A Woman's Gamble

Onna no Toba, is the first film in long-running series Daiei Studio's Woman Gambler with Kyoko Enami starring where she plays the woman gambler Ogin. The series gets cited on lists of action yakuza films or woman avenger films, but once the films are actually viewed, it is quickly obvious they are not generally about action except in the nominal sense of acts of gambling. And while Ogin is in fact sometimes motivated by revenge, she is not as a rule a martial artist or a killer, & this series tends to place its female hero as far away from the "action babe" method as she can get. Ogin is an honest dealer in the criminal underworld of yakuza-run gambling. She is samurai-like in that she sets out to become Japan's number one dealer, much as a samurai might go on his "warrior's pilgrimage" to become Japan's number one swordsman.