The dark and cruel side of the life of the geisha in Street of Shame

I watched Mizoguchi's 1956 film, Street of Shame, in part because it makes a revealing contrast with the novel I'm reading (Tanizaki's Naomi, which concerns the life of a young woman rescued from a probably life as a geisha/prostitute in 1920s Japan by an unsuitable marriage to a much older man). Street of Shame, based on a contemporary novel, is about the lives of several "geishas" in 1950s Tokyo: Unlike in Naomi, now 30 years and a World War later, there's a lot of public pressure to outlaw prostitution in Japan. I am assuming that the practice was tolerated and profitable, especially during the years of American occupation, but now that the Americans are gone the authorities are moving in on the remaining houses. As we see from this melodramatic film, the women in the houses are all struggling w/ poverty and isolation in various forms, and there's no easy solution: Shutting down legal prostitution will drive them further into crime and more dire poverty, whereas leaving things as they are will just protect the unscrupulous owners of the houses, men (and women) who profit by "loaning" money to the women who work for them - much like the company stores in American agriculture and mining in the early 20th century (before the labor movement took hold). The film is a little clunky at first,as it's hard to establish so many narrative lines (the novel probably does a better job at this), but gradually we see the various forms of suffering each woman endures: one from a prosperous family in which her father was a well-known patron of geisha houses, another struggling to get enough money to care for a sick child and an unemployed husband, another trying to support her adult son who it turns out is deeply ashamed of his mother, another sly trickster who manages to truck a wealthy customer until his business is ruined and she can swoop in and take control of it - the only "winner" among the several geishas. There are some very fine night-time street scenes, powerful scenes when the women leave the house to meet w/ family members, a scary segment in which one of the women has a mental breakdown - altogether a good drama about the dark and cruel side of an industry that has been far-too-often glamorized in books and movies.