Hot on the heels of her Female Prisoner Scorpion<\/em> series, Meiko Kaji took on the role of Yuki in Lady Snowblood<\/em>. Her characters in both film series were indeed angels of death, but hold key differences, the most important of which is this: where Matsu the Scorpion sought to right the wrongs committed against her personally, Yuki the Asura (a demon of lore) was assigned her vendetta by her dying mother, on behalf of their slain family. It was a curse she lamented but understood, later admitting, \u201cEven before we enter the world, we are marked by karma.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n As with so many tales of intergenerational trauma, Yuki\u2019s tale begins with her parents. Lady Snowblood<\/em> is divided into chapters, and \u201cChapter One: Vow of Vengeance\u201d paints the picture and connects love to hatred with blood. Using a non-linear style of storytelling, screenwriter Norio Osada and director Toshiya Fujita swing back and forth between Sayo\u2019s attempts to execute those who have wronged her clan, and what her clan went through. Narration exposits the climate of 1870s Japan, where the rich get richer, the poor get poorer, and a new government threatens to conscript males from already-strained households. Among the strife, Sayo Kajima (Miyoko Akaza), her husband Tora, and their son Shiro take a walk in Koichi Village. There, a quartet of criminals attacks the family, accusing Tora of being a conscription officer of the new government due to his all-white outfit (he was not, in fact, a conscription officer at all, but an elementary school teacher). The men brutally kill Tora and rape Sayo in a nearby barn, while the lone female thug of the group murders young Shiro. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Those killers are the same names on Sayo\u2019s kill list, bearing a heavy resemblance to the motifs and structure of Quentin Tarantino\u2019s Kill Bill<\/em> films (his homage to Lady Snowblood<\/em> is an entirely different deep dive to be written separately, but suffice it to say that both are fantastic for similar and differing reasons). <\/p>\n\n\n\n One of the rapists, Shokei Tokuichi (Takeo Shii, Kaji\u2019s prior costar in Stray Cat Rock: Wild Jumbo<\/em>) takes a predatory liking to Sayo and coerces her to accompany him on his travels. When the opportunity presents itself, Sayo gives him his comeuppance, stabbing him to death and earning herself a lifelong prison sentence. Therein, Sayo proceeded to seduce every guard in the facility to purposely conceive not a replacement baby, but a revenge baby. Naming the child Yuki after the gentle snowfall outside, Sayo imparts her only living words to the child as it wails into the damp darkness, \u201cSnow\u2026 you will carry on my vendetta.\u201d The very first sounds presented in Lady Snowblood<\/em> are the newborn Yuki\u2019s cries in the dank space, layered with grim handheld pans of women prisoners behind the grimy gray jaws of its cell bars. Outside, a flurried tempest howls, and the emotional oppression of the scene looms ever larger. Inside, Sayo and a writhing Yuki, both shot in profile, one leaving life and one entering. The film cyclically enters a transitional balance like this one and situates birth and death as a two-way passage of life; a miracle of childbirth, but it is in a prison, in a cold, cold storm, and mother dies. A target is slain and tossed into the sea, and as the waters around his body blossoms red, he is cleansed, atoned.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n Shortly after birth, the baby is passed to a caretaker and raised as an assassin from birth under the tutelage of D\u014dkai (K\u014d Nishimura), a priest. Yuki\u2019s training is intense\u2014 her master rolls her downhill in barrels and regularly draws his sword near her to keep her frosty, and on the mental side, he encourages her to forget her sadness and focus on vengeance, for \u201ceven the Buddha has forsaken you.\u201d He is not only aware of Sayo\u2019s deathbed oath, he reminds the girl that she was not born human but as \u201c\u2026an asura, giving your life to avenge death.\u201d Despite the militant dehumanization, Yuki remains sentimental to her mother\u2019s memory. Kaji, in turn, does not mimic her cold, calculating performance in Female Prisoner Scorpion<\/em> entries, though she is a killer in both. Instead, where the Scorpion operates from a place of rage and rarely allows sentimentality to emerge, Kaji\u2019s Lady keeps tenderness due north across her entire performance. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Early in the film, Yuki solicits the help of Matsuemon (Hitoshi Takagi), the leader of a gang of loinclothed hoodlums. Like Varys on a game about thrones, Matsuemon\u2019s little birdies are everywhere, and she needs his intel to find the rest of the names on her cursed kill list. As she\u2019s asking for his help, Kaji\u2019s voice hits a higher pitch of desperation, one in sharp contrast to the cold, flat delivery she\u2019d later serve along with a death blow, \u201cI am the daughter of a woman who died in prison cursing your name.\u201d Later, a chance meeting would bring her face-to-face with the daughter of one of Yuki\u2019s targets. As the assassin realizes who she\u2019s addressing, her welcoming glow darkens, as if closing a curtain on herself. Her body language goes from friendly to minimal and closed-off, and she stops blinking entirely. For real, watch the movie and count how often she blinks when she\u2019s in executioner mode. There are many reasons why Meiko Kaji is a demigoddess of cult cinema, and that fiery, unblinking gaze is one of them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n On a technical level, this is a film of contrasts: few things are as aesthetically gorgeous and unsettling as blood spatter across lily-white snow, or agonal screams slicing through the night with little echo under the cover of snowfall. Fujita is patient enough to let the audience listen not just to the slice of her blade, but to the crunch of her footwear in the precipitation as well. The frame is generally patient, even in assassination scenes, settling an air of stillness about her hunt. On a thematic level, there is a through-line of cyclical, even co-centric violence. Just after Yuki bemoans to Matsuemon, \u201cEven before we enter the world, we are marked by karma,\u201d another narration slides in to set the scene around the elimination of her family: poverty, a draft, peasant revolt, riots, deaths, paranoia, chaos. Amid that, Sayo and her loved ones took a fateful walk in the park. It\u2019s amid filth and confinement that Yuki was born, and it\u2019s on the blood oath of her slain family that she is weaned. She is retribution incarnate, but it was bequeathed by her parents and the world around her. <\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cHer name is Snowblood, child of vengeance.\u201d “Lady Snowblood” is currently streaming on HBO Max<\/a> and The Criterion Channel. <\/a><\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/05\/lady-snow2-1024x699.jpg\")
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