[Oshima's Boy] is one of the bitterest satires ever to be made on the Japanese family…. Oshima argues, not that he is realistically representing a typical Japanese household, but that the entire situation symbolizes the essence of family life in Japan. The power relationships between parents and children, exaggerated through the outrageous fraud, are nevertheless meant to suggest those beneath the surface of all Japanese families. (p. 353)

The psychology of the typical young Japanese … is characterized by frustration and repression of one's deepest longings. Oshima's boy hero experiences each day a total violation of his personal integrity. He hates the cheating and fraud he is forced to perpetrate. But, recognizing the power of the family over his life, he says nothing. Pathetically, he is also intensely loyal to his parents. At first this may seem unrealistic, given their vicious exploitation of him. But they are all that he knows…. Oshima's choice of a ten-year-old was well calculated. By the age of ten the boy has already learned the extent to which he must conform; he has absorbed the rules of what it means to belong to a Japanese family. Yet he is young enough still to long for self-definition.

Oshima's use of atonal music creates a sense of discordance, another facet of this film's subtle departure from realistic naturalism. The music denotes a universe where natural order has been distorted. (p. 355)

In the character of the father Oshima offers not psychological realism but the spirit of the Japanese patriarch. In most households the sadism would not, of course, be so overt, but for Oshima it would be no less real. Behind the patriarch's authority Oshima finds the destruction of the young, inevitable in the family at this stage of Japan's social development.

The boy's psyche becomes so damaged that he begins to welcome the pain that comes to him from the accidents. So perverse has been his life experience that only suffering assures him of his normality, and indeed that he exists at all: "Even an ordinary child can say it hurts when it really hurts." Only pain allows him to feel like an ordinary child; the perverse has become the normal. In this scene the boy lies in a fetal position, highlighting the motif of his desire to return to the womb and so end his suffering. It involves a death wish as well, for if he ceased to exist, his suffering would thereby also end.

Oshima insistently rejects the sentimental approach to such subject matter adopted by his predecessors in the Japanese film. For us to weep for this boy would permit an easy catharsis. It would allow the audience relief without accepting the necessity of remedy…. The strongest comment Oshima will make is dispassionately to reveal that such abuse exists.

The airplane trip to Hokkaido the family takes near the end indicates that the fantasy life of the boy has all but encompassed his consciousness. He explains to his little brother, and seems almost to believe it, that the clouds are "monsters out of which men from outer space will appear." More than ever he reveals his need to be rescued. (p. 357)

With nowhere left for them to flee, and decreasing opportunities to ply their "trade," the violence within the family becomes more extreme. Oshima records the man striking his wife, her blood spurting onto the snow, in black-and-white rather than color. As with sentimentality, he renounces spectacle, which he sees as antithetical to the ability of film as a medium to confront us with the truth…. [In] a clever use of irony, Oshima has the baby, unnoticed, step accidentally in front of a car which cannot stop on the ice. The meaning of their staged accidents is expressed in the family's actually becoming the victims themselves of a real accident, although only the boy is humane enough to face its consequences.

The car slams into a telephone pole, killing the driver, a young woman. For this real accident and death, however, only our boy, and not his parents, assumes responsibility, as if at an unconscious level he believes that his having tortured drivers with fake accidents and unreal wounds has brought down upon him, with this death, a just retribution. What he feels as he flings himself angrily on his father, the real culprit, is an acute sense of responsibility for the suffering of others, which his own pain has taught him in spite of the amorality of the environment provided by his family. The red boot in the snow, now photographed in color, reiterates the colors of the Japanese flag, red sun on white. For Oshima this symbol returns guilt and responsibility to where they finally belong, not solely to the man, part victim and part victimizer, but once more to the State and its institutions.

Oshima takes measure of the psychic damage done to this boy in the last moments of the film…. It is in this final response of the boy that Oshima pleads for the valuable humanity being trampled and ignored in today's Japan. The slowness of Oshima's last fade informs us of the permanence of the boy's memory of this gratuitous death. His sense of himself as a murderer, irrational though it may be, is the only legacy for the future bequeathed him by his now dissolved family. (p. 358)

The most uncompromising critic among Japanese directors of his nation's structures, Oshima remains obsessed by Japan and the Japanese, in himself and in those around him. The heightened emotion in his films comes not from any climactic dramatic developments in the action but from the director's continuous, silent lament over the default of a corrupt nation he yet loves. The tone of his films, particularly of The Ceremony, is as strikingly ambivalent as that of the American novelist William Faulkner toward the benighted denizens of Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi….

