Stories Written in Sunlight and Water: The Cinema of Yoshida Yoshishige: Part 2 Independence and Independent

Although its significance would not become apparent for over four years, Yoshida’s fourth film, the literary adaptation Akitsu onsen (Akitsu Springs, 1962), was to be an important, prophetic film in the director’s career and in the evolution of his oeuvre. It was made at the height of his time as a contract director at Shochiku, but nonetheless marked the embryonic beginnings of what would go on to occupy a central role in several of the director’s films in the late 1960s: namely, a focus on fractious marital relationships, sexuality, and desire, and a concomitant use and distortion of the melodrama and the Japanese genre of the gendai-geki contemporary life film.