Review of Crazed Fruit / 狂った果実, directed by Kō Nakahira

If you’re new here, and stumbled upon this blog through the mythical powers of the Internet, welcome! I know a lot of visitors to my website are people who randomly come upon this website through search engines like Google, but I also do have a lot of visitors who come back. Regardless: my name is Ashley, and I started this blog in order to keep track of everything I’m coming across in the world.

I feel like a lot of my blog introductions, especially when it comes to movies, have been lamenting on the fact I don’t have a ton of time lately. I used to work as a film critic (which, in fact, was so incredibly underpaid that I now make more off of this blog’s display ads than I ever did publishing anywhere else), and then when I was in graduate school I was writing a lot about film, so I used to watch so many movies.

But now I work an 8-5, come home, and then doom scroll my evenings away instead of watching the movies I used to love so dearly. And recently I realized I want to stop doing that, so I’ve set limits on my phone and am fully prepared to sit back and watch more movies and read more books in order to feed my brain.

I ended up acquiring a Criterion subscription in order to try and nourish my brain in this way, and it happened to collide with an interest in Japanese cinema pre-1970s. A lot of Japanese movies I’ve seen have been more contemporary, and I wanted to watch more movies specifically from the period directly after the war.

And that’s how I ended up watching Crazed Fruit. The premise interested me, so I ended up pressing play and splitting the movie into two watches across two nights.

Let’s get into the review! I don’t want to ramble too much.

In 1950s Japan, two brothers compete for the same woman they’ve fallen in love with.

The protagonists of this movie are two brothers: Natsuhisa and Haruji. It’s 1950s Japan and they’re young and ready for a summer holiday at the beach. There, Haruji, the younger brother and the one who’s more introverted, sees a woman who catches his eye. He obsessively thinks about her through the next two days, and while on water skis, they spot her in the water.

They bring her onto the boat and back to the shore, chatting while they make their way there. Her name is Eri, and Haruji is now even more smitten with her. He sees her at the train station one day and asks her if she wants to learn how to water ski. She agrees.

The brothers’ friend Frank hosts a party and Haruji invites Eri. There, his brother starts dancing with Eri. Haruji decides to take her to a secluded beach and ends up embracing her, but not long later Natsuhisa, while at a club with another girl, spots Eri with an American man.

Turns out she’s married, as she reveals to Natsuhisa at an oceanside club the next night. She’s not too happy with her living situation, as her husband is never around, leading to Eri trying to find other men to satisfy her needs.

She then engages in an affair with Natsuhisa, and his brother has no idea that this is happening. He falls madly in love with her, and Haruji, another day, takes Eri to the beach and holds her again. He even tells his brother how in love he is and how they’ve planned a camping trip.

Natsuhisa goes to her home and sleeps with her, which ends with Eri telling him to never come back. He steals Haruji’s letter from Eri and realizes she’s coming earlier than expected. He goes to see Eri in Frank’s boat, and Haruji realizes what’s happening and goes after them.

Eri and Natsuhisa sleep together in the boat. His brother finds them the next morning and becomes enraged at the sight of the two together. Eri jumps into the water to come to Haruji, but he runs her over instead, killing her on the spot. He then kills his brother by ramming his boat into Natsuhisa’s, then leaves the scene behind to continue his life.

Overall Thoughts

Considering I came into this movie with no idea what to expect beyond a couple of sentences for the synopsis, I was pleasantly surprised. The plot is rather straightforward—and so is the cinematography, if we’re going to be honest—but I thought that this movie was well done and tasteful.

I can see why it was so scandalous in the period. It’s pretty obvious upfront that the characters are upper middle class or wealthy based on the clothes and events happening throughout the course of the film, which is interesting context considering this was released not long into the rebuilding of the country after the war.

I think if you want to know more about the period through an interesting slant, then this might be the movie for you. I don’t know if this something I would rewatch, but it is a movie I would reference in terms of research and analysis about the broader period, as well as changing film trends in Japan.

Follow me below on Instagram, Letterboxd, and Goodreads for more.