Shinoda followed Double Suicide with this even more ambitious historical essay about Kabuki theatre in the 19th century. Amos Vogel wrote: “Magically transfigured by the well-known avant-garde playwright Shuji Terayama from a Kabuki play, this densely textured, sprawling tapestry of a ‘time of repression, anarchy, hedonism and decadence' offers a sophisticated equivalent of a flamboyant, picaresque cartoon strip serial, its studied ‘vulgarity' wedded to a profoundly modern ironic pessimism.”