critical atmosphere of exoticism that audiences don’t think to make a connection between the whispered damage and the strange reluctance. That would break the lovely oriental spell. Film-goers don’t have any difficulty with the idea that, say, My Beautiful Laundrette is ‘about’ Thatcherism, but would never dare to wonder if Late Spring doesn’t refer in some way to sexual trauma. Cultures that put certain styles of femininity on a pedestal can be very punitive to the unprotected and unrespectable.

Isn’t it as if an academic industry had grown up around Henry James’s magnificent suggestiveness, his occluded precision, with no one quite liking to mention the passage where the governess remembers the strange day when Maisie came home in tears without her unmentionables? (Please note: I know of no such passage. This for analogical purposes only. One bombshell per essay quite enough.)

The test of a worthwhile interpretation is that it should enrich the work of art rather than impoverish it. If Noriko was raped or sexually abused in the course of her forced wartime labour, away from the protection of her father and her class status, then it certainly explains her deep aversion to the sexual venture of marriage. Every other element in the film remains in place, though her susceptibility to Hattori gains in poignancy. Only feeble interpretations, of which there are plenty, need to move over or look around nervously for the exit.

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