Eros + Massacre

Among the greatest of all political films and perhaps the work that best embodies the spirit of Yoshida’s artistic projects, Eros + Massacre is an epic, historiographic examination of the points of intersection between the domains of desire and politics. The film depicts the last days of anarcho-feminist writer Noe Ito (indelibly portrayed by Mariko Okada) and Sakae Ōsugi, her lover and a prominent anarchist theorist, shortly preceding their 1923 assassination by military police officers in what is known as the Amakasu Incident. Yoshida vividly traces the revolutionaries’ political, intellectual, and sexual development, but he also connects their lives to those of latter-day lovers in contemporary Tokyo, movingly locating a throughline between the political imagination of a bygone era and his own fraught present. Print courtesy of the Japan Foundation.