When Japan transitioned from 264 years of rule under the military-led Tokugawa Shogunate to the restoration of imperial power during the Meiji era, it embarked on a path of rapid modernization. This modernization came at an enormous cost, a cost that was borne primarily by the already repressed members of Japan's society - the impoverished rural women, the female factory laborers, and the sex industry workers.
Born during the latter part of the Meiji era, a former geisha and prostitute, Abe Sada was elevated to celebrity status after committing the most heinous crime in 20
th
century Japan. After being convicted and imprisoned for strangling and emasculating her lover with a kitchen knife, she became the subject of countless articles, books, and movies. Although she remains very famous in Japan, not much is known about her life outside of Japan except for what was depicted in the sexploitation film
In the Realm of the Senses.
Of the countless works produced about her, very few have dared to faithfully examine her life or to discuss the series of tragic events which pushed her to commit the crime.
In
Nickname: Flower of Evil
, you are invited to travel back to the newly modernized, male-dominated, misogynistic, post-Tokugawa era in Japan, where women were deprived of their economic independence, subjected to the will of the household heads, and sold into the sex industry. This was the world into which Abe Sada was born, raised, and forced to survive.