Pastoral: To Die in the Country

Pastoral: To Die in the Country is a Japanese drama and fantasy from 1974, directed and written by Shūji Terayama. It follows a filmmaker who is struggling with creative block while making a new work based on his own adolescence in a rural mountain village in Japan. The film moves between the present-day director and the youth he is trying to put on screen, exploring his relationship with a mother who looms large in his life and a boy's escape with a woman from the neighbourhood. The setting draws on the landscape and folklore of the Aomori region, where the worlds of the living and the dead are imagined to meet.

Kantarō Suga plays the adult Shuji, with Hiroyuki Takano as the younger version, Chigusa Takayama as the mother and Kaoru Yachigusa as the married woman. The cast also includes Keiko Niitaka and Masumi Harukawa. Terayama directed the film as the first in the chronological list of his features, followed by Private Collections in 1979 and Fruits of Passion in 1981, and he also produced it with Eiko Kujo and Yumi Govaasu.

Made within Japan's independent film scene, the 101-minute film has held an audience rating of 7.7 on IMDb from around 2,800 votes and 7.5 on TMDB from a much smaller number of votes, indicating a well-regarded title within a limited viewership.