An inspiring cinematic ode to Japan’s artistic revolutionaries

TOKYO — This month marks the 90th anniversary of Shuji Terayama’s birth. He will not be celebrating, having succumbed to chronic nephritis in April 1983, but it is interesting to speculate what he would have got up to if he had lived.

For those who are unfamiliar with the name, Terayama was a huge figure in the Japanese counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s. Originally a poet specializing in Japan’s 1,000-year-old tanka form, he was the founder, producer and main playwright of an avant-garde theater troupe called Tenjo Sajiki. But he was also a maker of disturbing experimental films, a novelist, a horse-racing columnist, a songwriter, a boxing fan and one of the few Japanese intellectuals to “get” The Beatles when they played at Tokyo’s Budokan arena in 1966.