Shimizu’s films are often preoccupied with women forced into servitude by a hostile society, and geisha and sex workers are a recurring presence. Their subordination is marked by scent: In Forget Love For Now (1937), the perfume that a single mother has to wear to her job as a bar hostess causes her son to be bullied when his friends smell it on him, kicking him out of their group “because your mom is bad.” The smell of the perfume marks the mother as socially deviant, a condition that spreads to her son like a contagion and initiates a slide into delinquency that eventually ends in tragedy.