Little is known about the eighteenth-century woodblock artist Sharaku, a contemporary of Utamaro who gained instant notoriety for his hyperrealistic caricatures of kabuki artists, then just as quickly disappeared. Masahiro Shinoda has fashioned the mystery surrounding this human nova into a fictional biography, but it is less a portrait of a man than of a time and place, a voluptuous, teeming Edo. A kabuki acrobat forced by a stage injury to the life of the streets, Sharaku (Hiroyuki Sanada) joins a troupe of theatrical provocateurs in the Yoshiwara pleasure district but is ever drawn by the pleasures of the legitimate stage. Eventually, he draws them. But theater, along with novels and ukiyo-e prints, is fast becoming illegitimate in an era of the most extreme censorship, the last bastion of the samurai class threatened by urbanization and globalization. Realism becomes the most subversive act, and for Sharaku, the last act. The late Toru Takemitsu composed his last film score for Sharaku, addressing the forces of repression with a sensual and witty combination of Japanese music and Western jazz.