Juzo Itami and I, we go way back. During the first term in which I lived in Japan (from 2005-2007), I used to check out any Japanese movie I could find in the video stores that happened to possess English subtitles. For me, it was exciting to discover these movies that were virtually unknown in the USA, and I would watch almost anything regardless of genre as long as it had those coveted English glosses to the dialogue. However, one director I quickly became leery of was Juzo Itami. His films always came with English subtitles, and I could recognize the covers on sight because of the distinctive smeary-painted artwork (which, I didn’t realize, he did himself—he was a man of many talents). The thing is, after watching The Funeral (1984) and being mildly disturbed by some of the sexual content, I eventually picked up A Taxing Woman and it broke little sensitive me from the first scene. After that, for years I avoided Itami, and only watched his most famous film, the “ramen western” Tampopo (1985), because I found a cheap copy and had heard so many good things about it. But there is something raw and subversive and messily erotic that marks Itami as a unique voice in cinema, and it’s something I didn’t understand at the time—and that lack of understanding bothered me. Having recently visited the Juzo Itami Memorial Museum in Matsuyama, Shikoku, I really wanted to revisit the man’s works—and the perfect film just had to be the one that turned me so definitively off so many years ago. The question is, did it turn me off again in 2025?

The story: scammer extraordinaire Hideki Gondo (Tsutomu Yamazaki, High and Low [1963]) works a diabolical web of financial distortions with his mistress(es), and he draws the attention of an up-and-coming female tax agent. That tax agent, Ryoko Itakura (Nobuko Miyamoto, who married Itami for a time, and is most famous for her many collaborations with him) encounters Gondo early in her career, but is unable to pin him down (though Gondo seems to want to pin her down in another fashion). After she achieves official tax agent status (we witness a series of vignettes in which she breaks various comical tax-fraud cases through genius tactics), Itakura is overjoyed at a second chance to take down Gondo with the full backing of the tax agency and their police-like enforcers. Naturally, Gondo has other ideas, and with his sophisticated tax subterfuge and lady-killing charms, he won’t go down easy… But who is it that is really the villain here, and is there a happy ending for anyone?

Much of the strength of the film comes out of the central tension of whether going by the book (the law) is actually a better road than the slimy trails taken by the scammers and cheats of the world, which probably comes from Itami’s personal ambivalence, his own self-proclaimed lack of values and pessimism.[i] And I don’t think the movie gives a definitive answer, forcing the viewers to take a side or work out what they think themselves—provided they can get a chance to think during some of the films chaotically hilarious comedic collages.

Though there are many peripheral characters of great personality worthy of comment, the central pair are easily Gondo and Itakura, who are created as funhouse mirror images of each other. Both Gondo and Itakura are passionate about what they do, meticulous in their pursuit, dogged and with broken marriages or absent partners (and both have a son, not with each other). But where Gondo is an image of sleazy lasciviousness, Itakura almost seems sexless, a living symbol of the tax book. Neither of them seems to care about the lives they may be ruining with their pursuit of money… though I think there is a hint that Gondo, despite his very poor character traits, may be the more righteous of the two by Itami’s lights.

The first scam we see Gondo carrying out is by working a rich old man into signing over his money right before he dies of cancer. Gondo does this by employing his mistress to pleasure the old man with her body, making the victim happy on his way to the grave. We never see the old man in despair over the scam—really we only see him excitedly sucking away at Gondo’s mistress’s breast in the opening scene, and then later dead and peaceful. Was it really so evil for Gondo to take the old man’s wealth when the wrinkled codger couldn’t make or take cents in the grave and didn’t have much for relatives to leave his silver either? We don’t really see anyone suffering from Gondo’s money scams (though the same can’t be said for his womanizing…), and Yamazaki is wicked charming, taking on a pronounced limp as he straddles the world for more dough as he crosses into the viewers’ hearts.

Itakura, too, is charming in that watching someone excel in their work is a vicarious thrill. She takes down tax fraud after tax fraud as they scream and wail about the loss of their livelihoods. Yet while it is always clear that the scammers are indeed deliberate and dishonest (sometimes with comically fake tears), these money-chasers are tragicomic at worst. Some of Itakura’s targets are mostly small-time frauds who appear to be scraping by on their lies, or at any rate might be understandable in their scramble against the Man, wanting to live a better life than the tax brackets might “honestly” allow. We see her stare down small-town business owners who break down as they are faced with their “sins,” and one of the best sequences in the movie shows a multi-pronged anti-fraud series of raids with dozens of small-time criminals chased down, their creatively-stowed tax documents and fraudulent hanko stamps pulled from their secret chambers in love-hotel rooms and lipstick tubes respectively. We see the tax agents literally cornering a desperate woman on a rooftop. It’s funny, but it’s also horrific because everyone knows what always comes for us in this life, and at least death doesn’t demand us to fill in labyrinthine documents every year we can’t understand. Yet, for most of the film, Itakura blindly accepts that hellish enforcement role.[ii]

Toshiyuki Honda infuses the film with a snazzy, brassy jazz score with a cheeky ear-worm theme that repeats to the point of annoyance over Itakura’s exploits. The main theme of A Taxing Woman is distinctive enough to be iconic, but overused like Beverly Hills Cop’s dance-pop anthem, to the point Honda’s quirky, clicking, blurting melody may curl deep in your cochlear region and resurface like a droning ring tone.

