An adaptation of a novel by Yasunari Kawabata, With Beauty and Sorrow is a beautiful film that fits squarely in the Shinoda oeuvre-a study of the frailty of love, its many forms and repercussions. A young student, Keiko (Mariko Kaga), has three love affairs-with a married writer, a woman artist who is her mentor, and the writer's young son-innocently, but thoroughly, disrupting all their lives, and her own. "Shinoda's view that sex is the purest of pleasures is best illustrated in With Beauty and Sorrow (1965) and Double Suicide (1969). In these films he portrays men and women who, by their own acts, create a situation in which the only way they can enjoy sexual pleasure is to pay for it with their lives. His lovers rush headlong into their fate...This is pure aestheticism, where the beautiful is valued more than life itself, but in Shinoda's films fulfillment is not complete. It seems that he puts greater emphasis on the determination to pursue pleasure than its attainment." (Tadao Sato, Currents in Japanese Cinema) "The memorable thing about (With Beauty and Sorrow) is (its) atmosphere and the way in which Shinoda creates it. The still and claustrophobic world of the film (Kyoto, that most closed and inbred of all Japanese cities) is captured in shot after shot of the narrow interiors of the Japanese house, walls threatening to close in, doors always shutting in one's face, and by the many scenes in graveyards (with which Kyoto abounds), the tombs standing like so many teeth." (Donald Richie, Japanese Cinema)