Love Hotel / Rabu Hoteru (1985)

Though its two critical scenes occur in a hotel room used for sexual assignations, Shinji Somai’s Love Hotel is a love story, though admittedly an odd one. Overwhelmed by debts which lead to the yakuza rape of his wife, Muraki (Minori Terada) tries to jump out a window and is distracted by a fly. He …

Two Wives / Tsuma futari (1967)

One of the last movies made by Masumura with Ayako Wakao, Two Wives pairs her with Mariko Okada. Born in the same year, gaining their earliest major roles at about the same time, the two were the major faces of the new “women’s picture” that emerged around 1960, but they had never co-starred.* The result …

Black Rose Ascension / Kurobara shoten (1975)

What’s a poor porn film maker to do when his star gets pregnant and refuses to go on with his masterpiece? Find another woman, of course, but this is not as easy as you might think it would be, which Kumashiro’s Black Rose Ascension demonstrates. When Meiko (Meika Seri) decides she has had enough after …

Big Boss / Kaoyaku (1971)

In his first directing job, Shintaro Katsu managed to produce a genre masterpiece in a genre that, in most senses, did not yet exist. Katsu directs himself in a script that the credits say he co-wrote with the great Ryuzo Kikushima, playing a rogue cop, that most clichéd of movie and TV characters during the …

Coup d’etat / Martial Law / Kaigenrei (1973)

The coup of 1936 has been the subject of several significant movies. The most straight-forward presentation can be found in Memoirs of Japanese Assassins, with the same coup reflected in the romance of Utage and the teen-age bullies of Fighting Elegy. Yoshida’s Coup d’etat looks at this failed coup through the life of Ikki Kita, …

Long Darkness / Shinobugawa (1972)

Tetsuro and Shino have both lived under clouds from their families until they meet, fall in love, learn about each other’s pasts, and get married. That’s essentially it, though it takes Kei Kumai two full hours to tells us the story. Tetsuro (Go Kato) is a 27-year-old university student, who had tried to drop out …

This Transient Life / Mujo (1970)

The Art Theater Guild was established to expand the horizons of Japanese film-makers and audiences, first by showing foreign movies that could not find commercial release and then eventually producing movies of its own, shown primarily in their Shinjuku theater that was the center of Japan’s sixties avant-garde life, though for a time they did …

Throw Away Your Books, Rally in the Streets / Sho o suteyo machi e deyo (1971)

Whatever its title may suggest, Throw Away Your Books is the most intensely “rock ‘n’ roll” movie of the seventies, possibly ever.* Credited to four composers, the sound of rock is everywhere, with the exception of only one section that quotes classical music and an “American” restaurant that plays what sounds like Mae West recordings …

The Affair / Flames of Love / Joen (1967)

Oriko (Mariko Okada) is an unhappily married woman when she meets a sculptor who had previously had an affair with her mother. Her husband mistakenly thinks she is having an affair with the sculptor and divorces her. Meanwhile, she has at least once slept with another man, a common laborer, who also may have been …

Woman of the Lake / The Lake / Onna no mizumi (1966)

Onna no mizumi personifies so much of what most people think an "art house" movie is like that it is difficult to actually get to the content of the movie itself. Yoshishige Yoshida technically had left Shochiku after Escape from Japan and formed his own production company with his now wife Mariko Okada, and together …