Miryam Sas is a professor in the Departments of Film and Media and Comparative Literature at UC Berkeley.

(Hatsukoi jigokuhen). A portrait of a Tokyo and Japan on the crux of worlds old and new, Inferno combines the documentary film techniques of director Susumu Hani-hand-held shooting, the use of nonactors, observational street footage-with an experimental, wildly kinky fictional script by underground provocateur Shuji Terayama. We follow two young almost-lovers, the boy an adoptee with father issues, the girl more “experienced” thanks to her job as a nude model, as they weave through contemporary Tokyo's nightclub/counterculture district, Shinjuku, with its strip clubs, molesters, and gangs. Infernos, first loves: Hani brilliantly balances hell and heaven, the decadent and the naïve, to reveal a world where opposites exist hand-in-hand. “We are now living between two worlds-the traditional one, which is crumbling, and the new one, which is burgeoning,” wrote Hani. “Living between them, we are confronted with both. In consequence, we live in frustration.”