Lee Sang-il’s heartfelt and muscular epic (whose title means “national treasure”) was a box-office smash on its Japanese home turf, winning a host of festival awards and an Oscar nomination. It’s a mighty Cain-and-Abel drama spanning five decades, set in the rarefied world of kabuki theatre where some of the most exotically prized performers are the onnagata, the men who have mastered the rigorously observed discipline of playing women in classical kabuki roles, a convention which arose from Japan’s 17th-century banning of women on stage, rather as they once were in England 100 years before. It is a semi-intentional irony of this intensely and even passionately male film that actual women are of subordinate importance.

The story begins in an outrageously melodramatic way, with a situation which might even itself have once been amenable to kabuki dramatisation. In 1960s Nagasaki, a yakuza gangster is holding a social event to underline his prestige; he has provided kabuki entertainment for his guests, and such is his reverence for this Japanese high-cultural form that he has permitted his teenage son Kikuo to perform as an onnagata. Kikuo’s performance stuns a renowned kabuki actor called Hanjiro, played by Ken Watanabe. But the event is chaotically attacked by a rival gang, the yakuza is killed, and Hanjiro offers to adopt Kikuo and train him up as a onnagata in his kabuki company, alongside his own son Shunsuke.

Kikuo (played as an adult by Ryô Yoshizawa) and Shunsuke (Ryûsei Yokohama) become famous and as close as brothers, but their bond of friendship is tested to destruction when Hanjiro makes the yakuza-kid upstart his favourite and even his successor. Shunsuke angrily storms off, taking Kikuo’s girlfriend Harue (Mitsuki Takahata) with him; in his absence, Kikuo becomes more ruthlessly ambitious, even joking about making a pact with Satan in return for ultimate success, to the deep dismay of the daughter that he has had with his geisha mistress and whom he heartlessly refuses to acknowledge. He also has an abusive relationship with the daughter of one of the vital corporate sponsors. But Shunsuke is biding his time for a return.

The action is elegantly interspersed with kabuki performances, whose titles and stories are summarised in chyron subtitles. Perhaps the most important of these is Sagi Musume or Heron Maiden, about a heron in love with a man who transforms herself into a woman and dances for him until she dies. The onnagata actors also of course transform themselves into women, perhaps yearning for a certain idealised delicacy of feeling, nobility and beauty which they cannot achieve as men.

One reading of this movie – a westernised reading, perhaps – would be to see it as a queer narrative, challenging gender norms; when Kikuo is reduced to performing at tea-shops and restaurants, he is subjected to what amounts to a homophobic assault by a sneeringly fascinated hooligan who can’t believe a man is dressed this way, and is perhaps affected by Kikuo in ways he won’t admit. Maybe there is an element of eroticism and transgression in kabuki running very deeply beneath the surface. But this could be reductive. The emphasis is more largely upon discipline and commitment in the service of art, a vocational self-immolation in which the transformation of pain into beauty is the whole point.