A strange, beautiful masterpiece from Ichikawa. What is so wonderful about this film is Ichikawa's determination to create a filmic language that can relate dialogically to the theater language of Kabuki, yet, still facilitate great naturalistic narrative tension. Our sense of space and time is played with to great effect in this story of a great Kabuki actor's search fro revenge against the people responsible for his family's tragic fall. This is a key film of the modern cinema that features breathtaking cinematography, editing and sound. Kon Ichikawa is a neglected master filmmaker whose entire eclectic body of work deserves far more attention than it has received - especially in the United States.