Hotaru-bi features Chikage Awashima in a compelling portrayal of Tose, proprietress of the Teradaya Inn. An unhappy marriage without the consolation of children forces Tose to concentrate on business, through which she establishes her contacts with the ronin and samurai of the Satsuma clan, leaders of the movement to restore the Emperor to rule. But it is through her relationship with Ryoma Sakamoto, the ronin whom she protects (and) hides, that she comes to realize the relationship between her own desperation and that of the country on the whole as a result of the political repression of the Tokugawa shogunate. Hotaru-bi is a woman's film but an unusual film-one of the very few to discuss the problem of women under feudalism in a Tokugawa setting...Tose's problems not only define her as the traditional heroine, but they also define the world against which she is traditionally pitted. The traditional heroine (as opposed to the archetypal heroine) copes with her environment; Tose passes from one kind of heroine to the other and back again: the virtuous but unhappy wife, she falls in love with a man whom she loses to political struggle, and then becomes reconciled with her husband. This extraordinary film uses the rhetoric of two genres of Japanese film, not only to create a portrait of the ideal traditional woman, but to create a truly political work in the subtle delineation of the relationship between political structure and the individual. --Frank Motofuji