Nigorie

Tadashi Imai directs three sad tales from the short stories of Ichiyo Higuchi.

In the first, Yatsuko Tan'ami visits her parents. She had made what everyone considered a brilliant marriage when she was 17, marrying a man far wealthier than her modest upbringing. However, although she has born him a son, his continual cruelty has driven her to consider divorce. On the way home, her rickshaw man turns out to be a childhood friend, who had started well, but lost everything.

In the second story, Yoshiko Kuga is a maid in a wealthy household. Her uncle has been sick and unable to work, and she is asked to get two yen to pay the interest on a loan. Her mistress had agreed, but now refuses to lend her the money, but there is 20 yen in a drawer.....

The third story is about the hard life of the Number One girl at a bar in the Yoshiwara Red Light District, who dreams of a better life; there is also a poor man with a bickering wife and a boy, who obsesses over her.

Ichiyo Higuchi was born in 1872 in modest circumstances that grew steadily worse, as her father failed in one occupation after another. At 14, she began to study at the Haginoya, a leading school of poetry. There she felt out of place amidst the rich and pretty girls. Eventually she decided to write literature about the people she knew, the poor and outcast. She died in 1896 of tuberculosis. Her formal Japanese writing is still admired, and she is considered the first important woman writer of modern Japan. In 2004, her picture appeared on the 5000-yen note, the third woman who appeared on Japanese currency .... and far more than she ever earned in her lifetime.