Kyôshû (Remembrance)

As a shishosetsu (autobiographical literature), 'Remembrance' is filled with an admirable and straightforward honesty. It is the chronicle of a youth's coming of age and is told with all the detail which only reality can give. We watch one thing happen after another presumably because they happened that way. And it is the resultant feeling of complete reality which makes this a particularly Japanese-seeming film. As a first time director, Nakajima has been very fortunate that the actor who plays the author-director as a youth, brings to his part a like amount of innocence. It is his performance which must carry the film -and it does. (Donald Richie)