Notes of an Itinerant Performer

An extraordinary tracking shot along a forested mountain pass opens Hiroshi Shimizu’s melodrama on women’s limited roles in Japanese society. An itinerant or wandering performer in a theatrical troupe (considered one of the lower classes), Uta is taken in by a good-hearted tea merchant; after his death, she inherits his company (and its obligations) and must face everything from American businessmen to rival tea merchants to survive, none of whom take her seriously. (Tellingly, her main success is in forming a cooperative.) Not surprisingly for a wartime film, social obligation and female self-sacrifice are celebrated, though as ambiguously, and tragically, as the times would allow. “Notes insists on social obligation as potentially liberating,” wrote critic Chris Fujiwara. “This insistence would appear to be less conservative than anarchistic.”