Yamakawa, whose features Another Side and The New Morning of Billy the Kid are shown in our series, made his name, here as in Japan, with his narratively and cinematically inventive shorts. These, as J. Hoberman points out, may owe less to the French New Wave than to the Japanese rakugo tradition, which "concerns the misadventures of hapless, often lowlife characters (and is) typified by word play and comic failures of communication." Attack on a Bakery (1982, 17 mins) plays sound against image in telling of two young laborers who, out of a hunger that is only partly physical, pull a bakery heist. A Girl, She Is 100% (1983, 11 mins) is a story of love thwarted by the traps of tradition and the tricks of fiction. "One Step Beyond (12 mins) offers the year's most spectacular sequence shot, (while) The Cat Often Comes Back in the Morning (20 mins) is Chandler writ small more wittily than anything in the line since Gumshoe" (Tony Rayns). "Sogo Ishii (b. 1957) turns cinema into riotous anarchy. Shuffle (1981, 38 mins), based on a cartoon by Otomo, has a breathtaking chase sequence with a persistent police detective and a murderous avenger who sports a Mohawk haircut. His latest film, Master of Shiatsu (1989, 15 mins), takes the art of a Japanese massage beyond physical relaxation to the realm of visual pleasure." (Akira Tochigi, Japan Society)