A beautiful woman is kidnapped, forcibly tattooed, and then sent into service as a sex worker in Yasuzo Masumura’s iconic Japanese thriller Irezumi (1966). Ayako Wakao plays the unfortunate heroine Otsuya, whose circumstance transforms her into a classic femme fatale. It is a bold character, and one exceptionally well-played. She is well-balanced by Akio Hasegawa as Shinsuke, the hapless lover whose own moral restraints are loosened the longer Otsuya is manipulating them. The setting may be Edo-era Japan, but viewers can recognise a film noir when they see one.

Irezumi is typically considered a key work in Japan’s long history of exploitation cinema, combining as it does sex and violence, and confrontational elements of sexual assault and torture. It seems a slightly awkward fit, seeing as the events – while provocative – are not garishly depicted, and while the film can check a list of exploitation tropes and elements it can arguably do a neater job fitting the requirements of a jidai-geki period drama. It lacks the prurient edge of exploitation master Teruo Ishii, for example, but maintains a strong preponderance on matters of honour and a feudal historical setting. No surprise to find the screenplay is by Kaneto Shindo, whose own directorial works – including The Naked Island (1960), Onibaba (1964), and Kuroneko (1968) – represent 1960s Japanese cinema at its very bleakest and most powerful.

This is a film dominated by betrayal and moral compromise. Otsuya may be a victim, but she soon comes to direct her own murderous destiny. By the film’s climax, it is clear no individual character will be escaping events unscathed. Even the tattoo artist (Gaku Yamamoto), who is one of the film’s most interesting characters, ends the piece in a state of sorrow and regret. Such mournful fare is par for the course in jidai-geki, of course, but in this case the typically staid and formal aesthetic is replaced with a deliberately messy and panicky sensibility.

The film is scattered with incidents of violence, and strikingly they are unbalanced and frantic affairs. The purposeful sword duels that typify the genre make way for stumbling, slippery wrestling matches in the mud and rain. Every act of violence is a haphazard gamble, and the outcome of each fight remains perilously in doubt. Each fight is captured beautifully by cinematographer Kazuo Miyagawa, best known for Yojimbo (1961) and Rashomon (1950).

Irezumi tends to work counter to its own premise. Through her victimisation, Otsuya finds significant power. It enables her to set out on a mission of revenge, and it disrupts the power ostensibly held by the men that betray and buy her. In terms of Japanese period drama it is a powerful shift, and one that clearly had a lingering influence – not just on Ishii but Nagisa Oshima as well. Is it too far a stretch to call it a feminist work? Probably, but Masumura points Japanese cinema in the right direction.