Epitome (film)

Ginko (Nobuko Otowa), daughter of a poor shoemaker, is sold to work as a geisha in a brothel in Tokyo to support her family. Although made the madam after the death of the owner's wife, she suffers so much from the violence inflicted by the abusive owner, that her father buys her back. To help the family and her sick father, she starts working in a brothel in Hokkaido. There she meets a man who is seemingly willing to make Ginko his wife, but his upper-class family demands that he marries a woman of equal social status. Back in Tokyo working at still another brothel, she catches pneumonia and is carried home to die, but in the end her younger sister Tokiko dies and she lives. The last scene shows her again as a geisha, entertaining a group of customers.

• Nobuko Otowa as Ginko
• Isuzu Yamada as Tamiko
• Sumiko Hidaka as Somefuku
• Sō Yamamura as Wakabayashi
• Akira Yamauchi as Kuramochi
• Tanie Kitabayashi as Oshima
• Jūkichi Uno as Ginzō
• Taiji Tonoyama as Yamada
• Ichirō Sugai as Isogai
• Sadako Sawamura as Isogai's wife
• Osamu Takizawa as Ino
• Chikako Hosokawa as Fujikawa's owner
• Masao Shimizu as Nagase
• Yuriko Hanabusa as Kuramochi's mother
• Yōichi Numata as Kurisu

• Epitome at IMDb