastfeed, not the woman who hopes to bring her closer to Buddha—seem to recognize this.
	www.slantmagazine.com /film/film_review.asp?ID=1185 (821 words)

	DVD Times - The Life of Oharu
		Mistress Oharu (Kinuyo Tanaka) is a servant of the Imperial Household, a position that gives her claim to nobility and makes her love affair with a commoner Katsunosuke (Toshiro Mifune) a serious offence, for which she and her family are banished from the city.
		Oharu’s fate is also handled with great finesse by being depicted not just as a victim of society and injustice, but also being the victim of misfortune — something that the viewer can also relate to.
		The Life of Oharu however must be highly recommended as a film of enduring importance and relevance and with a reasonably good transfer the DVD at least serves the film well.
	www.dvdtimes.co.uk /content.php?contentid=11424 (886 words)

	MMI Movie Review: The Life of Oharu (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-20)
		"The Life of Oharu" asks the cinematic question, "Can a girl be too pretty?" According to this 1952 Japanese import, the answer is an emphatic "YES!" It tells the story of a seventeenth century beauty who possesses a pure heart and noble spirit.
		The story begins with Oharu, now an old woman, reflecting on the tumultuous events of her life.
		Or Oharu's exquisite feline revenge against a vain and petty persecutor.
	www.shoestring.org /mmi_revs/oharu.html (347 words)

	BBC Stoke & Staffordshire Films - The Life Of Oharu (Saikaku Ichidai Onna) Review
		An attendant at the imperial court in Kyoto, she is exiled to the countryside with her parents for the crime of falling in love with Katsunosuke (Toshirô Mifune), who suggests she should marry out of romantic feelings, not duty.
		Along with Akira Kurosawa's Rashomon, Kenji Mizoguchi's The Life Of Oharu was one of the first Japanese films that Western critics and audiences 'discovered' after World War Two.
		Both formally beautiful and unsentimentally compassionate, The Life Of Oharu deserves to be seen and appreciated on the big screen.
	www.bbc.co.uk /stoke/films/reviews/g_m/life_of_oharu.shtml (452 words)

	Forums - Movie of the Week - The Life of Oharu
		A bisected shot of Oharu leaving the Buddhist temple is reflected in the overhead, open market image of Oharu playing the shamisen, and in her departure from the house of a morally strict nun.
		Life of Oharu is a hauntingly transcendent and profoundly devastating portrait of a woman brought to ruin by the rigidity of social class: a cruel testament to the blind, hypocritical legacy of traditional honor, virtue, and duty.
		I connect with this aspect, each segment of her life are interesting and moving, but all at once for one woman seems a bit over the top, well at least for a film, I'm sure it may happen in real life.
	www.rottentomatoes.com /vine/showthread.php?t=358385 (1361 words)

	Kenji Mizoguchi - Life of Oharu
		Oharu (Kinuyo Tanaka) is an elegant courtesan, unable to compromise and exist outside her own rigid moral code.
		We first see the tragic figure of a fifty-year-old Oharu in a Buddhist temple, where she dreams of the face of her past lover Katsunosuke (Toshiro Mifune), who was beheaded thirty years earlier for seducing her-an act regarded as an attempt to rise above his station as a lowly page.
		Life of Oharu is a touching and indiscreet examination of human violation, suffering, and humiliation.
	www.dvdbeaver.com /film/DVDReview2/lifeofoharu.htm (634 words)

	The Life of Oharu
		Adapted from the Tokugawa shogunate-era novel, Life of an Amorous Woman (Koshoku ichidai onna) by Saikaku Ihara (1686), The Life of Oharu reflects the injustice and repressive legacy inherent in the governance of the Tokugawa regime's strict bounds of conduct and social class.
		In essence, Oharu's adversity is shown, not as a consequence of a youthful indiscretion, but as a chronicle of the endemic commodification and objectification of women in a society where identity, privilege and the retention of power are achieved through the conventionally masculine attributes of aggression and virility.
		Mizoguchi's The Life of Oharu and Patriarchal Discourse,” Robert N. Cohen proposes that the exquisite final shot of the film is not a reflection of Oharu's spiritual transcendence, but rather, a pyhrric victory that is attained only after the heroine (perhaps subconsciously) abandons her gender identity and sexuality.
	www.sensesofcinema.com /contents/cteq/02/22/oharu.html (668 words)

	Upcoming Cornell Cinema films (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-20)
		Loosely based on the novel by Ibara Saikaku, The Life of Oharu chronicles the downfall of Oharu, a woman who, born of upstanding parents, finds herself serving as a lady-in-waiting until an illicit meeting with a samurai gets her banished from the noble court.
		Her hapless life continues as she is denied entrance into a convent.
		The Life of Oharu is the masterpiece that launched director Kenji Mizoguchi's international reputation in 1952 after it won awards at the Venice Film Festival.
	www.news.cornell.edu /chronicle/97/7.10.97/cinema.html (397 words)

