It's a classy Nikkatsu Roman Porno (i.e. skin flick), with a heavyweight script, serious performances and lots of horror. Bloody hell, these people are monsters. Their lifestyles and relationships (in two eras: 1913 and 1932) are twisted enough to be hard to follow unless you're paying close attention. We have:

1. SADANOSUKE, a businessman who sponsors theatre troupes and lets his wife sleep with all the actors. (She tells her lovers that her husband knows everything she does.) He also has a mistress, Shino, and a bodyguard, Toudo, who are in love with each other. I think it turns him on.

2. SHINO turns bitchy when Toudo says they can't go on like this. "You'll always be a nobody. I'll say it. You're a coward. Hitting women is about your level. If you hate me that much, I'd be happy to ruin everything for you." I understand her feelings about being dumped by Toudo, but she's an idiot. For the rest of her life, she keeps running away from him no matter how hard he searches and doesn't speak to him even when he's kneeling by her deathbed.

3. TOUDO's response to the above was to give Shino a kicking, then later he accepted a job from Sadanosuke to murder her or something. (It's ambiguous, but the important bit is ensuring that the boss never meets Shino and her daughter Kyouko.) Nineteen years later, a repentant Toudo at last finds them... with Shino on the point of death and Kyouko determined to follow her mother into prostitution. What does Toudo do? Answer: he punches Kyouko in the stomach and kidnaps her.

We see infertility and an alarmingly pragmatic attitude to babies. Much time is spent in whorehouses and we see that the working girls there sometimes get stab-happy. Either they're after revenge for stealing each other's customers or they're committing a coital murder-and-suicide, with wild blood sprays. Girls get hung from the ceiling and whipped. Will there be incest? You'd be surprised if there weren't. This film is full of bastards, idiots, prostitutes and sordid sexual dealings. There's not the slightest chance of a happy ending. Instead, we'll have whorehouse thugs, swordsmen and a bloodbath ending with a whole lot of killing.

The sex scenes are censored in a crude 1973 way that's more distracting than actual sex would have been.

Does Toudo go insane? Quite possibly. Do we care about anyone here? Kyouko, perhaps, but she's damaged, hostile and heading for a bad end. (The same actress plays both Shino and Kyouko and gives a powerful, no-holds-barred performance.) This is an impressive film that's approaching literature, but it's absolutely no fun.