Circus Boys / Nijisseiki shônen dokuhon (1989)

The Art Theater Guild had ceased production and distribution in 1986, but its spirit lived on, most notably in the films of Kaizo Hayashi. In a sense, Hayashi was the first Japanese writer/director who fell in love with movies themselves rather than with making movies, which led eventually to his three movies about Maiku Hama, …

The Love and Adventures of Kuroki Taro / Kuroki Taro to ai no boken (1977)

Kuroki Taro is a stuntman, something of a rarity in Japanese movies.* However, we only see him do one kind of stunt, car races and wrecks, at the very beginning of the movie. The “Love and Adventures” all occur far from the movie set. Juichi and his two buddies are introduced to us on a …

Mosquito on the Tenth Floor / Jukkai no mosuquito (1983)

The first of two movies written by and starring the Japanese rock star Yuya Uchida, Mosquito presents a story familiar in America but exceedingly rare in Japan. Akami (Uchida) is a man in a dead-end job who, following his divorce, begins to slowly crack up until at last he explodes into violence. He is a …

Village of Doom / Ushimitsu no mura (1983)

One of the major reasons I began this blog was to see how the Japanese saw the war experience, at least as reflected in the movies. Village of Doom was on Kinema Junpo’s list for 1983, but I thought it was a horror movie. Then I saw the plot summary on IMDB that described a …

Funeral / Ososhiki (1984)

Wabisaki and his wife Chizuko are actors who make most of their living from TV commercials. One day Chizuko gets a phone call from her mother that her father has died, and the mother wants her and her husband to organize the funeral. Thus begins Juzo Itami’s quietly charming first movie The Funeral, as pure …

Living Koheiji / Koheiji is Alive / Kaidan: Ikiteiru Koheiji (1982)

After more than a decade of silence, Nobuo Nakagawa, the Grand Old Man of Japanese horror movies, re-surfaced in 1982 at ATG. The result, The Living Koheiji, is a cryptic and hypnotic ghost story that is short on shock value but full of visual, verbal, and character complexity far more fascinating than his more famous …

Poem / Uta (1972)

The post-Shogunate end of the “Old Japan” has been overtly treated in many ways in many different movies and might even be seen as a running theme under the surface of almost every movie made in the country. Seldom has the topic been treated so openly and yet so obliquely as in Poem, which spends …

At This Late Date, the Charleston / Chikagoro naze ka Charusuton (1981)

Even by the eighties, the war had not faded from Japanese consciousness and there was still a great deal of survivor’s guilt, which Okamoto manages to turn into the often hilarious At This Late Date, the Charleston. After an attempted rape, Jiro, the second son of a wealthy family, is thrown into a jail cell …

Muddy River / Doro no kawa (1981)

The Japanese have a long tradition of movies with children actually acting like children rather than child actors, and Muddy River is one of the great examples. Based on a presumably autobiographical novel by Teru Miyamoto, it depicts a few weeks in the life of nine-year-old Nobuo. His parents run a noodle shop at the …

Double Suicide at Sonezaki / Sonezaki shinju (1978)

The love suicide has permeated Japanese popular culture, almost as significant a subject as seppuku itself.* Chikamatsu’s Double Suicide at Sonezaki was one of the major drivers in the subject's popularity, as it was the first play (initially for bunraku then later Kabuki) in which both lovers were commoners. Given its immense popularity on stage …