	Choreography of desire: analysing Kinuyo Tanaka's acting in Mizoguchi's films
		Beginning with The life of Oharu, Mizoguchi tended to draw his subjects from a world of Japanese tradition, and many of his films, whose settings are placed in the pre-modern eras, fall into the category of the period film (jidaigeki).
		Oharu's act of taking the kimono-veil off registers her willingness to occupy the aggressive vector as the subject of looking.
		Oharu frees herself from Katsunosuke, and starts staggering, with her back to the camera, but it is no longer clear why, and from what, she is fleeing.
	www.latrobe.edu.au /screeningthepast/firstrelease/fr1201/ckfr13a.htm (12218 words)

	Bright Lights Film Journal \| Kenji Mizoguchi
		As in The Life of Oharu and The Crucified Lovers, implacable forces are brought to bear when class strictures are abandoned, and it is usually the women who suffer.
		Oharu (Kinuyo Tanaka) is the daughter of a samurai at Kyoto's Imperial Palace.
		From this point her life becomes a dizzying nightmare of decline almost without parallel in cinema, as she tries to kill herself, becomes a rich man's mistress, then a courtesan, then a maid, and finally a pauper and a decrepit whore.
	www.brightlightsfilm.com /22/mizoguchi.html (1522 words)

	Saikaku ichidai onna (1952) (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-20)
		To Western eyes, anyway, this story of a 17th Century woman's downfall -- from growing up in the Imperial Court to dying as a broken streetwalker, is affecting but frustrating.
		Mizoguchi's point about the cruel limitations on Japanese women's lives during this period is made clearly, but Oharu's passivity is maddening.
		OHARU is a fine film, but as characters I prefer the spunkier, better-characterized prostitutes of STREET OF SHAME, the director's final film.
	www.imdb.com /title/tt0045112 (384 words)

	Empire Reviews Central - Review of The Life Of Oharu
		When her romance with lowly born Katsunosuke brings shame on her samurai father, Oharu becomes a concubine, a mother, a courtesan, a maid, a widow and a prostitute, as she's buffeted by the conventions and prejudices prevalent in Japan during the Tokugawa shogunate.
		Oharu's endless round of disappointments, betrayals and abuses are flecked with moments of fleeting happiness to make her empathetic rather than pitiable and her strength and durability are subtly conveyed by the excellent Kinuyo Tanaka.
		Mizoguchi also exposes the carelessness and cruelty of the men in Oharu's life as a means of exploring the national character that brought about the militarist era that culminated in the Second World War.
	www.empireonline.com /reviews/reviewcomplete.asp?FID=9651 (540 words)

	Ugetsu - DVD Movie Central
		The Life of Oharu, went further, exploring the imprisonment of women, psychological or physical, within a harsh society.
		At 150 minutes in length, this truly epic documentary is quite comprehensive, covering Kenji Mizoguchi's life and extensive career from his earliest days with the Nikkatsu studio in the silent era through his greatest triumphs with the Daiei studio in the 1950's.
		Other events from Mizoguchi's life and career can be gleamed from numerous interviews with Mizoguchi's colleagues, including cameramen, directors, and actors, as well as through stills or occasional clips from Mizoguchi's numerous films.
	www.dvdmoviecentral.com /ReviewsText/ugetsu.htm (2018 words)

	Kenji Mizoguchi’s Movies Seek Beauty - New York Times
		Life is always pretty awful, and his characters manage to soldier on from day to brutal day only by keeping in their sights some elusive, distant possibility for deliverance: love, money, power.
		But Mizoguchi, more than most, was relentless in questioning its utility, even as he was, helplessly and almost obsessively, devoting his life to creating it.
		He was, of course, too tough on himself, like a courtesan searching her reflection for signs that her looks are fading, and wondering what good her patient art has done her.
	www.filmforum.org /films/mizoguchi/mizoguchinytimes.html (1012 words)

	Life of Oharu - Moviefone
		Oharu is a middle-aged prostitute in 17th century Japan.
		The Life of Oharu The Life of Oharu (1952) is a tragedy with few peers in or out of the cinema; it's 137 minutes of almost unrelieved grimness, made unsettlingly real by...
		Saikaku ichidai onna (1952) Saikaku: Life of a Woman (literal English title) The Life of Oharu...
	movies.aol.com /movie/life-of-oharu/21881/main (163 words)

	Amazon.com: Saikaku ichidai onna: DVD: Kinuyo Tanaka,Tsukie Matsuura,Ichirô Sugai,Toshirô Mifune,Toshiaki ... (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-20)
		Life of Oharu (1952) is the first in a series of major masterpieces directed by Mizoguchi at the very end of his life, followed by Ugetsu (1953), Sansho the Bailiff (1954, which I regard as his greatest achievement), and Street of Shame (1956).
		Oharu's fall from privelige to destitution and despair is one bleak portrait.
		Kenji Mizogichi's Saikaku Ichidai Onna, known hereabouts as The Life of Oharu, is a stunning piece of work, and not "cliched" as Leonard Maltin seems to think (is it possible that, having seen too many movies, he can no longer distinguish the good from the bad?).
	www.amazon.com /Saikaku-ichidai-onna-Kinuyo-Tanaka/dp/B0001EYTBG (1710 words)

