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The Women in the Mirror
(Kagami no onnatachi)

Kiju Yoshida and Mariko Okada in Person + Introduction by Abé Mark Nornes
Screening on Film
$10 Special Event Tickets
Directed by Kiju Yoshida.
With Mariko Okada, Yoshiko Tanaka, Sae Isshiki.
Japan, 2002, 35mm, color, 129 min.
Japanese with English subtitles.
Print source: The Japan Foundation

For his latest film, Yoshida turned once more to melodrama as a means of sensitively engaging a difficult political issue, here the devastating legacy of the Hiroshima bombing. Mariko Okada stars, in her 154th film, as the eldest of three women trying to uncover the hidden family ties that may or may not bind them together. A shared memory of the Hiroshima disaster draws the three generations together in a search back to the very site of the atomic trauma that unites them, with Hiroshima standing in as a figure for the limit point of the national imagination. Among Yoshida's more classical films, Women in the Mirror is an assuredly stylish late work that carefully balances the three women's stories as interlocking pieces of a complex psychological and historiographic puzzle.

The Woman in the Mirror (Kagami no onnatachi) introduction and post-screening discussion with Haden Guest, Kiju Yoshida and Mariko Okada. ©Harvard Film Archive

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