Based on a story by Kyoka Izumi, Kageroza is a follow-up to Zigeunerweisen in being even more erotic and enigmatic than that breakthrough film. Set in 1926, at the cusp of the Taisho and Showa eras, it concerns a playwright who is obsessively in love with the wife of a businessman, and who makes love to the ghost of the rich man's first wife-who is the second wife's close physical counterpart. Variety called it "orientalized Buñuel," but as Ian Christie points out, "the film's luminous images and fierce eroticism are unmistakably Japanese." And some of this can be attributed to the film's source in Izumi, who uses little plot per se but builds to "a condensed drama of love and death....At first I thought that the perfection and the beauty of Kyoka's romances would help me in making the film," Suzuki has said, "but I quickly realized these factors were in fact obstacles. A film doesn't work if you get too enmeshed in the search for beauty."