Crazed Fruit By Nakahira

Beginning in the late 1950s and continuing into the 1960s Japanese filmmakers began to explore the transforming youth of the nation through the genre of youth films (seishun eiga). The Sun Tribe (taiyozoku) films of the late 1950s and the Japanese New Wave (nuberu bagu) films of the 1960s depicted transgressive, rebellious youths who indulged in sex, violence and crime as a mode of defiance against their parent’s generation’s dominant social values . Such films as Ko Nakahira’s Crazed Fruit (Kurutta Kajitsu, 1956) and Nagisa Oshima’s Cruel Story of Youth (Seishun Zankoku Monogatari, 1960) feature characters who utilise their sexuality and violence to challenge to social status quo, to various degrees of success. Each film treats the character’s

Crazed Fruit portrays a love triangle between brothers Haruji (Masahiko Tsugawa) and Natsuhisa (Yujiro Ishihara), and their shared love interest Eri (Kitahara Mie). Natsuhisa, the elder brother, and his friends are introduced as typical examples of the taiyozoku youth: they spend their days gambling, wearing colourful Aloha shirts, lounging by the water and picking up women. These men affirm the archetypal structure of masculinity, especially in their treatment of women who function only as commodities for male exchange. This is evident in the game devised by the men where each must collect three women and present them at a party: the man with the best ‘hand’ of women wins the game. Natsuhisa’s male friends are always in active pursuit of women, and they understand them as objects to be traded or passed around. However, while Eri is initially presented as a subversion of the passive female object, in her relationship with Haruji she is the active force. This is visually represented in their consummation scene where she takes Haruji by the hand and guides him through the sexual experience. Eri’s sexual activeness comes from her prior experience, both with an older American husband and with previous affairs. Her active pursuit of the brothers transforms them into objects of her sexual desire. This transgressive female sexuality in Crazed Fruit defies social expectations of the archetypal passive