Pouty-faced Yumiko Nogawa, who lent intense pathos as Gate of Flesh’s tragic heroine, reteamed with Suzuki to play an even more emotionally unguarded figure in the following year’s Story of a Prostitute, which again concerns itself with libidos, machismo and forbidden romance in a military milieu. Adapting the popular Taijiro Tamura novel Shunpu den, itself previously brought to the screen in 1950 as Desertion at Dawn, Suzuki only further stresses the antiwar ethos that met controversy from Occupation censors at the time of the earlier film’s release.

Nogawa plays one of many “comfort women” shipped to the frontlines of the Sino-Japanese War to gratify deprived soldiers, but a developing affection for her assigned commander’s aide jeopardizes her job performance. A doomed love scenario develops in the shadowy backrooms of the Japanese post, then intensifies when Chinese forces capture the lovers in the middle of an exploding battlefield. Unleashing an arsenal of dynamic tracking shots, chiaroscuro lighting and agonized freeze-frames, Suzuki gradually pushes Story of a Prostitute to the hot-blooded extremes of melodrama.