General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20264 min read

Woman in the Lake

Woman in the Lake (女のみづうみ, Onna no mizumi, also translated as Woman of the Lake) is a 1966 Japanese drama film directed by Yoshishige Yoshida (also romanized Yoshida Kijū), starring Mariko Okada and freely adapted from Yasunari Kawabata's 1954 novel The Lake.¹^•² It was the first film produced by Gendai Eigasha, the independent company Yoshida founded in 1966 with his wife and partner Okada after leaving the Shochiku studio.¹

Key fact	Detail
Native title	女のみづうみ (Onna no mizumi), with copyright © 1966 Shochiku Co., Ltd.¹^•³
Director	Yoshishige Yoshida (Yoshida Kijū), one of Shochiku's "new wave" directors who went independent⁴
Source	Yasunari Kawabata's 1954 novel The Lake, freely adapted²^•¹
Cast	Okada Mariko, Tsuyuguchi Shigeru, Hayakawa Tamotsu, Natsu Keiko¹
Screenplay	Toshirô Ishidô and Yasuko Ōno⁵
Release	27 August 1966, Japan; 35 mm black-and-white²^•⁶
Runtime	102 minutes per most catalogs; Japan Society lists 94 minutes for its Shochiku print²^•⁶

Spoilers

Plot

Mizuki Miyako has been married for eight years. She appears happy, but has grown tired of a husband who shows interest in nothing but his work.¹ She begins an affair with Kitano, a young interior decorator, and permits him to take nude photographs of her.¹ On her way home from the hotel the photos are stolen by an assailant, and she faces threats of blackmail from an anonymous stranger.¹^•⁶ After a train accident she meets Sakurai Ginpei, the alleged assailant, and develops a purer love for him.¹

Festival catalogs describe the result as "a fractured and obscure narrative filmed with striking photography", in which it is hard to tell where character ends and texture begins.⁷^•⁶

Cast and production

The film stars Okada Mariko, with Tsuyuguchi Shigeru, Hayakawa Tamotsu, and Natsu Keiko in the cast.¹ The screenplay is credited to Toshirô Ishidô and Yasuko Ōno.⁵

An independent production. Yoshida had left Shochiku after Escape from Japan and formed his own production company with Okada, beginning a series of films featuring her.⁴ Gendai Eigasha's first film was Woman in the Lake; Shochiku nonetheless holds the copyright and supplied prints for later international screenings.¹^•³^•⁶

Adaptation of Kawabata's novel

Kawabata's The Lake is a collection of a man's memories of the many women he knew while living around a lake. The film departs radically from the novel: it eliminates the central male character and replaces him with a single female protagonist, who never goes near a lake.⁴ The Hong Kong festival program describes Kawabata's impressionistic text as transformed into a profoundly sensual film in which a married woman, fearing exposure of her affair, is forced to confront her bondage to men.⁷

Style and themes

The film continues the theme of female sexuality from Yoshida's previous film A Story Written with Water, using the motif of a woman in a photograph to question the relationship between the imaginary and the real.¹ Almost none of the film was shot in a studio: it was filmed almost entirely on location, much of it at night, with many striking images in extreme telephoto.⁴ The score by Sei Ikeno, written for flute and harp, consists of about eight bars of near tone-row material that repeats throughout, becoming jazzy during the movie-crew scenes.⁴

Okada has no actual nude scene; the bare-breasted photograph hides the face and is certainly a body double.⁴

Reception and legacy

Program notes have characterized the film's treatment of sexual encounters as "in the manner of a fogbound documentary and the nocturnal gravity of a requiem," and as a surrealist erotic story reminiscent of Antonioni's visual universe and some of Bergman's formal experiments.⁶ The HKIFF Cine Fan catalog compares it to Antonioni's L'Avventura (1960).⁷ A Chinese-language database entry likewise notes Antonioni's shadow and credits the film with breaking from traditional Japanese perspectives to release female passion while retaining the lingering mood of Kawabata's literary imagery.⁸

Retrospective commentary places the film within the 1960s independent Japanese art-film current alongside directors such as Teshigahara and Hani, and notes that its comprehensible situation makes it easier to watch than many other independent art films of the era.⁴ The film has continued to circulate internationally at festivals and retrospectives on Shochiku prints.⁶

Release details and catalog discrepancies

The film was released in Japan on 27 August 1966.²^•³ It was shot on 35 mm in black-and-white.⁶

Two attribution details vary across catalogs. Runtime is given as 102 minutes by Viennale, AllMovie, HKIFF, aniSearch, and IMDb, but as 94 minutes by Japan Society for the 35 mm print it screened.¹^•²^•⁷^•⁵^•⁶ The director's name appears both as Yoshishige Yoshida (AllMovie, HKIFF) and as Kiju / Yoshida Kijū (Japan Society, Viennale); both romanizations refer to the same director.²^•⁶^•¹

References

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026