The award-winning director of such esteemed films as Black Rain and The Ballad of Narayama has chosen here to tell the decidedly dicey true tale of Iheiji Muraoka Read More »
Tag Archives: Shôhei Imamura
A Man Vanishes (1967) Shôhei Imamura, Yoshie Hayakawa, Shigeru Tsuyuguchi
Plastics salesman Oshima disappeared without a word to anyone, and has been missing for two years. Read More »
Intentions of Murder (1964) Shôhei Imamura, Masumi Harukawa, Kô Nishimura, Shigeru Tsuyuguchi
A housewife living under her tyrannical husband has her life stressfully turned upside down after getting raped by a burglar. Read More »
The Pornographers: Introduction to Anthropology (1966) Shôhei Imamura, Shôichi Ozawa, Sumiko Sakamoto, Ganjirô Nakamura, Comedy, Drama
Mr. Ogata lives a complicated life: he is a pornographer making two skin flicks per day and trying to stay beneath the radar screen of the local mob Read More »
Warm water under a red bridge (2001) Shôhei Imamura, Kôji Yakusho, Misa Shimizu, Mitsuko Baishô, Comedy, Drama, Fantasy, Romance
Nippon konchuki / The Insect Woman (1963) Shôhei Imamura, Emiko Aizawa, Setsuko Amamiya, Tomio Aoki, Drama
Amorality in Japan. Tome is born into poverty in rural Japan, in the late 1910s. Chuji, her father, dotes on her; her mother is less faithful. Read More »
Karayuki-san / The Making of a Prostitute (1975) Shôhei Imamura, Kurahachi Fukuda, Tora Hirano, Documentary
It is a documentary on one of the Japanese “karayuki-san,” who were women that were taken from their homes in Japan and used as prostitutes in the post-war period. Read More »
Postwar History of Japan as Told by a Bar Hostess (1970) Shôhei Imamura, Chieko Akaza, Etsuko Akaza, Tami Akaza, Documentary
The star of this documentary is a quintessential Imamura heroine: a hard-nosed, ruthless survivor, with a sense of loyalty and an earthy sense of humor. Read More »
Buta to gunkan / Pigs and Battleships (1961) Shôhei Imamura, Hiroyuki Nagato, Jitsuko Yoshimura, Masao Mishima, Drama, Comedy, Crime
Kinta is caught in the mesh of poverty and opts out by joining the local yakuza gang. His greed draws him into the drug dealing, pimping, and racketeering that fill the gang’s coffers. Read More »
Hateshinaki yokubô / Endless Desire (1958) Shôhei Imamura, Reiji Akitsu, Shinsuke Ashida, Takeshi Katô, Comedy
On August 15, ten years after the Pacific War, five people meet at a station. Their purpose is to dig out a cache of morphine — now worth sixty million yen — that HASHIMOTO, an army medical officer, buried in an air-raid shelter in this city on the day the war ended. The five are: SHIMA, a beautiful woman who claims that she is HASHIMOTO’s younger sister and that her brother is dead; NAKADA, a pharmacist; ONUMA, who owns a Chinese restaurant; YAMAMOTO, a thug; and SAWAI, who says he is a junior high school teacher. But HASHIMOTO originally had only three accomplices — and hid the morphine late at night, so they did not know each other’s identities. There is one person too many in the group, but they do not know whom. A butcher shop now stands over the old air-raid shelter. The five decide to rent a vacant house across the street, and dig a tunnel to the butcher shop.
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