Oshima's unquestionable masterpiece, Death By Hanging is one of the great works of Brechtian cinema, wielding avant-garde anti-narrative and intense, absurd theatricality to deliberately rupture and restore cinematic illusionism and pull the spectator into a sustained and emotionally resonant dialectic on the death penalty and the responsibilities of the State. Death By Hanging‘s harsh critique of the Japanese justice system and the nation's endemic racism was inspired by Oshima's impassioned connection with the life and later published writings of Lee Chi-nu the young and precociously talented ethnic Korean convicted of murdering two Japanese school girls. With his talented wife Akiko Koyama as the young man's sister, Oshima also perversely cast the maverick radical filmmaker Masao Adachi in the role of a hapless policeman.