Yumeji

Yumeji is a Japanese drama centred on the artist and poet Yumeji Takehisa. Rather than a straightforward biography, the film builds an imagined encounter between Takehisa and a beautiful widow whose past is shadowed, weaving that meeting into a portrait of his bohemian life and his restless search for an ideal of beauty.

The film was directed by Seijun Suzuki, the twenty-sixth of the twenty-six features he directed in chronological order, arriving after Lupin the Third: The Legend of the Gold of Babylon. Yōzō Tanaka wrote the screenplay. Kenji Sawada plays Takehisa, with Yoshio Harada as Wakiya, Tomoko Mariya as Tomoyo Wakiya, Masumi Miyazaki as Hikono, Tamasaburō Bandō V as Onshu Inamura and Kazuhiko Hasegawa as Onimatsu. It runs 128 minutes and was released in May 1991.

Audience response has been modest but positive. On IMDb it holds a rating of 6.9 from 841 votes, while on TMDB it sits at 6.4 from 36 votes. The larger IMDb sample and the smaller TMDB sample point in a similar direction, suggesting a film that has found a settled, if limited, appreciation among viewers rather than wide popular attention.