Wuthering Heights / Arashi ga oka (1988)

On its surface the least likely European novel for a Japanese adaptation, Wuthering Heights is transformed by Yoshihige Yoshida, Toru Takemitsu, and a towering characterization by Yusaku Matsuda into one of the finest unknown Japanese movies ever made and certainly the best film adaptation of the novel itself I have ever seen. A blind biwa …

Gonza the Spearman / Yari no Gonza (1986)

Gonza is a handsome young samurai, so handsome that girls sing songs about him in the street, and regarded as the best spearman in his clan. Oyuki, the sister of his competitor Bonnojo, wants to marry him, but he feels he needs further advancement to secure permission from her brother. When the daimyo of the …

Empire of Passion / Ai no borei (1978)

When I first saw Empire of Passion almost forty years ago, like most people I was disappointed because it was not like In the Realm of the Senses. Now, a second look after my intense immersion in the traditions of Japanese film-making reveals this as Oshima’s most “Japanese” movie. Its mixture of unreality and absolute …

Demon Pond / Yashagaike (1979)

A man walks across a desert, eventually running out of water in his canteen. He suddenly comes upon an isolated house where a woman tends a pool formed from water seeping out of the Demon Pond, surrounded now by lush forests. As he talks, the man hiding inside recognizes the voice and reveals himself as …

Petrified Forest / Kaseki no mori (1973)

An old woman takes a train from a town in the pristine sunshine of the countryside and eventually comes out of a tunnel into a smog-shrouded Tokyo, which will turn out to be a world of secrets, failures, and serious crime. For a long time, we do not see her again, turning instead to a …

Scandalous Adventures of Buraikan / Buraikan (1970)

The American release title of Buraikan is a bit deceptive, suggesting one single central character. In fact we have three major characters, only connected to each other by the slenderest of threads. First we see Naojiro (Tatsuya Nakadai), a neer-do-well ronin who wants to be an actor and who tries to seduce passing beauties by …

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 …

Scattered Clouds / Two in the Shadow / Midaregumo (1967)

If we did not have Yoko Tsukasa’s sleek sixties skirts and hairdo, we might easily think Scattered Clouds had been made a decade earlier. Its color looks like fifties Eastmancolor and its bland compositions look like the work of people still trying to master wide-screen. Its omni-present music score by Toru Takemitsu sounds like it …

Mother / Haha (1963)

When is a tear-jerker not a tear-jerker? Certainly, Kaneto Shindo’s Mother follows one of the major formulae but the tears don’t come. Neither do the laughs that the old-fashioned tear-jerkers often provoke when seen through contemporary eyes. Nobuko Otowa is the mother of a boy just ready to start school who is discovered to have …

Illusion of Blood / Yotsuya kaidan (1965)

Yotsuya kaidan has been one of the most consistently popular kabuki plays in Japanese history and has been directly adapted into movies and TV on a regular basis, possibly even more often than the Chusingura story. Its mixture of the loving woman done wrong, the desperate ronin, visual horror, insanity, betrayal, and mistaken identity provide …