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Half Empty | Marty's Notes On "The Life of Oharu" (706 words) |
 | She is banished form place to place, finding a home in steadily lower positions until she hits rock bottom, and becomes deathly ill. It is at this point that she is invited to the palace to be rejoined with her son so that the narrative can be seen as completing a full circle. |
| Twice Oharu's shaky relationships with the "wives" lead to her banishment, and her pragmatic friendship with the nun is juxtaposed with her acceptance by the prostitutes. |
| Oharu is not in positions where she can make active decisions about herself and her life, relying on the judgements of her father and other male figures to decide her path. |
| Bright Lights Film Journal | The Life of Oharu (806 words) |
| Oharu's refusal to live outside her own moral code, her inability to compromise by following feudal custom that demands total submission from women, is her undoing from the start, and repeats itself in a series of wrenching sequences that see her steadily, systematically decline. |
| But Oharu's degradation continues when a man hires the now decrepit whore; he turns out to be a pilgrim who brings her to a group of acolytes for the purpose of ridicule and moral instruction. |
| Oharu's status as a helpless submissive to a malevolent world of men is everywhere evident, but perhaps most subtly symbolized during an entertainment where a small Oharu-like hand puppet is manipulated and made to "act" for the amusement of the audience. |
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