ABSTRACT
Both Shohei Ooka's MusashinoFujin(Lady Musashino, 1950) andKenji Mizoguchi's film version (1951) are set in the heady democratic climate ofpostwar Japan, a time that saw an evolution of the civil code. Adultery as a crime had ceased to exist. It vanished from the statute books as the 1947 civil code evolved along more "democratic" lines in postwar Japan. But of course the human fact of adultery persisted, taking on new meaning, even new urgency, as Japanese society looked for ways to renegotiate the moral terms of this tricky and sometimes tragic phenomenon.
