Kiyonori (Seijun) Suzuki was himself a young rebel in the fifties and sixties, subverting routine assignments by creating anti-militaristic satires out of action films, outré romances out of period melodramas, and anti-heroes out of heroes. A cult figure among Japanese cineastes, in the West he is far less well known than Oshima and the early Shinoda, whose intemporate alter egos he might represent (he has been called the "aesthete of cinematic violence"). Despite his popularity following Elegy to Violence, he was fired from Nikkatsu Studio in 1968 for making "incomprehensible" films. Akutaro's young rebel, Togo Konno, is an early incarnation of the Suzuki nihilist-the gangster in Tokyo Drifter (see March 15) or the juvenile delinquent in Elegy to Violence-and tamer for it. The film takes place circa 1910. Expelled from school and relegated to the tough-love of a school principal friend of his mother's, Togo comes up against an absurd morality code among his peers in a protofascist disciplinary gang. Still, his sexuality blossoms, in a humorously staged seduction scene that is neither fantasy nor reality, and then a true love affair with the daughter of a local doctor. She introduces him to Strindberg; he introduces her to the eternal farewell. ("Doomed love...attends Suzuki's antiheroes like an unwanted pet," as Luis Francia writes.) Like Togo, who aspires to write trash ("literature for fools"), Suzuki is something of a Japanese movie brat. His brackish, jazz-like direction feeds melodrama with anger and humor.