Considered Shinoda’s most experimental film, Double Suicide is based on an eighteenth-century puppet-theater drama. The director retained the genre’s central clash between giri (social obligation) and ninjô (personal emotion) while synthesizing a number of contemporary cultural and political elements. The story concerns an obsessive love affair between a wealthy businessman and a beautiful courtesan. Married and with two children, Jihei (Fujiwara) flaunts the dictates of bourgeois morality in pursuing Koharu (Iwashita in the double role of courtesan and wife). In a Brechtian gesture, Shinoda retains the kurago, the black-clothed puppet handlers traditional to Bunraku theater, as silent witnesses to the unfolding tale. The couple’s tragic fate, visible at the outset in a wrenching image of two lifeless bodies laid side-by-side, captures the moral dimension of the original while bestowing an erotic inflection to this strikingly modern version.