Vengeance Is Mine

The film opens with Iwao Enokizu being brought to a police station, where an angry mob and a flood of journalists surround him. Police interrogate him, but he refuses to answer, signaling a defiant, enigmatic killer who will not reveal his motives.

Flashbacks reveal Enokizu tricking two men, killing them, and stealing their money before vanishing. The killings establish his pattern of calculated violence and set the manhunt in motion.

He travels to another city and asks a taxi driver to take him to an inn where he can obtain a prostitute. There he tells Haru's innkeeper that he is a professor at Kyoto University in order to gain trust.

Police bulletins with his face appear on television as the search for the fugitive widens. Media coverage heightens public pressure and signals an imminent confrontation.

The prostitute suspects the professor is Enokizu, but she is advised not to approach the police because of her own occupation. This warning leaves the truth unsettled and helps the killer slip by for a while longer.

A flashback ties together Enokizu's troubled childhood—he is the rebellious son of a Catholic father, Shizuo—with his postwar fraud conviction. The bleak family dynamics foreshadow the patterns of control and deception that follow him.

Kazuko divorces Enokizu but, moved by Shizuo's Catholic beliefs, agrees to remarry him. After their remarriage, a bath scene shows Shizuo coldly rebuffing Kazuko, highlighting his cold, calculating nature.

Shizuo later persuades a railway worker to sleep with Kazuko to satisfy her desires. Enokizu, newly released from prison, grows suspicious of a dalliance and accuses Kazuko of cheating while he was incarcerated.

Enokizu travels to Tokyo, manipulates the bail money of a young defendant by duping the defendant's mother. He then befriends a lawyer, kills him, and uses the lawyer's apartment to hide the victim's body.

Haru and her mother realize that the man calling himself the professor is the wanted killer, but they keep the truth a secret. Enokizu and Haru begin a tentative relationship as the danger around them deepens.

Haru is raped by a benefactor who uses her as his mistress, while her mother and Enokizu are forced to watch silently. The brutal scene underscores the powerlessness of the victims and the killer's control over their fates.

Convinced Haru is carrying his child, Enokizu kills both Haru and her mother and pawns their goods for money. This murder marks a peak in his spree and seals the fates of those around him.

Five years later, Enokizu has been executed and cremated. His father and wife go to a mountain to scatter his ashes, but the thrown bones remain hanging in the air, leaving an eerie, unresolved image.