Japanese avant-garde playwright, poet and filmmaker Shuji Terayama died in May, 1983 at the age of 47. His autobiographical second feature, made with the actors of his famous experimental stage company Tenjosajiki, is one of the most remarkable Japanese films of the seventies. London Times critic David Robinson describes it as “a surrealist revisit to childhood. A 15-year-old boy lives with his dreadful old mother in a crumbling house where the clock has broken and will not stop striking, even when they tie it up with a rope. The boy chats to his dead father with the help of a medium, nurtures a passion for the beautiful widow next door, gets himself spectacularly raped, and mingles with the people of a travelling circus. Halfway through the film he is visited by his own grownup self, the author and filmmaker, whom he rebukes for distorting the past. The exploration then resumes, modified in the light of their debate. ‘If we wish to free ourselves, wipe out the history of humanity inside us and the history of society outside us, we must begin by getting rid of our personal memories. But that is when our memory begins to play hide and seek with us....' This is Terayama's most immediately attractive and perhaps his best film. Alongside the rich comedy and truly surrealist vision...there is a real and serious anxiety.”