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Synopsis: During the second half of the 19th century, Japan is in a state of flux. The Tokugawa Shogunate, which ruled Japan for three hundred years has fallen and the new Meiji government is attempting to bring Japan into the modern world. Toward this end, Japan is militarizing itself along the model of the other dominant nations in the world. Universal conscription for young men has been instituted--a move that is highly unpopular among the peasant classes. Conscription riots break out. Anyone wearing white is suspected of being a "government man." In a sleepy little seacoast village, a quartet of con artists takes advantage of the unrest. As part of a broader scheme to defraud the villagers, these ne'er-do-wells murder a newly arrived schoolteacher who has the misfortune to be wearing white on the day he arrives in town. The teacher's wife is taken by the con-men and raped repeatedly over the course of three days. She survives the experience and swears a dark and bloody vengeance. One of the con men takes her to Tokyo with him to serve as a consort/geisha. She bides her time and then kills him in bed as he is raping her. Before she can track down her other assailants, she is arrested for murder and imprisoned for life. Her vengeance seems to be thwarted, but she is determined. She seduces prison guards one after another in a bold scheme to make herself pregnant. It is her hope that her son can carry on her vow of vengeance. The birth kills her, but not before she entrusts her newborn daughter to one of the other prisoners to raise and train to continue her revenge. Twenty years later, Yuki, the daughter, picks up where her mother left off. Having trained all her life as an assassin, she becomes a pale angel of vengeance as she tracks down her mother's enemies. The first, Banzo, she tracks down in a gambling den. He is consumed by regret and concern for his own daughter. Yuki shows him no mercy. Shortly afterwards, she learns that one of the men she is seeking--Gishiro, their leader--is already dead: killed in a shipwreck after a profitable career as an opium smuggler. Meanwhile, Yuki comes to the attention of Ryurei, a muckraking journalist, who sees her desecrate Gishiro's grave. Smelling a story, he begins shadowing her. In the process, he begins to fall for our Yuki. He publishes a novel about her exploits, which smokes out the last of Yuki's enemies. It also turns up Banzo's orphaned daughter, seeking vengeance. The police are interested in Ryurei's story, too, and take him in for questioning...except they aren't police. They are agents of Okono, the last of Yuki's enemies. A trap has been baited for her. Yuki walks into Okono's hideout and massacres most of her men. Rather than satisfy Yuki's thirst for vengeance, Okono hangs herself. Yuki's campaign of vengeance is finished...except....Gishiro reappears. He faked his death to become a shadow figure in the underworld, a silent puppeteer. This sets the stage for a final confrontation....

Blood and Snow: Before the Coen brothers discovered that snow makes a stylish backdrop for bloodletting, the Japanese had been doing it for years. The most artful use of this technique is found in Kihachi Okamoto's austere Samurai Assassin. The most brutal is found in Shurayuki-Hime, known as Lady Snowblood to heathen gaijin. Anyone familiar with the Lone Wolf and Cub movies is familiar with the kind of violence I'm talking about here. Japanese fencing styles incorporate comprehensive maps of the human circulatory system, so any time someone waves a sword in the general direction of another human being is likely to strike a major artery (and you know it's an artery, too, because the resulting geyser of blood is bright red arterial blood). In fact, this film contains one of the most shockingly violent scenes I've ever seen in a movie (I won't say what it is, lest I ruin the movie's surprises for the unwary). Lady Snowblood's violence is so extreme that it threatens to overwhelm the rest of the movie.

A Dish Served Ice Cold: To counteract the violence, the filmmakers have not, as might be expected, made the central character more sympathetic--quite the contrary. Yuki is as cold blooded an anti-heroine as anyone has ever put on film. The film sets her up as a child of vengeance, literally born to kill. A "Child of the Netherworld," as she is called by most of the other characters. Meiko Kaji invests this character with a heartlessness that is so striking that it upstages the film's lurid violence. American audiences are likely to find this repellent, but I found it fascinating. It carries the Count of Monte Cristo storyline to its logical conclusion and doesn't flinch as it does it.

Ran: As anyone who has ever seen Kurosawa's Ran knows, "Ran" means "Chaos." There are a number of periods in Japanese history to which that word applies, including the Meiji Restoration, the setting for Lady Snowblood. The events of the movie are directly predicated on the political upheaval caused by the collapse of the Tokugawa Shogunate and the "opening" of Japan. This is all convenient for the storyline, sure, but it provides an interesting insight into the culture and history of Japan, too. It enables the filmmakers to take potshots at the westernization of Japan. Certainly , the character of Gishiro--who is busy making shady deals with western powers--is a sly dig at the Japanese businessmen who were busy transforming Japan into a world economic power at the time the film was made. One of the final images of the film is a Japanese flag over which someone has bled profusely, which could be relevant to any of the movie's themes, but in context foreshadows Japan's emergence as a western-style world power. In contrast, Yuki is an anachronism--an angel of vengeance from Japan's past vetting herself on the forces ushering in Japan's future. Yuki destroys herself in the process after destroying everyone around her. Is this a metaphor for the collaboration between Japan's feudal past and its western-style imperialist ambitions during the twentieth century? Perhaps.

Certainly, all of this helps to make the film more palatable by providing interest beyond the violent acts perpetrated by its heartless protagonist.

The fractures in Japanese society on display in the film manifest themselves in an equally fractured narrative. The film is achronological and jumps between past and present and eventually metamorphoses into scenes from a novel written by Ryurei, the journalist. This further stylizes the movie and further distances the audience from the violence. The end result is a movie that is visually and thematically arresting, although it is by no means pleasant. The question is, is that enough? Maybe, but it sure is violent...