Introduced by Audie Bock In her introduction to Shiro Toyoda, Audie Bock will discuss space (ma) in relation to plot and characterization in the director's work. Audie Bock is the author of Japanese Film Directors and Mikio Naruse (published in French), and translator of Akira Kurosawa's Something Like an Autobiography. She has taught Japanese cinema at UC Berkeley and Santa Cruz, and at Yale and Harvard Universities. (Meoto zenzai/a.k.a. Love Is Shared Like Sweets). The love between the good-natured but lazy scion of a well-to-do businessman, and a popular geisha for whom he leaves his wife and child, is depicted against a backdrop of pre-War Osaka, its decadence and its common people. It was the latter that sparked Toyoda's interest, what he called "strong, living personalities among the common people-those who after being knocked and kicked never fall or sink." The geisha Choko (Chikage Awashima) is certainly one of those, and the wayward, disinherited Ryukichi (Hisaya Morishige) becomes one through the force of his lover's endurance in the midst of misfortune. This literary adaptation, considered to be Toyoda's finest, has moments of raucous humor as well as sadness as the lovers become increasingly marginalized. Marital Relations also is particularly rich in the purely visual revelation of character and psychology for which Toyoda is so admired by Richie and other critics.