Converging towards Kobo Abe’s experimental fiction in its fragmented examination of the strange phenomenon of johatsu – the unexplained (and presumably self-initiated) disappearances of otherwise seemingly responsible and professional salarymen in metropolitan Tokyo – as a broader social symptom of the anonymization and erasure of identity inherent in urbanization and rigid cultural conformity (most notably, […]
Anticipating Nagisa Oshima’s Ceremony in its metaphoric representation of the dying of the samurai class through contaminated bloodlines, mystical connections, incestuous relationships, frailty, and impotence, Intentions of Murder bears the characteristic imprint of Shohei Imamura’s recurring preoccupations: the sensuality and resilience of women, the manifestation of individualism in a codified society, the idiosyncrasies and primitive […]
On the morning of August 6, 1945, a young woman named Yasuko (Yoshiko Tanaka) catches a ride with a neighbor who is evacuating from Hiroshima in order to transport her family’s formal clothes and sentimental possessions to a friend’s home for safekeeping on a nearby island in Furué. At 8:15, during a tea ceremony, Yasuko […]
The Ballad of Narayama opens to an aerial shot of a vast, frozen wilderness on a remote mountainous region in Northern Japan at an inexact date of a hundred years ago. Along the base of the mountain is an isolated, snow covered feudal village, where a family matriarch Orin (Sumiko Sakamoto) lives with her widowed […]
On January 4, 1964, a convoy of patrol cars traverse a provincial countryside to escort captured criminal Iwao Enokizu (Ken Ogata) to the local police precinct for interrogation. Callous and unremorseful, Enokizu laments his inevitable fate as unfair, citing that his arresting officers will outlive him and continue the pursuit of hedonistic pleasure now denied […]
A film crew hikes to the outskirts of town in order to surreptitiously shoot a pornographic film. Flouting the law, a pornographer named Ogata (Shoichi Ozawa) rationalizes his disreputable livelihood as a necessary commodity and public service for the continued well-being of society. The enterprising men screen their latest project, and the film opens with […]