In the sixties, the seething Shinjuku district of Tokyo was well-known to newspaper readers as the heart of Tokyo's hippie and radical underground, as well as its largest shopping center. On one level, Diary of a Shinjuku Thief is a kind of documentary on this area of social unrest and counter-culture life styles. Shot hand-held in the streets, it features impromptu happenings (notably a neo-kabuki troupe of “Situation Players” led by Kara Juro), and many underground or intellectual personalities play themselves before Oshima's camera. The film mixes reality and fantasy, color and black and white, and narrates a complex plot about existential sex, crime, and theatrical role-playing. “A boy and a girl in search of their rightful moment of sexual ecstasy” is Oshima's own description of the overall movement of the story, which begins brilliantly in a Shinjuku bookstore, where a boy who calls himself Birdey Hilltop is caught stealing a book.