Film director Nagisa Oshima, who died in Fujisawa, Kanagawa Prefecture, of pneumonia on Tuesday at age 80, was a leader of Japan's postwar New Wave movement.
In the West, however, he became best known for a 1976 film "Ai no Corrida" ("In the Realm of the Senses"), a sexually explicit drama based on the true story of notorious prewar murderess Sada Abe, who strangled her married lover in an erotic game of death.
For decades afterward Oshima was regularly cited by foreign scholars and fans as a leading force in contemporary Japanese cinema, even as he struggled unsuccessfully to bring "Hollywood Zen," his long-meditated biopic of silent-era star Sessue Hayakawa to the screen.
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