Just prior to her iconic roles in the Female Prisoner Scorpion series and the Lady Snowblood diptych, Kaji Meiko starred in Yamaguchi Kazuhiko’s Wandering Ginza Butterfly. Where those later works would cement Kaji’s status as 1970s Japanese cinema’s ice queen and cult heroine, Yamaguchi’s 1972 film finds her operating in a more naturalistic register.
As Nami, Kaji is still tough as nails, having spent time in an all-female biker gang before landing in the prison we find her in at the start. Upon her release, she’s looking to go straight, wanting to repay the kindness of Saeko (Mieko Aoyagi), the wife of the man she killed, who helped secure her early release, and help various friends, but her need for justice keeps her perpetually on the edge of violence. Through it all, the fantastic location shooting in Ginza, a district of Tokyo packed with bars, pools, and hostess clubs, adds to the film’s overall aura of danger and disarray.
To anyone familiar only with Kaji’s later roles, it’s almost jarring to bear witness to her character’s joyousness here, as Nami feels straight out of a ninkyo (or chivalrous) yakuza film. Indeed, her character is enlivened by a sense of humor and empathy, even if that comes at the cost of having only a couple brief action sequences until the very satisfying explosion of violence at the end. Still, Nami suffers no fools, stepping in at one point to steal the truck of a man who’s stiffed her friend (Mochida Mari) on a debt and playing in a tough game of billiards—in a sequence directly inspired by Robert Rossen’s The Hustler—to save the club she works at from the ruthless yakuza leader, Owada (Nanbara Kōji).
Released the same year, Wandering Ginza Butterfly: She-Cat Gambler, which Yamaguchi also co-wrote with Matsumoto Isao, is less a sequel than a re-imagining of the first film, with Nami now an expert gambler rather than a pool shark and the revenge plotline more front and center. Nami is no longer plagued by regret, instead remaining focused on finding her father’s killer (Suga Fujio), but she also looks out for various women she comes across, such as Hanae (Mitsukawa Tamase), whom Nami rescues from a yakuza gang forcing her into prostitution.
Although the film’s feminist thrust is admirable, it’s undermined by the excess of casual violence against women. And rather than leaning into the full-on exploitation filmmaking of Female Prisoner Scorpion, She-Cat Gambler moves toward broad farcical comedy that, even with Sonny Chiba as the goofy Ryuji, a pimp and Nami’s most loyal associate, the film’s wild swings between the broadest of humor and gritty violence leaves it feeling less cohesive than its predecessor. But as with Wandering Ginza Butterfly, Kaji is the selling point here, and even if Nami doesn’t get to slice and dice her way through nearly as many terrible men as her other more famous, ruthlessly violent characters, she’s as transfixing as she is mysterious.
Image/Sound
Both films have been transferred from high-def restorations, and the images are free of any blemishes, with strong details, particularly in close-ups. The color balancing is naturalistic in both its rendering of skin tones and the gritty, neon-drenched exteriors. Grain is healthy and even, while even the most chaotic swings of the camera during the action sequences show no sign of motion blurring. The mono audio is free of any hissing or pops, dialogue is clean as a whistle, and the effects in the few action scenes are perfectly layered.
Extras
In his archival audio commentary, Japanese cinema expert Chris D. ably covers Yamaguchi Kazuhiko’s career as a director, as well as his screenwriting process with Matsumoto Isao on both Wandering Ginza Butterfly films. He also provides some strong scene and character analysis throughout, and if his approach is just a tad on the dry and academic side, it balances nicely with the new audio commentary by the hosts of the Pure TokyoScope podcast, Patrick Macias and Matt Alt. This duo are quite lively and indulge in some humorous banter throughout their conversations about Toei’s typical approach to the yakuza film, Kaji Meiko’s career, the various dialects spoken in the film, and the backgrounds of the rest of the cast.
Macia and Alt also provide a new video essay about She-Cat Gambler that touches on the differences in Kaji’s character in both films and how this one embraces farce and comedy far more than the first. The disc also includes an archival interview with Yamaguchi Kazuhiko and an appreciation of Kaji by Japanese action and pink film expert J-Taro Sugisaku. A bound booklet contains an essay by Asian cinema expert Camille Zaurin, who sees the Wandering Ginza Butterfly diptych as marking a transitional point between the ninkyo (or chivalrous) yakuza film and the emergent wave of jitsuroku (actual record) films.
Overall
For those familiar with Kaji Meiko only from her iconic roles in the Female Prisoner Scorpion and Lady Snowblood series, her performances in the Wandering Ginza Butterfly films offer a look at the actress operating in a more nuanced, if less ruthlessly bone-chilling, mode.
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