Nobuko Otowa, born in Yonago, Tottori, in 1925, was a Japanese actress whose career is inseparable from the films of Kaneto Shindo, her longtime director and later husband. She gave landmark performances in The Naked Island (1960), Onibaba (1964) and Kuroneko (1968), embodying rural resilience and elemental terror with rare physical intensity. Earlier in her career she appeared in Children of Hiroshima (1952), one of the earliest Japanese features to reckon with the atomic bombing. Her fierce, grounded presence made her one of the essential actresses of Japan's postwar independent cinema. Read more