Born into an upper-middle-class medical family in Tokyo, Imamura studied Western history at Waseda University before entering the film world as an assistant to Yasujirō Ozu at Shochiku and later to Yūzō Kawashima at Nikkatsu, where he absorbed a taste for portraying Japan’s marginal, often amoral characters. After directing his first feature, Stolen Desire (1958), he gained recognition with social…
