Adapted from a best-seller credited with being Japan's first European-style psychological novel. Its protagonist is a woman determined at all costs to protect the property left her by her father. Married to a scholar absorbed in his translations of Stendhal, she finds herself unable to adapt to the postwar world.
“A late work of the Japanese master and one of his most profoundly conservative statements. The heroine Michiko is introduced in her country refuge of Musashino during World War II while Tokyo burns in the background. In the next decade, she anchors herself to ascetic, ancient traditions while her westernized husband, her mercantile relatives, her promiscuous friends, and the culturally uprooted youth of the war convulse around her. Michiko becomes one with the lovingly pastoral, placid, watery countryside, and stands apart only during a highly symbolic, tempestuous storm, when she withholds her sexuality from the only man she loves. Michiko is both the most lonely and tragic of Japanese heroines. Mizoguchi had no answers for her dilemma, but held up her destruction to his country as a symbol of the wanton assault on old, ingrained values.” --Andrew Sarris, Village Voice

(Lady of Musashino will be repeated Monday, August 17, at 9:35.)