An Innocent Witch (Heinosuke Gosho, 1965)

Jitsuko Yoshimura in An Innocent Witch

Ayako Oshima: Jitsuko Yoshimura
Kikuno: Kin Sugai
Kansuke Yamamura: Taiji Tonoyama
Kanjiro Toda: Minoru Terada
Kanichi Yamamura: Keizo Kawasaki
Father: Yoshio Yoshida
Shaman: Eijiro Tono
Narrator: Takayuki Akutagawa

Director: Heinosuke Gosho
Screenplay: Hideo Horie
Based on a novel by Hajime Ogawa
Cinematography: Sozaburo Shinomura
Art direction: Totetsu Hirakawa
Film editing: Sadako Ikeda
Music: Sei Ikeno

An Innocent Witch begins like a documentary, with a voiceover narration describing the pilgrimages to Mount Osore, where the faithful gather to ask blind seers to facilitate communication with their dead loved ones. One of the pilgrims is Kikuno, who wants to speak with her daughter, Ayako. As the seer goes into her trance, the film switches abruptly to a conventional narrative in which we learn that Ayako was sold -- willingly, it seems -- into prostitution by her mother because Ayako's father is too ill to continue supporting the family as a fisherman and gatherer of seaweed. (The father is never told about Ayako's work as a prostitute; he thinks only that she has gone to the city to earn more money.) In the brothel, Ayako loses her virginity to her first customer, a wealthy lumber wholesaler named Kansuke. Pleased with the young woman, Kansuke becomes Ayako's regular customer. Then one evening a shy young man named Kanjiro arrives with his fellow military cadets and Ayako relieves him of his virginity. They begin to fall in love, but just before he is called up for service, Kanjiro realizes that his own father, Kansuke, has been one of Ayako's customers. Kansuke, it turns out, has been aware that Kanjiro has also been seeing Ayako, and doesn't really mind sharing her with his son. But Ayako has promised Kanjiro that she won't see his father again, and when Kansuke insists on having sex with her anyway, he dies of an apparent heart attack. Soon word arrives that Kanjiro has also died at the front. The coincidence of the deaths of a father and son causes Ayako to be labeled a "femme fatale." But while visiting Kanjiro's grave, Ayako meets his older brother, Kanichi, and her involvement with this ill-fated family deepens into further tragedy. The film climaxes with Ayako seeking a kind of exorcism that will purify her of guilt, but that, too, has fatal consequences. The core story of An Innocent Witch is very well handled by screenwriter Hideo Horie and director Heinosuke Gosho, but the framing of it in the context of a documentary about the search for communication with the afterlife feels awkward, as if Horie and Gosho were trying to impose a larger statement about the consequences of superstition on the material. Ayako's story speaks for itself without extra help.