Seats remained for a repeat showing the next day, the end of the week and a half of Japan Cuts, but Japan Society’s auditorium was sold out for the last evening’s Sakuran and Red Light Party to follow. Scripted for live action from one of Moyoco Anno’s manga series, this is a first feature from Mika Ninagawa, an award winner for her meticulous color definition in fashion and advertising still photography.

Occurring in the licensed eighteenth century Yoshiwara red light district, the lavishly set, wardrobed and photographed costume drama-romance never gathers other than the feel of a happy ending, and thus much depends on visual sumptuousness. From eight-year-old kamuro (Ayame Koike) sold into the elegant district, through hikkomi-in-training to oiran crème de la crème courtesan, Kiyoha/Higurashi (Japanese-Russian Anna Tsuchiya) suffers indignities, beatings, and sentimental setbacks, her uncompromising character is an invitation to cheer, and her anguish at a miscarriage is real, but her end is foreseeable. What one will remember is the eye-feast of painted panels and recurrent goldfish -- “in the river, only a carp” -- of coiffures and intricate layered robes and ten-inch platform shoes for brothel procession.

Memoirs of a Geisha will crop up, the Arthur Golden novel placed two hundred years later and given a Hollywood treatment that brought Academy Awards in the four visual categories. A closer fit is “A Time for Freedom,” the 1911 middle of Hou Hsiao Hsien’s Taiwan triptych Three Times, which though spoken-wordless, slower and sad, approaches the current offering in its story of courtesan Ah Mei with less candy color but lots of ambient sensuality.

Anno’s popular idealized “reality of women” mangas attract the adolescent set, as do similar translated “Boys over Flowers” and “Peach Girl,” graphic-novel analogies to America’s romances. With wildly varied original songs by Ringo Shena, Sakuran on celluloid goes after women and maybe men no longer that young. “Five brilliant women, one brilliant film [about] a young woman set on living life her way . . . passion . . . love.”

Dragged to Tamagikuya brothel, the child is smelly, sullen and unruly, to be disciplined and trained in bought women’s wiles. Escaping, she is confronted by Seiji (Masanobu Ando), who does not age during the story and is among the males who maintain house order in mattress-ticking robes that further highlight the women’s sartorial splendor. Specifically, he brings her back from beside the quarter’s lone, barren cherry tree and calms resentment with a promise to whisk her away “the day it flowers.” True to character, she pouts that “I’ll take myself out.”

SPOILER ALERT

From those words from his kind lips, the resolution is apparent. Nine years later, groomed into magnificence but still her own feisty woman among the girls posing for ogles from johns, this beauty “you only see once in ten years” is plucked from the crowd by the oiran’s elderly regular, Konoya (Sadanji Ichikawa). Interested in more than animal sex, he, too, teaches her a lesson. Frail and grandfatherly, he returns much later to die on her shoulder after making her realize that cherry trees must flower or there would be no more. The tree and a hairpin gift from departing oiran Shohi (Miho Kanno) point to the expected ending.

Before love triumphant after an hour fifty-one minutes, however, there must be insurmountable, but not really, complications, disappointment and hard knocks in this New York première. Belying a beautiful scene of communal bathing, other prostitutes are jealous of her, and, no shrinking violet, she retaliates. Besides catfighting. she refuses important clients or is surly with them, falls for respectful Soujiro (Hiroki Narimiya) and is abashed when he does not defend her against an irate big-wig customer, prompting another of her flights (and pursuit again by Seiji), one that ends in despair.

A year later, the bloody death from love of imperious Takao (Yoshino Kimura) elevates the unwilling heroine to head courtesan, though she continues her contrary ways. Now the leading lady for house-owner Boss and Missus (Renji Ishibashi, Mari Natsuki), she so enflames the heart of samurai Kuranosuke (Kippei Shiina) that he wants to marry her even when she reveals her unknown-father pregnancy. The sex workers dream of marrying a client and leaving or at least being purchased out into concubinage, so at a wedding announcement gala everyone celebrates -- except the intended bride and Seiji, whom the brothel owners have chosen to marry their daughter at a double wedding and carry on the business upon their retirement.

Goldfish, it is shown, die outside their bowl. But do such women also wither away outside the immaculate stately pleasure-dome? Of course not. They blossom.

(Released by Asmik Ace Entertainment; not rated by MPAA.)