Shurayukihime
| Lady Snowblood | |
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Japanese release poster
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| Directed by | Toshiya Fujita |
| Produced by | Kikumaru Okuda |
| Screenplay by | Norio Osada |
| Story by |
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| Starring |
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| Music by | Masaaki Hirao |
| Cinematography | Masaki Tamura |
| Edited by | Osamu Inoue |
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Production
company |
Tokyo Eiga
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| Distributed by | Toho |
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Release date
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Running time
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96 minutes |
| Country | Japan |
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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 plot is nonlinear jumping from present to past; this is a linear plot in chronological order
In 1874, an deathly-ill woman named Sayo gives birth to a baby girl in a womens' prison. Naming the child Yuki from seeing the snow outside, Sayo confided to the inmates who helped deliver the baby how she was brutally raped by three of the four criminals who murdered her husband Tora and their son Shiro a year ago. While she managed to stab her captor Shokei Tokuichi to death when the chance presented itself, she was arrested and imprisoned for life. Sayo seduced a prison guard to conceive Yuki, her final words before for the child to be raised to carry out the vengeance against the three remaining tormentors. In Meiji 15 (1882), the child Yuki undergoes brutal training in sword fighting under the priest Dōkai to become her mother's wrath incarnate.
Yuki, now twenty and an assassin going by the name Shurayuki-hime, blocks the path of several men and a rickshaw and kills them and their leader Shibayama using a sword concealed in the handle of an umbrella. Yuki appears in a poor village looking for a man called Matsuemon, the leader of an underground organization of street beggars, and asks him to find her mother's surviving tormentors in return of having killed Shibayama for him. Matsuemon's intel leads her to Takemura Banzō, who became an alcoholic wreck with gambling debts while his daughter Kobue took to prostitution to support him. After convincing the gambling house's owners to pardon Banzō after he was caught cheating in a card game, Yuki leads him to the beach and remorselessly kills him after revealing her identity. Yuki then learns that the last of her mother's rapists, Tsukamoto Gishirō, had suspiciously died in a ship wreck three years prior when she first attempted to find him.
After attacking Gishirō's tombstone in frustration, Yuki finds herself being followed by a reporter named Ryūrei Ashio whom she warned to stay away from her. However, Ashio learned of Yuki's story from Dōkai who told persuaded him to publish it as a means to draw one the last of Sayo's tormentors who personally murdered Shiro: Kitahama Okono. Okono sends men to kidnap Ashio, threatening him with torture for Yuki's location as he refuses to tell them. But Yuki enters Okono's estate and kills several of Okono's men while pursing Okono throughout the estate. Eventually, Yuki and Ryūrei finds Okono's dying body hanging within a room with Yuki slicing Okono in half before her heart can stop beating.
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Wikipedia