Sanshō's son Tarō, the second-in-charge, is a much more humane master and convinces the children to survive before they can escape to find their mother.

At work, Anju hears a song from a new slave girl from Sado which mentions her and her brother in the lyrics, leading her to believe their mother is still alive.

Zushiō is ordered to take Namiji, an older woman who is acutely ill, out of the slave camp to die in the wilderness.

Anju accompanies them and while they break branches to provide covering for the dying woman, they recall a similar act from their earlier childhood.

However, after Zushiō's escape, Anju commits suicide by walking into a lake, drowning herself so that she will not be tortured and forced to reveal her brother's whereabouts.

He then tells Zushiō that his exiled father died the year before and offers him the post of the governor of Tango, the province where Sanshō's manor is situated.

Realizing she is his mother, he reveals his identity to her, but Tamaki, who has gone blind, assumes he is a trickster until he gives her the statuette of Kannon, which she recognizes by touch.

In 2022, Sight and Sound repeated the poll, and Sansho the Bailiff came in joint 75th place, tied with Spirited Away and Imitation of Life.

[6] The New Yorker film critic Anthony Lane wrote in his September 2006 profile on Mizoguchi, "I have seen Sansho only once, a decade ago, emerging from the cinema a broken man but calm in my conviction that I had never seen anything better; I have not dared watch it again, reluctant to ruin the spell, but also because the human heart was not designed to weather such an ordeal.

"[8] Fred Camper, writing in The Little Black Book of Movies (edited by Chris Fujiwara), calls Sansho "one of the most devastatingly moving of films".

In 1990, producers Robert Michael Geisler and John Roberdeau (Streamers, The Thin Red Line) commissioned director Terrence Malick to write a stage play based on Sansho the Bailiff.

It was directed by Andrzej Wajda with sets and costumes by Eiko Ishioka, lighting by Jennifer Tipton, sound by Hans Peter Kuhn, choreography by Suzushi Hanayagi, and a large cast, including Lui Chink.