Born in 1956, Yoshihiko Matsui worked with indie icon Sogo Ishii on his early films, including the seminal 1980 biker pic "Kuruizaki Thunder Road (Crazy Thunder Road)."

In 1979, Matsui made his debut film, "Rusty Can (Sabita Akikan)" about a gay-love triangle, with Ishii serving as cinematographer. His second film, the 1981 "Pig-Chicken Suicide (Tonkei Shinju)," was another love story, this time about a Korean boy and girl, with admixtures of animal butchery, sexual deviance and madness. Experimental theater and film maestro Shuji Terayama, a longtime Matsui associate, screened it at his theater, where it acquired a cult following.

Then in 1988, Matsui released "Noisy Requiem (Tsuito no Zawameki)," a film five years in the making, about a serial killer (Kazuhiro Sano) who wanders about Osaka's Shinsekai homeless district killing birds and women and removing the organs of the latter to deposit in his "lover" — a shop window mannequin. The film set a house record at the Nakano Musashino Hall theater in Tokyo, but roused a storm of controversy. Matsui did not make another film for two decades, for reasons he prefers not to discuss.