Played by Meiko Kaji (of Lady Snowblood fame), Nami begins as a naïve woman betrayed by her corrupt lover and unjustly imprisoned. Inside a brutal women’s penitentiary, she is stripped of dignity but not of will. What follows is not just survival, but transformation—Nami emerging as “Scorpion,” a near-mythic embodiment of female rage in a world engineered to crush her. 

Director Shunya Ito elevates the exploitation framework into something startlingly stylized: bold pop-art compositions, theatrical lighting, surreal flourishes, and sudden eruptions of violence fracture realism into something closer to feverish allegory. Spiritually aligned with films like Ms. 45, Coffy, and The Bride Wore Black, #701 channels vengeance into revolutionary spectacle. 

A direct inspiration for the avenging iconography of Kill Bill, Female Prisoner Scorpion: #701 remains a landmark of Japanese genre cinema—where suffering becomes defiance, and defiance becomes legend.