Crazed Fruit was the most faithful and most famous of the "sun tribe" films adapted from the novels of Shintaro Ishihara, about the anarchic behavior of well-off, ego-driven youths. A young woman summering by the seaside has affairs with two brothers, one a devotee of the debauched "sun tribe," the other more vulnerably in love with her. The ménage wreaks havoc. "Ko Nakahira captured the sense of intoxication of the original and expressed Ishihara's premonition that these rich youths, who had been raised without restraints, were the harbingers of an age of rapid economic growth and free sex." (Tadao Sato) Public protest soon eclipsed the trend but the reverberations of the "sun tribe" films were felt into the Japanese New Wave of the sixties. Nagisa Oshima, writing in 1958, remembered Crazed Fruit: "I felt that in the sound of the girl's skirt being ripped and the hum of the motorboat slashing through the older brother, sensitive people could hear the wails of a seagull heralding a new age in Japanese cinema."