Epitome (縮図, Shukuzu) is a 1953 Japanese drama film written and directed by Kaneto Shindō,[1][2][3] based on an unfinished novel by Shūsei Tokuda.
[4][5] Ginko, daughter of a poor Tokyo shoemaker, is sold to work as a geisha in a brothel in Chiba to support her family.
There she meets Kuramochi who is seemingly willing to make Ginko his wife, but his upper-class family demands that he marries a woman of equal social status.
In their 1959 book The Japanese Film – Art & Industry, Donald Richie and Joseph L. Anderson described Epitome as "so excessively explicit that there were parts where one could scarcely bear to look at the screen", resuming that its attempted move towards naturalism was in parts "quite successful".
[6] Comparing Epitome with Kōzaburō Yoshimura's two years earlier (and also Shindō-scripted) Clothes of Deception, film historian Alexander Jacoby saw Shindo's view of the geisha system "less resigned, and more bluntly critical".