NOTE: The below Blu-ray captures were taken directly from the Blu-ray disc.

ADDITION: Radiance Blu-ray (September 2026): Radiance have transferred Kon Ichikawa's Ten Women In Black to Blu-ray. Radiance present the film at 2.39:1 in 1080P on a dual-layered disc, from a 4K restoration carried out by Kadokawa. What the transfer has to serve is unusually demanding for a monochrome catalogue title. Cinematographer Setsuo Kobayashi (The Burmese Harp, Play It Cool, Blind Beast, The Red Angel) and lighting director Yukio Itō (Street of Shame, 1959's Floating Weeds, Seisaku's Wife,) shot this at a contrast level far closer to late-1940s American noir than to Daiei's ordinarily softer, more modeled house monochrome - hard key light, deliberately crushed shadow, black costume against white wall as a graphic device rather than a naturalistic one. That is precisely the material most vulnerable to over-filtering, and equally the material that punishes a weak encode with banding across the large flat tonal fields Ichikawa favors. Blacks are impressively deep and the gray scale nicely modulated, with the loss of low-end shadow detail reading as intended rather than as crush. The nightmare/fantasy sequence, which shows slight blooming and softness consistent with in-camera diffusion filtration - an original photographic choice, not a transfer fault. All good - as we usually get from Radiance.

NOTE: We have added 52 more large resolution Blu-ray captures (in lossless PNG format) for DVDBeaver Patrons HERE

On their Blu-ray, Radiance use a linear PCM mono track (24-bit) in the original Japanese language. This is a soundtrack built on the contrast between density and vacancy - Kenichi Nishii's mix keeps the television studio environments in a state of constant electrical chatter and then drops the domestic scenes into near-total silence, and any attempt at expansion or artificial widening would flatten exactly the effect Ichikawa is after. Retaining the original mono uncompressed preserves the abruptness of those transitions, which is where a good deal of the film's unease is actually generated. The score is by Yasushi Akutagawa (Fires on the Plain, An Actor's Revenge,)- a serious concert composer, son of the novelist Ryūnosuke Akutagawa, and previously heard on Gate of Hell - and it is a brass-forward, jazz-inflected crime-picture idiom deliberately mismatched to the domestic farce on screen. Mono of this vintage typically shows its limits in exactly that register: brass stabs are where you'll hear any thinness, distortion or age-related hardness in the elements, so that's the material to audition. Dialogue is clean and centered; the diegetic passages, including the Hajime Hana and the Crazy Cats performance sourced as broadcast-style material and will legitimately sound more constrained than the scored cues. Radiance offer optional English subtitles on their Region FREE Blu-ray.

The Radiance Blu-ray has assembled a strong and thoughtful selection of extras. This is where the release justifies itself, and the headline item is substantial by any measure: 2006's "The Kon Ichikawa Story" (1:18:32, HD,) Shunji Iwai's feature-length documentary on the director. That is a genuine coup for a single-film release - a full-length portrait of Ichikawa by a significant filmmaker in his own right, extending far past the boundaries of the feature it accompanies and effectively functioning as the primer on Ichikawa's career that the film's marginal position in his canon otherwise denies it. Anyone coming to Ten Women in Black cold gets the whole context in one sitting. Alongside it is a new 20-minute appreciation by Yasuharu Konishi, founding member of Pizzicato Five, English-subtitled. On paper an odd choice; in practice an inspired one. Shibuya-kei as a movement was built substantially on the graphic and musical vocabulary of exactly this period of Japanese pop modernism - the monochrome 'Scope design sense, the jazz-lounge scoring, the whole 1961 urban-cool surface that Ichikawa is simultaneously deploying and satirizing here. Having that lineage traced by a musician who worked from it is more illuminating than a conventional academic commentary would have been, and it addresses the film's sound and design directly rather than treating it as a footnote to the plot. Two trailers are included - the original theatrical trailer and the 1997 re-release trailer, both HD - and the 1997 piece is worth attention as a document of the film's rediscovery. Print material comprises a booklet with a new essay by Yuka Kimbara, plus a reversible sleeve and removable obi strip, in Scanavo packaging, limited to 3,000 copies.

Ten Women In Black has been one of the more frustrating gaps in Kon Ichikawa's availability outside Japan - a genuinely peculiar, formally adventurous 1961 satire from the middle of his strongest decade, and one that has never had the circulation of Fires on the Plain or An Actor's Revenge despite arguably having more to say about the world it was made in. Radiance have treated it as a major title rather than a curio. The ensemble is one of the more remarkable gatherings of Daiei-era talent in any Ichikawa picture. Fujiko Yamamoto (The Demon of Mount Oe), as the wife, was the studio's reigning star - winner of the inaugural Miss Nippon in 1950, more than a hundred films in a decade, and lately seen for Ozu in Equinox Flower - cast here against the serene, iconic beauty that had made her, as the one woman in the film who declines to compete for her husband; two years later Daiei chief Masaichi Nagata, who produced this as well as Rashomon + Ugetsu, would refuse her a new contract, dismiss her and use the Five-Company Agreement to blacklist her from every rival studio, ending her film career at 31. Keiko Kishi, playing the diva actress, was by then the most internationally connected performer in Japanese cinema, co-founder of the independent Ninjin Club and married to the French director Yves Ciampi, with Kwaidan and The Makioka Sisters still ahead of her. Kyōko Kishida - daughter of the playwright Kunio Kishida, and Mishima's Salome on stage - was three years from the twin erotic landmarks of Woman in the Dunes and Manji, and the watchful, faintly predatory intelligence that made those performances is already fully formed here. Mariko Miyagi, a hit recording artist and Kōhaku Uta Gassen regular, plays the meekest of the ten and turns out to be the coldest; she would later found Nemunoki Gakuen, the first school of its kind in Japan for disabled children, and run it for fifty years. And Tamao Nakamura (The Human Condition III: A Soldier's Prayer,) daughter of the kabuki actor Nakamura Ganjirō II (The Lower Depths, When a Woman Ascends the Stairs, The Pornographers,) was a year away from marrying Shintarō Katsu (Zatoichi and Hanzo the Razor fame) and six decades away from a death - in June 2026 - that makes this release land as an unintended memorial. The Kadokawa restoration on Blu-ray appears to serve Kobayashi's high-contrast monochrome 'Scope photography properly; the original mono is preserved uncompressed. For anyone working through Ichikawa seriously, or anyone with an interest in how postwar Japanese cinema processed the arrival of television, this is a straightforward Blu-ray purchase - and at 3,000 copies, not one to think about for too long. Absolutely recommended.

Gary Tooze