The story begins in 1874 with the birth of a child in a women’s prison. We will later discover that the woman who is giving birth has sworn vengeance on three men and one woman who murdered her husband, stole her son, and spent three days raping her. Having already killed one of the men (hence why she is in prison for life), she plays the nymphomaniac and has sex with every guard in the prison, thus ensuring she will get pregnant and produce a child who can fulfill her vengeance. That child is Yuki (Meiko Kaji), the “Lady Snowblood” of the title who spends her childhood training to be an assassin so that she may avenger her father’s death and her mother’s brutal humiliation. Her adoptive father and relentless trainer, Dôkai (Kô Nishimura), tells her, “You have a destiny that needs to be realized. Forget joy, forget sorrow, forget love, and forget hate. Except for vengeance, these must be forgotten.”

The majority of the film, which is divided into four chapters (an allusion to its origins on paper and one of the many narrative devices Tarantino borrowed for Kill Bill), takes place in near turn-of-the-20th-century Japan, where Yuki, now an adult, tracks down each of the killers, which requires her to work with Matsuemon (Hitoshi Takagi), the leader of a network of beggars who is renowned for finding people. She also ends up allying with Ryûrei Ashio (Toshio Kurosawa), a newspaper reporter who, in a clever bit of meta-narrative playfulness, chronicles Lady Snowblood’s exploits via a comic series he writes and illustrates.

The film’s nonlinear order makes the otherwise straightforward revenge narrative even more compelling, and it also highlights the various setpieces, which stand out more for not necessarily following in chronological order. For example, we are introduced to Lady Snowblood in a highly stylized street scene amid beautifully falling snow as she hacks to death five guards and a gangster who she meets on the street, which follows immediately after the scene in which she is born in the prison. There is visual disjunction between the two scenes (the prison is dark and cramped, whereas the street scene, despite taking place at night, is bright with new fallen snow), and it also takes place several decades later without any explicit demarcation of time. Thus, the scene stands on its own, as we have no real context at that point to link it with what has previously occurred.

The street scene is also crucial for the role it plays in introducing Lady Snowblood’s violent prowess, which she hides behind a seemingly submissive façade (her sword is hidden inside the handle of her purple umbrella, thus turning a demure symbol of feminine beauty and fragility into a lethal castrating agent). It also sets the film’s over-the-top tone in terms of its representation of violence, which finds arteries spurting hyperbolic geysers of paint-red blood. Her markedly pale face immediately informs us that she is an agent of death (in Japan, white is the color of death and red the color of life), and the rest of the film is testament to that assertion as she hacks and slices her way through her vengeful journey. Each of her kills is like the crescendo of a particularly demented opera, especially the final one, which finds her tracking her would-be victim, who is now a wealthy and powerful government operative, through an elaborate masquerade ball.

Of course, it is impossible to discuss the effectiveness of Lady Snowblood without giving due attention to its star, Meiko Kaji. Although virtually unknown in the West, she is a highly regarded figure among aficionados of Japanese cult and exploitation cinema, and it is no small surprise that film scholar Rikke Schubart dedicated an entire chapter of her 2007 book Super Bitches and Action Babes: The Female Hero in Popular Cinema, 1970–2006 to her. Described by Schubart as being “to Japanese cinema what Pam Grier is to American cinema: a queen of cult cinema and erotic bloodshed,” Kaji is an important figure who helped recalibrate the landscape of female roles in Japanese cinema. She was not the first to play a female samurai (the four-film The Crimson Bat series [1969–1970] had previously featured a Zatoichi-like blind swordswoman), but she was certainly the most memorable. The choice to make Yuki virtually silent, which underscores her character’s mythical, superhuman qualities, was Kaji’s, just as it was Clint Eastwood’s idea to render his iconic Man With No Name in Sergio Leone’s spaghetti western trilogy mostly silent to emphasize his mythos. Brooding, intense, and virtually silent, she becomes instantly mythical—and unforgettable—the moment she steps on screen. No woman on screen had wielded a blade quite like Kaji, and, with all due respect to Uma Thurman, no one has equaled or bettered her since.

Copyright ©2016 James Kendrick

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