Build a movie plot around this: Who plays "the boatman"? Hiroshi Kuze
The answer to this question is:
Christopher (Billy Drago), a Victorian era American journalist, is traveling through Japan looking for Komomo (Ito), a lost girlfriend whom he had promised to rescue from prostitution and bring to America. He travels by boat with several handfarms (Shiho Harumi, Magy, Shin'ichi Tokuhara and Takao Handa). The boat hits something, but it's not a rock - it's the dead body of a woman (Miyuki Konno). The boatman (Hiroshi Kuze) says that the body weighs a ton, so he deduces she was pregnant. When he turns her over, we can see that she was heavily pregnant. Finally landing on an island populated solely by whores and their masters, he is solicited by a syphilitic tout (Yamada). She claims no knowledge of Komomo (Michie), but Christopher has to spend the night, requesting the company of a girl (Youki Kudoh) lurking back in the shadows, who joins him in his room.Disfigured and disturbed, the girl claims a closer connection with the dead than the living. She tells him that Komomo was there, but hanged herself after her love never came for her. Distraught, Christopher seeks solace in sake. Falling asleep, he requests a bedtime story. The girl recounts her past her mother, a midwife, was forced to sell her to a brothel after her father died, and eventually she wound up on the island. Komomo was the most popular girl there, making the others jealous. When the Madam's jade ring was stolen, Komomo was tortured to confess. After suffering hideously underarms burned, needles driven under fingernails and into gums she killed herself in shame and torment.Christopher refuses to believe the girl's story, and he pleads for the whole truth. The girl starts again, in the second telling, her family is no longer happy nor loving; her father was an alcoholic, her mother an abortionist. She was taken in by a Buddhist priest, who, presumably, molested her and inspired an obsession with hell. Her father never died of lung disease she beat him to death for raping her. Again she tells of being sold into prostitution, but gives a new version...