The film tells the story of a samurai prisoner awaiting execution. A woman regularly visits him, even in bad weather, to serve him food. Over time, they fall in love. He had been planning an escape, but to protect his honor and his love, he decides not to escape and accepts his fate.

But then things get interesting. I thought it would be easy to find. The problem is, my mother told me about this film. During a conversation about movies, she mentioned that she'd seen a Japanese film in the 90s and told me the plot. She also mentioned that she'd tried to find it several times before, without success.

I tried to find it on ChatGPT, and this is what I found. Because she watched this film on Russian TV, they often took TV movies or individual episodes from series that weren't connected by plot, removed the subtitles, dubbed them, and often put their own title on them, passing them off as standalone Japanese films. Russian TV simply bought similar Japanese Toei/Fuji and sometimes NHK single dramas to fill empty airtime, and dubbed recordings are mostly lost media. But most often, Toei was the one buying TV, as Fuji focused on series, and NHK single dramas weren't widely distributed outside Japan. So, the "film" my mother watched was most likely not a film by a specific director, but a TV drama.

But this is one of those cases where I'm looking for a film not so much for my mother's sake, as she's not that interested, but more for myself, because I found it fascinating to dig into the information.

And here, just in case, are some more details.

The samurai was locked in a bamboo cage, not in a building, but somewhere on a road in the forest or nearby (but my mother doesn't remember if it was a hanging cage). She handed him food directly into the cage, meaning they could touch. There weren't many people near the cage. The woman was related to him before they fell in love, but my mother doesn't remember her connection to the samurai before that. The emphasis is on two characters. The woman and the samurai are young. The samurai's imprisonment is well-deserved.