Imamura's debut film was a ribald depiction of a traveling theater troupe whose director (modeled after Imamura) is an intellectual who has quit college for the theater. He is secretly in love with the wife of the lead actor but is forced to settle for her younger sister, who pursues him relentlessly. The actors, who hail from a sleazy section of Osaka, travel to a small village where “theater” is dictated by the boisterous demands of the audience: striptease alternates with Kabuki, and both are received with raucous humor. The locals, as Audie Bock notes in Japanese Film Directors, “enjoy a robust relationship of mutual commercial and sexual exploitation with . . . the city people passing through.” In the characters of the younger sister and a farm girl who runs off to become a stripper in the chorus line, Imamura suggests his coming parade of determined women whose only “desire” is for self-preservation.