Tokyo's teeming Shinjuku district is a center for artistic experimentation, intellectual radicalism and, for the likes of Nagisa Oshima, adventure. Diary of a Shinjuku Thief is itself a teeming mixture of fantasy and reality, color and black-and-white, on one level a kind of documentary of the social unrest and counter-culture life of Shinjuku, shot hand-held in the streets and featuring several well known "underground" figures. On the level of narrative it is a complex plot about existential sex, crime, and theatrical role-playing. The story of "a boy and a girl in search of their rightful moment of sexual ecstasy," in Oshima's words, the film begins brilliantly in a Shinjuku bookstore where a boy who calls himself Birdy Hilltop is caught stealing a book (wisdom and intelligence must be stolen) and leaves with the shopgirl. What follows is their labyrinthine search for sexual satisfaction, which takes the couple to a troupe of actors who attempt to instruct them in the art of seduction, a Freudian sexologist who just doesn't get it, and the neo-Kabuki street theater of the Situation Players led by Kara Juro. Ritual and riot, thievery and fantasy, and ancient forms of role-playing: parts of a complicated analysis of sex, and perhaps of cinema.