with the shinkansen in the background and takes a rickshaw through today's Ginza. Ultimately, the frames of past and present completely disappear, in this way, there is the sense that contemporary young women and Noe Itō are able to converse. Therefore, this is one way in which I challenge history." It is not just the framing of the film that brings historical characters into the present: the characters themselves reject the distinction at the opening of the film, when Eiko and Mako pun on the shared ko ending of their names, naming each other as alter-egos, and Mako refuses to take part in the interview as Itō's daughter. Instead, actress Mariko Okada takes on the role of Noe Itō herself. In this way, the film depicts Itō as "derived from the contemporary Eiko's imagination". To accentuate the notion of history being perceived falsely, the transitions between the two periods often feature characters seen from mirrors and reflected surfaces. For example, in the scene where Itō gets introduced to the staff journalist Hiraga Haruko, Yoshida frames their inverted reflections in a pond as they're conversing. This is part of a general aim among Yoshida and his avant-garde contemporaries to subvert viewer expectations by destabilizing simple, linear narratives, forcing the realization that what the spectator sees is a series of fabrications that can only be given meaning by the interpretation of the spectator themselves. This "denial of the self" (, "") is related to the "death of the author" concept. Mathieu Capel writes: "does the past exist beyond the words that state and organize it? Is what we call "world" anything but a tracery of "world views"? Then, how unlikely would it be for Itō Noe and Eiko to meet in a contemporary setting? In a probably conscious way, Yoshida grasps the same questions as contemporary structuralist thinkers do, mostly their obsession of the "text", with logos as the leading organization principle." Director's cut The film was completed in 1969, and Ichiko Kamichika, who had survived the massacres of the Great Kanto Earthquake, requested Yoshida to have a private screening of the film before it was released to cinemas. Unhappy with the way that Yoshida had portrayed her, Kamichika refused him the right to release the film because she considered it an invasion of her privacy. Because of this, Yoshida removed about an hours worth of material from the film (mostly scenes