Lady Snowblood

is a 1973 Japanese jidaigeki film directed by Toshiya Fujita and starring Meiko Kaji. Based on the manga series of the same name by Kazuo Koike and Kazuo Kamimura, the film recounts the tale of Yuki (Kaji), a woman who seeks vengeance upon three of the people who raped her mother and killed her half brother. The film's narrative is told out of chronological order, jumping between present and past events. Alongside Kaji, the film's cast includes Toshio Kurosawa, Masaaki Daimonm, Miyoko Akaza, and Kō Nishimura. Lady Snowblood was released theatrically in Japan on 1 December 1973, and was distributed by Toho. It spawned a sequel, Love Song of Vengeance (1974). Lady Snowblood served as a major inspiration for the 2003 Quentin Tarantino film Kill Bill and its lead character, The Bride. Plot In 1874, a woman named Sayo gives birth to a baby girl in a women's prison. Naming the child Yuki from seeing the snow outside, Sayo confided to the inmates who helped deliver the baby how she was brutally raped by three of the four criminals who murdered her husband Tora and their son Shiro a year ago. While she managed to stab her captor Shokei Tokuichi to death when the chance presented itself, she was arrested and imprisoned for life. Sayo then seduced many prison guards in order to conceive Yuki. Due to difficulties during the birth, she dies shortly after telling her story. Her final words were for the child to be raised to carry out the vengeance against the three remaining tormentors. In Meiji 15 (1882), the child Yuki undergoes brutal training in sword fighting under the priest Dōkai to become her mother's wrath incarnate. Yuki, now twenty and an assassin going by the name Shurayuki-hime, blocks the path of several men and a rickshaw and kills them and their leader Shibayama using a sword concealed in the handle of an umbrella. Yuki appears in a poor village looking for a man called Matsuemon, the leader of an underground organization of street beggars, and asks him to find her mother's surviving tormentors in return for having killed Shibayama for him. Matsuemon's intel leads her to Takemura Banzō, an alcoholic wreck with gambling debts whose daughter Kobue works as a prostitute to support him. After convincing the gambling house's owners to pardon Banzō after he was caught cheating in a card game, Yuki leads him to the beach and remorselessly kills him after revealing her identity.