And because I tend to frame history and literature through movies: one film that documents the summer of 1968 not through the barricades and the University of Tokyo’s Yasuda Hall but through Shinjuku as the very centre of the counterculture is Nagisa Oshima’s (大島渚) Diary of a Shinjuku Thief (『新宿泥棒日記』, 1969).

Jūrō Kara (唐十郎) and his Situation Theatre (状況劇場) appear in it, and the lead is Tadanori Yokoo (横尾忠則), one of the most famous Japanese artists, who drew posters for the underground theatres of those years, Kara’s Situation Theatre and Shūji Terayama’s (寺山修司) Tenjō Sajiki (天井桟敷) alike. Yokoo plays the young man, calling himself Birdey Hilltop, who shoplifts from the Shinjuku branch of Kinokuniya at the East Exit. French literature and philosophy feature prominently, but so does Guevara, so it is a mirror of the era. Among the character’s takings is Jean Genet’s The Thief’s Journal (『泥棒日記』, in Sankichi Asabuki’s (朝吹三吉) translation), the very book the film’s own title plays on; Genet is later read aloud in both the original French and the Japanese. The thief (Tadanori Yokoo) is caught by a young female clerk, and the film drifts into a charged erotic entanglement and a fevered and rambunctious Shinjuku of 1968. The bookshop’s founder, Mōichi Tanabe (田辺茂一), appears as himself and, in a moment that shows Oshima the documentarian as much as the director, signs and hands the thief a copy of his own book. The Shinjuku station, the small police box there: everything is nostalgic in a way, yet feels real and fervent. Japanese New Wave at its most interesting.