Ichikawa is often compared with Dostoyevsky, and this film's brooding, conscience-driven hero, a Mishkin-like "idiot," exemplifies the comparison. In Burma at the close of the war, Mizushima, a harp-playing scout for a captured Japanese detachment, is dispatched by the British to inform an obstinate fighting unit of Japan's surrender. He arrives too late. What this simple man encounters leaves him gripped by an obsession: he becomes a monk, and determines to remain in Burma to bury the dead and thereby expiate the sins of war. As a dramatization of the conflicts between men in war, The Burmese Harp is unparalleled; as an elegy for Japan's war dead, it is haunting, linking the simple beauty of music (even the soldiers sing in harmony) with a sense of loss. The film, which won the Venice Film Festival prize, catapulted the director to fame.