Donald Richie noted in his A Hundred Years of Japanese Film that Itami considered his films like essays (Itami was also an essayist, an actor, an artist, etc), that he was “writing” about the traditional Japanese life, that Japanese people tended to live a cloned-lifestyle where everyone is a twin to their neighbor, almost as if his movies were meant to be a universal Japanese memoir. Roger Ebert makes mention of this “movies as essay” philosophy in his mixed review for the film (he thought A Taxing Woman is not a focused essay and doesn’t quite come together). Nevertheless, Ebert remarked that Itami was attempting to cover the four bases of life in his first films—death, food, taxes, and the ever-present underlying eroticism that adds a gooey center to his movies, giving a holistic description. If that was Itami’s intention to depict Japan as a uniform society, it strikes me that his characters in this film are anything but monotone, and Itami himself refused to walk a normal path through Japanese society (which may have led to his death, depending on who you believe). He was a maverick in his way, and even his name Juzo was self-ascribed—it was simply the number 13.[iii] Movies were a late addition to an already long-and-successful career, with his first film released after he turned 50. A Taxing Woman succeeds as much as it does by embracing the absurdity of life, by grabbing hold and staring wild-eyed but steady at the grotesque beauty and paradoxical whirl of our money obsessed, life-drained world. Itami still makes me uncomfortable, but I think part of that is his work acts like a spur, that his cockeyed viewpoint is meant to yank our eyes in a new direction and force us to look again.

A Taxing Woman is a flurry of cynical fun with uncomfortably relatable characters and a searing sense of humor that stimulates the gray matter to be less gray and consider the wider colors of society through our obsessions with money and society’s stifling control on our happiness. The movie veers into bawdy laughs in awkward and shocking scenes, but this, too, is like a kick in the knickers. It’s well worth a thoughtful, grinning watch with your more thick-skinned loved ones.

[i] In an interview reprinted in Mark Schilling’s Contemporary Japanese Film, Itami states, “I don’t believe in anything, because I’m a pessimist. I tend to look at things in a pessimistic way, so my films naturally become comedies.” Despite saying this, during Schilling’s interview, Itami is shown to have a wide-range of strong opinions, often harshly criticizing Japan and its insularity, strict hierarchies, lack of strong men of character, and youth pursuing too much pleasure without enough self-control. It’s possible to take from these statements and look anew at Gondo and his weakness as a father, or his relentless pursuit of women, as expressions of some of Itami’s concerns. Itami also speaks at length about how Japanese live in their own circles and cannot see outside of those circles, and how this perspective causes limited harmony but wider societal problems, that people have “no connection to the outside world”—which could be seen in Itakura’s single-minded pursuit of adherence to her personal circle of interest, the arcane and befuddling tax system, and her inability at first to see outside of that circle.

[ii]For what it’s worth, the Japanese title for the film, “Marusa no Onna,” literally means “Tax Inspector Woman,” but the word “marusa” has a unique origin very different from the double meaning of the English title (“taxing” can mean difficult, and it can mean… well, something related to tax). The Japanese word is a combination of the kanji for “circle” and the kanji for “inspection” because the mark of the tax invasion division (doubtlessly stamped with a hanko) is the kanji for “inspection” with a circle around it. If my reading is correct, that Itami is exploring the idea of Itakura trapped in her societal “circle” and blind by her obsessed adherence to the tax-world’s doctrines, the title itself may encapsulate her absorption into inspection. She is the inspector trapped in that circle. However, anyone who as seen the title written in Japanese knows “marusa” here is written in katakana, which is a legitimate way to write the word (you can write “marusa” in all hiragana as まるさ, all kanji as丸査, a combination of katakana and kanji as マル査,  as a combination of katakana and hiragana asマルさ, or entirely in katakana as マルサ). I am completely speculating here, and I kind of doubt this was intentional, but I have a pet theory here. Writing a word in katakana in Japanese can stress a foreign origin or otherwise highlight a word, emphasize it. What I would like to believe is that, with her job written in an emphasized fashion that often indicates foreign origin, the implication may be that Itakura herself may be able to break out of her circle and embrace something outside of herself after the conclusion. Maybe that will be the case in the sequel.

[iii] The main, permanent exhibit in the Itami Memorial Museum is split into thirteen sections to illustrate Itami’s multifaceted life. I was puzzled at the reading of his name—“thirteen” is not normally read as “juuzo” (the “ju” has an elongated vowel), and I asked the staff if he was like the thirteenth son (he wasn’t) and if there are other names that read “three” as “zo.” The staff member replied that there were indeed, and named Shinzo Abe (the former prime minister) as an example.