Ryūnosuke Akutagawa

A tale of two islands and growing up as a stranger in a strange land, told with an artistry that recalls Hou Hsiao-Hsien at his best. Based on Ryunosuke Akutagawa’s short story of the same title (1922), Kawaguchi’s film moves the original early 20th-century Izu Peninsula to present-day Taiwan, where the strength of family ties is singularly put to the test. Yumiko (Machiko Ono), who married against her parents' wishes, has struggled on in stubborn determination since her husband’s death, moving her family from their Tokyo home to the verdant, rural Taiwan village of her in-laws. Her son Atsushi, strongly conscious that in ethnocentric Japan he is "different," is in a state of rebellion against both the society in which he has grown up and his mother. In their new home the family rediscovers the bonds that unite it.

Ryuichi Okagawa, a Japanese writer who worked as a reporter in China has been sick ever since his return home. While in China, Okagawa had met a devoutly religious girl named Jin-hua. Okagawa was born with a predisposition to agonizing recurrent migraines, but found happiness with Jin-hua and married her. Unfortunately, he already had a wife in Japan, and this revelation crushed Jin-hua. When Okagawa returned home, leaving Jin-hua behind, she was forced to work as a prostitute, catching both a severe case of the flu and a rather less socially acceptable condition. Meanwhile, Okagawa's guilt has torn him apart enough for him to return to China in an attempt to bring Jin-hua home with him to get medical attention, but the girl is already too far gone for his help.

The story, set in the Heian era, depicts the conflict between Korean painter Yoshihide (Nakadai) and his Japanese patron, the cruel and egotistical daimyo Horikawa (Nakamura). It is based on the 1918 short story Hell Screen by Ryūnosuke Akutagawa.

The picture belongs to the jidai gekki (historic) genre. It is a powerful story of violence and eroticism, picturing a world at once sordid and poetic, with two central themes which intermingle to compound an admirable panel of a critical period in Japanese history: the great famine in the mid 19th Century.

Four people recount different versions of the story of a man's murder and the rape of his wife.