As a key – if often overlooked – member of the Japanese new wave cinema of the early 1960s, the cinema of Kiju Yoshida is integral to Japanese film culture of the modernist, post-classical era. Like his contemporaries Oshima Nagisa, Shinoda Masahiro and Imamura Shohei, Yoshida abandoned the studio cinema that began and beget his career and moved decisively into independent production under the auspices of his own company.

Working for the second time with his wife Okada Mariko after the more conventional (though no less interesting) melodrama Akitsu Springs (1964), Yoshida here turns the extreme emotionality of the typical melodramatic mode on its head. The story concerns a dramatic twist on the Japanese cinematic staple of the Shomin geki, or family drama – a kind of twisted mirror of an Ozu picture – wherein a young man about to marry a desirable partner with a powerful father is drawn inexorably back into a quasi-incestuous relationship with his mother.

Filming in cool, high key black and white, Yoshida’s distanced and at times oblique visual approach and his narrative fragmentation as memories, dreams and fantasies coalesce. Thus, whilst the psychodrama increases to a fever pitch as Shizuka veers ever closer to his mother and the primal relationship that the film suggests is paramount in his problematic subjectivity, the film tends to stand back and view these characters obliquely, from distorted or otherwise opaque angles.

There are moments that provide a visual and narrative crescendo, especially in the build up to a car accident late in the film as this seems to precipitate some decisive final developments, but for the most part there is a contrapuntal increase in the intensity of the story and at least a lack of the same in Yoshida’s style in A Story Written with Water. This opens up another, complementary, fault line whose significance extends to the very title of the film.