Meiko Kaji and the art of not blinking

The image is so widely reproduced that people who have never seen the films can describe it: a woman in a black coat and wide hat, half her face in shadow, looking directly into the lens without expression.

That is Nami Matsushima, and the reason it works is that Meiko Kaji does almost nothing.

The economics she was hired into

Kaji moved to Toei in 1971 after Nikkatsu abandoned mainstream production for softcore. Toei's sukeban pictures, the female delinquent films later labelled pinky violence, were fast and cheap and formulaic, and she was cast as the lead in several of them.

The Female Prisoner Scorpion series was supposed to be four more of those. What it got instead was a first-time director, Shunya Ito, who apparently did not understand the assignment.

What she does

Kaji's performance in Scorpion is built on subtraction. She has roughly forty lines across a 90-minute film. She rarely raises her voice. Most of her scenes consist of standing still while other characters do things to her or near her, and looking.

This should not work and it completely does, for a mechanical reason: in a film where every other character is playing it broad, the shrieking guards and the cackling warden and the scheming inmates, stillness reads as the only interiority on screen. Everyone else is performing. She is there. The camera keeps finding her at the edges of frames she isn't supposed to dominate.

Ito understood what he had immediately. By the second film he is building whole sequences around her refusal to react.

The song

Kaji also recorded the theme, Urami Bushi, which means grudge song, and sang the Lady Snowblood theme Shura no Hana the following year. Quentin Tarantino used both in Kill Bill, along with the coat, the hat, the snow, the yellow, and the structure.

That has been good for her international profile and slightly bad for her reputation, since a lot of people now encounter her as a Tarantino reference rather than as the reason the reference exists.

The films to actually watch

The three Ito-directed Scorpion films (1972 and 1973) are the ones that matter. After he left, the series goes ordinary fast. Lady Snowblood (1973) is the other essential.

The Girl Boss pictures are a fair sample of what the cycle looked like without a director of Ito's ambition: energetic, well-shot, and entirely disposable. Useful for calibration.

The part that does not resolve

These are exploitation films made by men for a male audience, sexual violence is a recurring device, and the camera is not neutral about it. Kaji has talked about pushing back on nudity requirements during this period and about how far that pushback could realistically go.

Her performance does not cancel any of that. It sits inside it and declines to participate, which in a Toei prison picture in 1972 is a strange and quietly funny thing to watch an actor do.