"Pale Flower opens as the gangster Muraki emerges from jail after serving time for an assigned murder. He finds that in his absence his gang has made peace with its former rival. Using the period after World War II, as Japan prepared to enter into economic competition with the West, Shinoda examines the effect of change on Japanese culture and society. His depiction of contemporary gangsters updates the traditional yakuza genre; in a world organized around established roles and obligations, a 'mood of uneasiness' prevails. It is a mood created by Shinoda's striking visual style in which sudden movement and stasis, individual and group alternate, as the camera seeks out expressions and gestures and then steps back to survey underworld locales. It is an uneasiness centered on Muraki and Saeko, the enigmatic woman he is drawn to, and the elusive pleasure she seeks in gambling, he in killing. For them, death, risk and desire are inseparable and fatalistically pursued for personal, aesthetic reasons, detached from any traditional (anti-)social context. It is this 'paling' of traditional roles, while retaining their historical forms, that Shinoda focuses on, and that is expressed in his use of the hanafuda (flower) gambling cards as a motif. Shinoda has commented, '(I) wanted to contrast the absurdity of modern life (as expressed in Shintaro Ishihara's novel) with the traditional Japanese aesthetic (as represented by the hanafuda cards). My subject is a man in traditional yakuza society who finds himself hopelessly out of place in the modern social structure, and learns something about himself through this discovery...'" Kathy Geritz