At the end of the Edo era and two years before the Meiji restoration, Genji, a man from a peasant family, is shipwrecked off the coast of Yokohama Port. He is rescued by an American ship and spends six years abroad before finally returning to Japan. During his absence, his in-laws sell his wife Ine to a sketchy carnival in Ryogoku, where she makes a living by performing in an exotic act. The Ryogoku area is home to a variety of characters, including Kinzo, the boss of freak shows and brothels, and former samurai Furukawa.

In this historic epic of unprecedented scale, director Shohei Imamura reimagines how the pent-up energy of the common people during the turbulent end of the Edo period finally explodes in the form of the ‘Ee ja nai ka’ (which can be translated as ‘isn’t it good?’ or ‘why not?’)—a social movement spearheaded by the lower class on the cusp of a new era.

Shohei Imamura (1926–2006, Japan) is widely recognised as one of the most important directors to emerge from the Japanese New Wave of the 1960s. A master storyteller, his works are typically ribald and earthy, revealing the lives of the ‘sub-proletariats’ of society, including criminals, pimps, and pornographers. The investigation of the primal gives his works an anthropological aspect even as they implicitly critique the costs of modernity and capitalism. Imamura was awarded the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival in 1983 for The Ballad of Narayama and in 1997 for The Eel.