One of several early Shinoda collaborations with the young poet (and later, filmmaker) Shuji Terayama and composer Takemitsu, Tears on the Lion's Mane is a portrait of the suppressed passions and violence of youth, painted in the vital strokes of the New Wave: melodrama and poetry, blood and politics, rock'n'roll. The "lion" of the title is a young dockworker (Takashi Fujiki) on the Yokohama waterfront who tries to break up a strike out of a misguided sense of loyalty to his crooked boss. Whether in period dramas or in energetic gangland sagas like this one, Shinoda consistently explores the theatrics of life in a society in which honor and loyalty are so deeply rooted as to function as a classic notion of fate. When Fujiki, consumed with rage at the discovery of a lifelong betrayal by his would-be father figure, picks up his guitar and begins to wail, the effect is grotesque, comic, and strangely moving.