Masuo, says Oshima, running an allegorical second story-line alongside that of his characters, represents all young Japanese forced after the War to submit to the institutions of the old Japan rapidly undergoing resurrection. Masuo, as a child, is already a participant in the first ceremony of the film, funeral rites for his dead father. The boy's hand is guided by his grandfather's in making the offering, a magnificent allegorical expression of the reconstituted old zaibatsu, or ruling class, appropriating the energies of all young Japanese almost at the moment the War ended….

Oshima sees distorted sexuality as the inevitable consequence of political and social repression. The seductive aunt, Setsuko, insisting on washing the eleven-year-old Masuo, has herself been seduced and sullied by the grandfather. Oshima makes it clear that she never washes her own daughter, Ritsuko, so feelingly. Setsuko finds an unnatural outlet for her thwarted sexual energies among her young nephews, for her opportunities for relationships with eligible men are as negligible as those of women under feudalism. (p. 361)

Before the character for "The End" appears, Oshima allows the screen to go black, offering no image. Any hope for a different, freer Japan has been lost. Moral defeat, like a dark cloud, has finally consumed those who saw the need for change. The Ceremony … chronicles the moral consequences of a neo-feudal epoch of prosperity following the early postwar period. And it is finally only Oshima who has placed the story of the Japanese family in its appropriate historical context. (p. 366)

[For Oshima, if the student revolts in Diary of a Shinjuku Burglar] accomplish only for a moment a demystification of Japan's "cherry blossom" identity, they have achieved something positive. Birdey and Umeko are not yet sexually free, just as Japan has not yet been liberated from her past. In how the two are inextricably connected lies the logic of Diary of a Shinjuku Burglar. But the film remains a minor work because the allegory is so much more interesting than its surface action.

Oshima also portrays the lost youths of the student movement in The Man Who Left His Will on Film. Self-referential in style, its circular plot at once suggesting inhibition that can find no release, the "story" is that of a student filmmaker who films his own suicide and then kills himself at the end of the film by jumping from a building. Oshima's only apparent "contribution" lies in the shot of the boy's actual death…. The effect is as if Oshima were offering us so authentic a work that it was actually entrusted to him by his own central character.

Any causal explanations for the death, however, as in Godard, must be provided through active participation by the audience itself in piecing together the boy's footage, which is randomly projected. Oshima leaves the chronology of events in as subtly elaborate a disarray as Alain Resnais did his in Last Year at Marienbad. He demands of his Japanese audience that it confront what has befallen the restless youths of the New Left, who have moved without purpose or direction through the new Japan despite the fury of their political protests. (pp. 368-69)

At the end of The Man Who Left His Will on Film a hand grabs the camera from the dead boy. Another man is about to assume the task of filming the meaning of his life. Just as the demonstrations at the end of Diary of a Shinjuku Burglar did not mean that the revolution was at hand, this film equally suggests the need for a permanent, ongoing struggle in which the first step must be attainment of greater self-knowledge on the part of these students. The man who picks up the camera and would take the hero's place may not end his life in an ineffectual suicide. His quest for truth may not fill him with the hopelessness experienced by Motoki, Oshima's hero. The camera's new owner may in fact see the revolution through to a further stage.

Oshima leaves us with a cacophony of images, debates, dreams, and fantasies. They reveal the trauma of the young in Japan, desperately opposed to the policies of an authoritarian state, yet incapable of creating a meaningful political opposition with which ordinary Japanese could identify. For such a bewildered generation, who have turned to tormenting each other, suicide becomes a ready option. Even the landscape of the revolution now seems uncertain, whether it will occur on the quiet middle-class streets photographed by Motoki, or amid violent demonstrations, as his radical friends would have us believe. Chronology has been so reversed as to make it impossible for us to reconstruct the action in a linear manner because any single solution to Japan's problems does not seem ready to hand. Like the deserted highway on which Motoki's girlfriend is raped and beaten, Japan has become a no-man's land. Everyone has been cast forth in isolation and without solace, with even the would-be revolutionaries sufficiently diverted to believe that their enemies are each other rather than the all-powerful State. (pp. 369-70)