Gonza the Spearman, like Shinoda's Double Suicide presented later in this series, is based on an eighteenth-century bunraku play by Chikamatsu. Gonza explores Shinoda's fascination with the rituals of aesthetics and death in the absence of war. The setting is the early years of the Tokugawa Shogunate, an era of peace when the tea ceremony functioned as a secularized, secretive social grace which ambitious samurai aspired to acquire. Gonza (Hiromi Go), a handsome lancer, becomes unwittingly linked with his master's wife (Shima Iwashita) in order to gain access to the secrets of the tea ceremony, and the two play out the parts of fugitive lovers to a fated conclusion. Donald Richie: "...an extremely realistic and pictorially beautiful film....It is as though old prints, scrolls, screens have been made animate....(T)he doomed couple are...killed by the ideals of that very society the beauty of which we have been led to admire."