Oil Hell Murder / Onna goroshi abura no jigoku (1992)

In what would sadly be his last movie before his death in 1992, Gosha turned to Chikamatsu for inspiration. Working from the last screenplay of the great Masato Ide, who had died several years before the film went into production, the movie shifted the focus of Chikamatsu's original to a woman who, though the murder …

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 …

Himiko (1974)

Himiko was or was not an early third century Japanese queen whose story is known only from brief references in a Chinese source from the late third century. From these, Yasahiro Shinoda and his writing collaborator Taeko Tomioka have fashioned a strange movie describing the earliest unification of the Japanese nation and the founding of …

Double Suicide / Shinju: Ten no Amijima (1969)

One of the simplest yet one of the most complex of Japanese movies, Shinoda’s Double Suicide adapts Ten no Amijima, one of the most popular of Chikamatsu’s domestic suicide plays, to film. Unlike Mizoguchi’s adaptation of a different love suicide play, however, Shinoda theatricalizes the film medium without ever suggesting he is filming a stage …

Chikamatsu’s Love in Osaka / Their Own World / Naniwa no koi no monogatari (1959)

Chubei has been adopted into a family to learn the business and eventually marry the daughter. Dragged by a friend/customer to the pleasure quarter, he is trapped reluctantly into spending his first night with a woman, the popular and lovely courtesan Umegawa. They fall in love, and when a rich man tries to buy Umegawa, …

Ballad of Narayama / Narayama bushiko (1958)

There have long been legends of remote Japanese villages that drove out the elderly when they essentially ate more than they were able to produce. None of those legends appear to have been confirmed, but in 1956 a short novel about such a place appeared, and it was almost immediately adapted by Kinoshita for a …