The Japanese New Wave of the late 1950s/early 1960s introduced the world to a number of rising directors who are now icons of cinema like Nagisa Oshima, Hiroshi Teshigahara, Shohei Imamura and Masahiro Shinoda but it has only been in recent years that Yoshishige Yoshida aka Kiju Yoshida has started to receive the belated acclaim he deserves. His 220-minute masterpiece Eros + Massacre (1969), which told the parallel stories of two student activists and Sakae Osugi, an anarchist and free love advocate, startled critics with its radical take on sex and politics, not to mention a fragmented narrative approach with unusual camera compositions of widescreen black and white imagery. Long before that, Yoshida learned his trade at Shochiku Studio at a time when the company began making films about the disaffected post-war generation such as Oshima’s Cruel Story of Youth (Seishun Zankoku Monogatari, 1960) and Good-for-Nothing (Rokudenashi, 1960), Yoshida’s debut film about an aimless youth and his attraction to the secretary of a rich friend’s father. The director would eventually part ways with Shochiku over creative differences and start his own production company in 1964 but his final movie for the studio, Escape from Japan (Nihon Dasshutsu, 1964), shows Yoshida imposing his own aesthetic and stylistic approach to what is essentially a B-movie melodrama.