May 2026: Rewatched this (and the rest of the Taisho trilogy) for the blog’s 20th anniversary, since this movie was the very first post.

Whole movie is dream-sequencey, walking the line beetween meaningful vital art and absolute goofball weirdness. All three movies are homi-sui-cidal identity love triangles – this isn’t the longest, but the slowest and most fatebound.

Our somnambulist hero is Japan’s coolest man, who I saw recently in The Beast To Die:

25 years earlier, Mr. Tamawaki had his skin painted in Kwaidan:

Tamawaki’s wife Ine is maybe part German, and probably a ghost.

Among other things, they spend a long while looking inside hollow dolls like they’re sexy viewmasters.

original post:
Wonderful movie, maybe the best of the Taisho trilogy. Starts and ends very free-flowing, dreamlike… little bit of storyline in the middle there. Suzuki shifts to different scenes and characters within the same shot. Lots of color, flowers, unexplained images. Beautiful.

Man with mustache and large hands apparently likes a girl who’s afraid of old women and cherries. He also likes a german girl with her “hair in the japanese style”. Or maybe they like him, or nobody likes anybody – I was mostly gazing at the flower petals, really. A meddling mustachioed man with a hat and cane threatens everyone with his gun. Maybe some or all of them die by the end of the movie.