It’s rare that an experimental filmmaker’s grave is regularly visited by weeping fans. But Shuji Terayama, who died in 1983, is an unusual case. The protean and prolific artist was most acclaimed in his native Japan as an avant-garde dramatist and poet, although he was also celebrated for the lyrics he wrote for pop songs (including Carmen Maki’s 1969 debut single, “Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child”) and his boxing and horse-racing criticism. He was both a public figure and avant-garde artist, two roles that—Warhol aside—seem irreconcilable in the US. One of Japan’s most popular comedians, Kazuyoshi Morita, still performs a famous impersonation of Terayama, which is akin to Jay Leno being known for his Jack Smith impression—if only Leno had four regular programs on TV and Smith had penned lyrics to Loretta Lynn’s songs.

Yet outside a small circle of cinephiles, Terayama remains obscure in the West. Only two of his narrative films, including Fruits of Passion: The Story of “O” Continued (1981), starring Klaus Kinski, are available on DVD in the US, and none of his experimental films have been released there. Last year Tokyo’s Daguerreo released the DVD boxed set The Experimental Image World of Shuji Terayama, whose trickling out beyond Japan may help Terayama reach wider acclaim. The dominant themes of his oeuvre—critiques of origins and traditional family structure—remain relevant to Japanese cultural production today, as so much of the latter capitalizes on associations between Japan, cuteness, and images of infantility.

Befitting a man who questioned the primacy of origins, Terayama frequently revised his biography. Nevertheless, he was born in rural Aomori Prefecture in 1935 and escaped at the age of 10 with his mother from their hometown after it was bombed in an air raid. That year Terayama’s father was killed while stationed in Manchuria, which, as Terayama put it, absolved him of the Freudian impulse to kill his father or sleep with his mother. By the age of 15 Terayama was publishing poems; by 20 he had scripted his first play at Waseda University, where he studied literature. His first screenplay, A 19-Year-Old’s Blues, based on Nelson Algren’s Never Come Morning (1942), was written in 1959, and the following year he directed a now-lost 16 mm film that allegedly documented cats being pushed off the roof of a high-rise building. In 1967 Terayama established the theatrical troupe Tenjo Sajiki (the name was taken from the Japanese release title of Marcel Carné’s 1945 Les Enfants du paradis but roughly translates to “peanut gallery”). He claimed the group was partly composed of runaways who had arrived at his doorstep—a product, one assumes, of a series of essays and lectures in which Terayama encouraged young adults to leave home. Although he would direct five feature-length films before his death at age 48, it is chiefly Terayama’s experimental films—informed by other avant-gardes like Surrealism and British expanded cinema—that continue to reverberate today.

The 1970 Emperor Tomato Ketchup, Terayama’s best-known experimental film and a high point of his interrogation of origins and teleology, issues from some key historical contexts. Its roots lie in his 1960 radio play The Parent Hunt, in which a child stabs his father after being beaten for not doing his homework, triggering a child rebellion. In Emperor Tomato Ketchup, a violent regime of rule by children is unleashed by a similar episode. The film’s opening scene shows a group of armed kids looking on as a girl is spanked by her mother, while her father, in makeup, holds her still. The year 1970, like 1960, was one in which the US–Japan Security Treaty was ratified, guaranteeing the continued existence of US military bases in Japan. Many there felt the treaty compromised the country’s independence and involved it in US neocolonialist agendas and the cold war. In 1960 Michiko Kanba, a Tokyo University student, became the first casualty of demonstrations protesting the treaty’s renewal; her death became a cause célèbre of the Left for the decade that followed.