Shohei Imamura shares with Nagisa Oshima a deep social commitment, and a fascination for time-fragmented narration and the ambiguities of illusion and reality. Yet his films look and feel nothing like those of Oshima, or any other director for that matter. At once sensuous and structured, outrageous and analytical, they forage into the primordial Japanese spirit, the ancient drives on which modern life thrives. Imamura has been called the "anthropologist" among the Japanese New Wave directors but the scientific method is in part a clever stylistic device, contrasting with the irrational and instinctual forces his films ultimately celebrate. The Insect Woman follows the trail of a rural woman who survives the war years and the difficult postwar reconstruction period by primordial instinct, impervious to all direction or restraint imposed from without. Tome (Sachiko Hidari in an obsessive, spellbinding performance), at home in the tall grasses of her native Tohoku village, migrates to the city and takes up a life of prostitution, eventually becoming a tyrannical madam. From early shots of her innocently incestuous relationship with her retarded stepfather to later scenes of her in bed with a lover while the Emperor is announcing Japan's defeat, Imamura establishes Tome as a woman who survives an oppressive patriarchy with "insectlike" values that are irrelevant to modern notions of intelligence, beauty or nobility. Shot, like all of Imamura's films, entirely on location using natural sound, the film has a documentary-like grittiness that gives its rigorous structure the illusion of spontaneity.