Vibe
Teenagers Makoto and Kiyoshi turn desire and resentment into a criminal scheme, entrapping older men and extorting money while their relationship becomes increasingly coercive. Ōshima’s second feature rejects the sentimental image of youth as a promise of national renewal. The lovers inhabit a society where older generations appear compromised, political optimism is unstable and sexuality becomes another arena of power. The film’s violence is intimate as well as social: Kiyoshi’s possessiveness and Makoto’s vulnerability prevent the couple from becoming romantic rebels. Ōshima uses youth-film energy against itself, creating a story in which rebellion is real but cannot easily escape the structures it hates. Makoto and Kiyoshi’s scheme depends on turning older men’s sexual entitlement back against them, but Ōshima refuses to make the couple clean avengers of hypocrisy. Kiyoshi is controlling and violent toward Makoto, and their relationship reproduces domination even as they imagine themselves outside respectable society. That contradiction is the film’s bleakest insight: generational rebellion does not automatically invent new ethics. The 1960 political atmosphere surrounds the romance. Chris Fujiwara’s Criterion essay links the film directly to the Sun Tribe cycle and to a Japan moving through Anpo-era protest, conservative consolidation and youth alienation. Ōshima uses popular youth-film imagery—motorbikes, boats, bright clothes, nightlife—but empties it of carefree glamour. Makoto and Kiyoshi are surrounded by consumer modernity while lacking any convincing future inside it. Their sexuality becomes transactional because the wider society has already taught them to treat bodies, affection and ideals as things with exchange value.
Watch for
- Watch how Makoto and Kiyoshi’s extortion scheme turns sexuality, age and money into one mechanism of power.
- Notice the bright color and widescreen imagery; Ōshima uses visual modernity to make the social world feel heated rather than liberating.
- Track the romance as it becomes coercive from within, complicating any simple idea of the pair as heroic rebels.
- Pay attention to references to protest and generational failure without expecting a conventional political speech; the atmosphere is already political.
Production notes
Criterion describes Cruel Story of Youth as Ōshima’s artistic breakthrough and his second feature, made at Shochiku in 1960. Miyuki Kuwano and Yūsuke Kawazu star, with Yoshiko Kuga in a major supporting role. The film emerged during the turbulent Anpo protest period and just before Ōshima’s break with Shochiku after the studio withdrew Night and Fog in Japan. Its vivid color, location shooting and aggressive framing separate it from the decorum associated with older studio melodrama. Yet it was still produced within Shochiku, making the film an important example of the New Wave beginning as an internal studio challenge before moving into independent production. Criterion’s restored edition lists Cruel Story of Youth as a 97-minute, color, 2.39:1 Shochiku film from 1960. Ōshima wrote and directed it, Tomio Ikeda produced, Takashi Kawamata photographed the film and Riichirō Manabe composed the score. Miyuki Kuwano and Yūsuke Kawazu star, with Yoshiko Kuga and Fumio Watanabe in important supporting roles. The production is historically important because the Japanese New Wave was still emerging from inside the studio system. Ōshima had not yet broken with Shochiku; his radicalism was being expressed through a company that had promoted young directors partly as a response to changing audiences. The new Criterion restoration and essaying make clear how deliberate the color and widescreen design are. This is not simply rough youth reportage. Its visual heat, modern objects and compressed movement are part of an attack on the decorum associated with older studio melodrama.
Trivia
- Criterion lists Cruel Story of Youth as a 97-minute color film in 2.39:1.
- It was Nagisa Ōshima’s second feature.
- Ōshima wrote the screenplay as well as directing.
- Miyuki Kuwano and Yūsuke Kawazu play Makoto and Kiyoshi.
- The film was produced at Shochiku before Ōshima’s eventual break with the studio.
Legacy
Cruel Story of Youth became one of the defining early films of the Japanese New Wave. Criterion and BFI both treat it as a key turning point, and its KJ1999 #29 placement confirms substantial domestic historical standing. Its importance lies not only in announcing Ōshima’s career but in showing how quickly postwar youth cinema could shift from Sun Tribe hedonism toward explicit political and sexual disillusionment. At #68, the film complements Crazed Fruit at #74: one is a 1956 youth-culture shock that helped open the space; the other pushes that energy into a more openly antagonistic 1960 political climate. Cruel Story of Youth became one of the foundational films of the Japanese New Wave because it takes the commercial youth cycle of the 1950s and forces it into a more openly political and morally corrosive 1960. BFI’s New Wave overview treats it as a key point of departure, while Criterion now presents it as Ōshima’s artistic breakthrough. At #68, the film works historically as a bridge. Crazed Fruit at #74 helps create the Sun Tribe shock of 1956; Cruel Story transforms that youth energy into Anpo-era nihilism; later Ōshima films move even further from conventional genre. Keeping this film therefore preserves the industrial genealogy of the New Wave rather than presenting radical cinema as something that appeared fully formed outside the studios. It also demonstrates that Ōshima’s formal experimentation began before his independent period.