Sonoko, a bored housewife entering middle age, met a young girl, Mitsuko, at a private school of art. Read More »
Tag Archives: Ayako Wakao
Koshoku ichidai otoko / A Lustful Man (1961) Yasuzô Masumura, Raizô Ichikawa, Ayako Wakao, Tamao Nakamura, Comedy, Drama
Fascinated with women from an early age, Yonosuke had his first sexual encounter at the age of seven. Read More »
Karakkaze yarô / Afraid to Die (1960) Yasuzô Masumura, Yukio Mishima, Ayako Wakao, Keizô Kawasaki, Crime, Drama
A group of yakuza is hired to break a strike and an antihero of his former law partners faces while trying to escape the clutches of a murderer to asthmatic salary.
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Nise daigakusei / A False Student (1960) Yasuzô Masumura, Ayako Wakao, Jerry Fujio, Jun Fujimaki, Comedy, Drama
Nise Daigakusei is an odd, straightforward youth drama by Yasuzo Masamura, set in a Japanese university which is home to a group of active, leftist students. Read More »
Aozora Musume / The Blue Sky Maiden (1957) Yasuzô Masumura, Ayako Wakao, Keizô Kawasaki, Kenji Sugawara, Comedy, Drama
Ayako Wakao plays good-natured Yuko, the illegitimate daughter of a well-off executive, raised in the country by relatives. Journeying to Tokyo she finds Father’s Western-style house to be a nest of vipers straight out of There’s Always Tomorrow, replete with Terrible Children, a housekeeper who sees all, and a dog named Cal with his own doghouse. But Yuko meets it all with aplomb; she’s interested in one thing only, finding her real, cast off mother.
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A Woman’s Testament / Jokyo (1960) Kon Ichikawa, Yasuzô Masumura, Ayako Wakao, Hiroshi Kawaguchi, Jirô Tamiya, Drama, Romance
The first story concerns an attractive young woman who works in a Tokyo nightclub. Her plan for a solid financial future has a double whammy. She is investing in a company on the one hand, and on the other, taking action to snare the son of the company’s owner in matrimonial bliss. In the second story, a beautiful young woman is employed by an unscrupulous real estate agent to convince male clients to invest in worthless property. A scrub in the tub usually does the trick. The last story is about a widowed geisha who has no real financial worries and when she falls in love with a forger, she opts to wait for him after he is sent to prison, rather than follow societal or family dictates.
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Red Angel / Akai tenshi (1966) Yasuzô Masumura, Ayako Wakao, Shinsuke Ashida, Yûsuke Kawazu, Drama, Romance, War
In 1939, Sakura Nishi is a young army nurse who is sent to the field hospitals in China during the Sino-Japanese war. She has to assist the surgeon Dr. Okabe with an incredible number of amputations. In the crowded wards, she gives sympathy to some of the soldiers, including sexually servicing one who has lost both arms and has no hope of returning home. She falls in love with Dr. Okabe, and follows him to the front, even though he is impotent from his morphine addiction.
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Irezumi (1966) Yasuzô Masumura, Ayako Wakao, Akio Hasegawa, Gaku Yamamoto, Drama
In this elegant proto-feminist shocker from Yasuzo Masumuro, a woman forced into prostitution wreaks her spidery revenge. A mysterious tattoo artist puts his masterpiece, a human-faced spider, on a kidnapped woman’s back. She and her lover are then forced into a conspiracy-born nightmare, where they face the danger of becoming the very evil they seek to escape. With each new bloody incident, the spider’s face seems to redden with ever-growing hunger…
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