Shinoda's eighth film was one of several collaborations with the young poet (and later, filmmaker) Shuji Terayama and the composer Toru Takemitsu. Tears on the Lion's Mane, set on the Yokohama waterfront, 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) who tries to break up a strike out of a misguided sense of loyalty to his crooked boss, who he believes saved his life when he was a child and was crippled as a result. Whether in stately period dramas like Double Suicide and the recent Gonza the Spearman, or in energetic gangland sagas like this one, Pale Flower (see August 6), and Killers on Parade (shown in July), Shinoda consistently explores the theatrics of life in a society in which honor and loyalty are so deeply rooted as to function as an almost classic notion of fate. When Fujiki, consumed with rage at the discovery of his lifelong betrayal by his would-be father figure, picks up his guitar and begins to wail, the effect is grotesque, comic, and strangely moving.