Immediately following his angry break with Shochiku over their unyielding suppression of Night and Fog in Japan, Oshima turned to an adaptation of an unsettling and politically trenchant fable by Nobel laureate Kenzaburo Oe. The story of an African-American pilot captured by the inhabitants of a remote mountain village in the final days of WWII, The Catch's study of the Japanese peasant as national archetype offers perhaps the closest link to the work of Shohei Imamura, the contemporary with whom Oshima is most often compared. With its vehement insistence on the collective guilt of the Japanese people, The Catch makes clear Oshima's categorical rejection of the humanistic interpretations of the war prevalent in postwar Japanese cinema.