	'The Life of Oharu' by Kenji Mizoguchi - Berkeley - Film - Zvents.com
		Mizoguchi considered The Life of Oharu his masterpiece, and critics have placed it among the greatest films of all time.
		Sold by her father as a courtesan, she is gradually stripped of social respectability until she is reduced to prostitution and beggary.
		Through all of Oharu's degradations and transformations, Tanaka is the wick in the candle, keeping an epic tale of a woman being punished for her sexuality—right up until the last “incident in my lost life”—painfully on topic.
	www.zvents.com /events/show/368205 (347 words)

	IONCINEMA.com presents: Life of Oharu, The (1952)
		Oharu became the mistress of a prince, who cast her off after she bore his son.
		She was then sold into prostitution by her father, and thus began a catch-as-catch-can existence alternating between brief happiness with those she genuinely loved and servitude to those she despised.
		A potential happy ending, reuniting her with her royal son, is dashed by the much-maligned Oharu herself, who opts for the life of a beggar.
	www.ioncinema.com /beta/movie.php?id=3597 (207 words)

	The Life of Oharu
		The Life of Oharu is based on a 17th century comic novel about a woman who, by stages, falls down the social scale to end up as a prostitute.
		The film is episodic, and is nearly all in flashback after the opening sequence of Oharu as a prostitute too old to ply her trade.
		I have a theory that he had been lined up for the role in Oharu but had to be substituted for at the last moment, and none of the reference books have picked this up.
	www.talkingpix.co.uk /ReviewsLifeOfOharu.html (642 words)

	Reviews for The Life of Oharu on MSN Movies
		When it won the 1952 Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival one year after Akira Kurosawa's Rashomon did the same, Oharu not only solidified the reputation of Japanese cinema but also ended Mizoguchi's decade-long artistic tailspin and freed him from studio constraints, allowing him to create his later masterpieces.
		Yet while Sakiku uses Oharu's decline as a means to satirize Japan's rigid feudal culture, Mizoguchi strips away all parodic elements and views her tortured life as noble and sacred.
		Quiet and profound, Life of Oharu is a masterful work by a filmmaker reaching the pinnacle of his creative powers.
	entertainment.msn.com /movies/movie.aspx?mp=v&m=20750 (223 words)

	BAM : Brooklyn Academy of Music
		The Life of Oharu (Saikaku ichidai onna) (1952) 137min
		This moving allegory of women in Japanese society focuses on a middle-aged prostitute, as she looks back at her life.
		Yet despite its lurid title, the film is a remarkably straightforward portrait of post-war life in Japan.
	www.bam.org /film/series.aspx?id=38 (548 words)

	Saikaku ichidai onna - Review (Diary of Oharu, The Life of Oharu, Saikaku: Life of a Woman )
		Kenji Mizoguchi made more than 85 films from 1922 until his death in 1956, and although many of these are now forever lost or destroyed, he was, along with Ozu, the most admired Japanese director of his generation.
		Mizoguchi was himself no stranger to the sufferings of women, having witnessed as a child his older sister being sold off as a geisha, and his other sister and mother being mistreated by his father, and these memories have left their clear imprint on the film.
		Born a noble, she starts out as a cloistered, elegant servant in the Imperial Court, but a brief affair with the low-born page Katsunosuke (Toshirô Mifune) leads to his execution and her banishment, along with her parents, from the Imperial City.
	www.movie-gazette.com /cinereviews/778 (677 words)

	The Life Of OHaru (1952) - Channel 4 Film review
		In The Life of Oharu, Mizoguchi mediates on his favourite theme with deceptive simplicity, charting the life of Oharu (Tanaka) who is made destitute after she has a fleeting affair with a servant (Mifune).
		Sacked from her position as an attendant at the imperial court, Oharu discovers that her haughty airs hold no value in a world in which breeding, social status and money are everything.
		Caught between her ambitious desire not to marry without love and the grim realities of patriarchy, she's gradually subjugated by the men around her until she ends up as a haggard prostitute.
	www.channel4.com /apps26/film/reviews/film.jsp?id=105326 (202 words)

	NG London/Film/'Portrait of an Artist' Film Season/The Life of Oharu
		As the camera moves around her we see that her face is covered with a scarf: a 50-year-old woman trying to pass as a 20-year-old in order to work as a prostitute.
		In flashback the film chronicles Oharu's descent from a respected lady of the imperial court in Kyoto to this final abasement, using long takes and fluid camerawork to give visual expression to her internal struggles.
		The devastating experiences that result from an early indiscretion in love serve to highlight the injustices of feudal Japan's repressive patriarchal society.
	www.nationalgallery.org.uk /what/film/portraitofanartist/lifeofoharu.htm (136 words)

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