Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s stately, meticulously composed period drama, set in 16th-century Japan, is a tense and metaphysical whodunit with the director’s characteristic philosophical overtones.
Abandoned by her family as an unwed mother and sold as a prostitute to soldiers by a traveling salesman, Josephine Monaghan (Suzy Amis) decides to live as a man. As ‘Jo,’ she settles in the shabby mining town of Ruby City and becomes a frontiersman.