Yoshida's first film made independently after his departure from Shochiku inaugurated his celebrated cycle of edgy and stylistically dazzling "anti-melodramas," each starring the incomparable Mariko Okada and all challenging the Japanese melodrama's conventional focus on family and suffering womanhood. A feverish tale of a son's troubled relationship with his radiantly beautiful mother—played with devastating grace by Okada—A Story Written on Water introduced a new psychological complexity into Yoshida's films, using its poetically charged flashback structure to explore the interwoven patterns of memory and unspoken desire. In A Story Written on Water, as in all of Yoshida's anti-melodramas, the woman portrayed by Okada possesses a power and presence that she herself cannot quite understand, an instinctually anti-patriarchal force embodied in her stunning, almost otherworldly pulchritude.