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Utamaro and His Five Women

Utamaro and His Five Women
Directed by Kenji Mizoguchi
Written by Yoshikata Yoda
Starring Minosuke Bandō
Kinuyo Tanaka
Kōtarō Bandō
Hiroko Kawasaki
Toshiko Iizuka
Cinematography Minoru Miki
Edited by Shintarō Miyamoto
Distributed by Shochiku
Release date
17 December 1946
Running time
106 minutes
Country Japan
Language Japanese

Utamaro and His Five Women or Five Women Around Utamaro (Japanese: 歌麿をめぐる五人の女 Hepburn: Utamaro o meguru gonin no onna?) is a 1946 Japanese film directed by Kenji Mizoguchi. It is based on the novel of the same title by Kanji Kunieda, itself a fictionalized account of the life of printmaker Kitagawa Utamaro. It was Mizoguchi's first film made under the American occupation.

Mizoguchi was fascinated by painting and had trained as a painter as a young man. Kitagawa Utamaro (1756-1806) was 'possibly the greatest of all the portraitists of the floating world' - he painted also idyllic outdoor scenes, Yoshiwara festivals and drinking bouts, bathers and shell-divers, as well as erotica. The film dramatically presents this sense of range, and openness to life's variety, and contrasts the old official court-approved style of painting, called kano with the new, dynamic form of painting known as ukiyo-e (literally:paintings of the floating world).

The story is set in Edo (now Tōkyō) in Japan.

The film starts with a parade of samurai and their concubines (oiran, distinguished by their high shoes) along an avenue of cherry trees. Koide, called Seinosuke by his woman Yukie (Kotaro Bando), an artist/samurai apprenticed to a Kanō master, leaves the parade and visits a print shop where he sees a woodcut print by Utamaro that boasts of ukiyo-e 's superiority to the official style. Enraged, he goes to a tea-house to find Tsutaya Jūzaburō, the owner of the print shop, to express his displeasure. Word is leaked to Utamaro to avoid the tea-shop, but instead he goes there directly to investigate. Koide then challenges him to a duel. Utamaro counter-challenges him with a different kind of duel––a painting contest.


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