Set in a Japanese village, 1895.
A rickshaw puller's daughter tells him she wants to go to school. All she wants is a good life.
"Your mother said that when she was young. She hasn't had a good life at all." He says this without sympathy or sadness and seems to think this is reason for his daughter not to have good life, either.
The guy's wife starts sleeping with a much younger man who is terrible to her. It doesn't do her any good, but he forces her to help murder her husband and dump him down a well. She tells the neighbors he's working in Tokyo. He never writes because he's illiterate.
Then his ghost starts to appear to her, picking on her and not the man who played a somewhat larger role in his death.
I had seen this movie when I was high school but didn't remember it well. The husband was pitiful but not sympathetic, the boyfriend, if you can call him that, was horrible.
There's stuff about 1890's Japan. The neighbors are sure she did something but the local constable explains that in the New Japan, he needs evidence. I don't remember what information he required before he began torturing confessions out of them.
Available on the Criterion channel.
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