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Lady Snowblood (film)

Lady Snowblood
Lady Snowblood (film).jpg
Japanese release poster
Directed by Toshiya Fujita
Produced by Kikumaru Okuda
Screenplay by Norio Osada
Story by
  • Kazuo Kato
  • Kazuo Kamikura
Starring
Music by Masaaki Hirao
Cinematography Masaki Tamura
Edited by Osamu Inoue
Production
company
Tokyo Eiga
Distributed by Toho
Release date
  • 1 December 1973 (1973-12-01) (Japan)
Running time
96 minutes
Country Japan
Language
  • Japanese
  • English

Lady Snowblood (Japanese: 修羅雪姫 Hepburn: Shurayuki-hime?) is a 1973 Japanese action thriller film directed by Toshiya Fujita and starring Meiko Kaji. It is based on the manga series of the same name, recounting the tale of Yuki, a woman who seeks vengeance upon three people who raped her mother and killed her mother's husband and son.

The scenes of this film do not appear in chronological order. Each paragraph below represents a passage of the film in the order it appears.

In 1874, a baby is born in a women's prison. Her deathly-ill mother names her Yuki (snow).

A woman blocks the path of several men and a rickshaw, and kills them using a sword concealed in the handle of an umbrella. She tells the last man to die, Shirayama, that her name is Shura Yuki-hime. She appears in a poor village looking for a man called Matsuemon, the leader of an underground organization, and asks him to find four people for her, having killed Shirayama for him.

In 1873, a teacher, his wife Sayo, and their son are attacked by four criminals. One of the criminals, a woman named Kitahama Okono, holds Sayo while the three men – Takemura Banzō, Shokei Tokuichi, and Tsukamoto Gishirō – murder the teacher and his son and rape Sayo. Tokuichi secretly takes Sayo far away to work for him. Sayo kills him with a knife and goes to prison.

In the women's prison, after the baby is born, Sayo tells her story. She has seduced a prison guard to conceive the child. She tells the other women to raise the child for vengeance, then dies.

In Meiji 15 (1882), the child Yuki trains in sword fighting with a priest called Dōkai.

Yuki, now twenty, finds Banzō's daughter Kobue. Kobue is a prostitute, and her father is now an alcoholic wreck with gambling debts. At a gambling house, Yuki plays cards with Banzō, who is caught cheating. He is about to be killed. Yuki persuades the owners to pardon him, then leads him to a beach and kills him.


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