As a study in the relationship between two generations of radical Japanese—a physically and intellectually liberated but increasingly rudderless youth and a more contemplative, critically-minded, older group of men—within the late 1960s Tokyo zeitgeist, Diary of a Shinjuku Thief posits a reimagining of the self through a series of literary and intellectual maneuvers. We witness a series of reflective social trials/rituals: the protagonist couple being lectured to by Kinokuniya’s elderly essayist-owner after compulsively stealing and returning books; a meeting of middle-aged, literary critics attempting to resolve issues of contemporary gender identity through language hearkening back to the pre-war period (e.g. “nonsense”); an older male sexologist fatefully advising the young couple on their physical relations; simultaneously appearing and hiding in a play by Kara Juro’s Red Tent Theater; and so on. Repeatedly, nothing really works for the two youths (less a couple than a pair of lost souls not knowing any better but to follow each other’s irresolution’s) to solve their issues, and the viewer is slowly surrounded by an increasingly pessimistic and cynical paradigm of a Japan that repeatedly finds itself over generations unable to reconcile free-thinking liberalism with authoritarian traditionalism.
Diary of a Shinjuku Thief suggests another mid-1960s, French film, Alphaville, written and directed by Jean-Luc Godard, which also depicts an alternate reality, with a black and white, documentary-style evocation of Paris as a distant world ruled by pure logic and authority. It is, like Oshima’s film, a reimagining of a nation/culture’s capital city as the locus of contemporary social crisis of identity and mind/body dichotomy.
Just as Shinjuku’s youth have lost the ability to feel and authenticate love or passion, the citizens of Alphaville are so emotionally vacant that they have lost, not the will to live, but the differentiation between life and death itself. As a solution, Godard posits healing through poetic reification of a modernist subjective self. For example, the hero posits the Surrealist poet Paul Eluard’s The Capital of Pain (1926) to circumvent and subvert the logic of the computer that runs society, i.e. the future dystopia symbol of late, post-industrial capitalism. The historical roots of the poems in Eluard’s dark period in the early to mid-1920s of lost love, despair, searching, and renewal reference both the population of Alphaville’s loss of humanity as well as a literal indication of the city itself.
Conversely, as the above examples imply, Diary of a Shinjuku Thief instead posits an ongoing dialectic process of loss of self in a multiplicity of subjectivities as perhaps, in the swelter and madness of late 1960s political and cultural upheavals, the only way through society’s increasing chaos. Donald Richie has described the presence in the film of pop artist Yokoo Tadanori, who plays lead character, Birdy Hilltop, as nonexistent [“there was no one there; a hole in the screen.” (Richie 2006: 107][1]
Ultimately, Alphaville resorts to rescuing “Man” (between Lemmy Caution’s machismo and Professor Von Braun’s intellect, patriarchy still maintains authority over both good and evil) via a high modernist bailout of the assertive individual (“I” is the magic word spoken at long last by Anna Karina’s daughter-lover-whore in the last scene). Diary of a Shinjuku Thief, on the other hand, leaves us with a pile of tattered vestiges of Japanese postwar identity. It doesn’t really take stand on any of the myriad of issues it brings up, instead, like a mysterious guide dropping bread crumbs for us to follow in routed, three-dimensional circles, Without answers, Oshima proffers drops of concept, opinion, feeling, and experience all along the way down a rabbit hole. The film leaves us with questions because in 1968, when the film was made, with daily protests, assassinations, invasions, and failed revolutions worldwide, that’s all there was.
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