Screened as part of a season of Japanese movies at London's ICA, this contribution is perhaps not the best advert for Japan's Generation X directors. It's a disappointingly leaden portrait of incest, wallowing in metaphors and imagery that drown the more sensational aspects of this controversial subject.
An incestuous love affair begins when a young girl (Yoshiko) presents herself at the bedside of motorcycle crash victim Haruo (Cho) and tells him that she is his paramour, Ice. For reasons not readily apparent, she is, in fact, taking advantage of her brother's crash-induced amnesia to play out her fantasy of being his lover. Haruo, disorientated, goes along with the charade and the couple set up home together. He gets a job at one of the many demolition sites in a grey, crumbling Tokyo suburb while Ice turns to casual prostitution to supplement their income.
Inevitably, Haruo's memory returns and Ice's deception is exposed, although, gratifyingly the obvious outcome is studiously avoided, in favour of something far more challenging.
Yet it's the casual, almost off-hand approach to incest that infects the film as a whole. There's none of the erotic, sensual tension you'd expect, and the final scenes, which should be shocking, are almost run-of-the-mill. Instead, Hitoshi plumps for packing every scene with elementary symbolism - a shattering mirror signifies Haruo's restored memory, a woman killing a puppy then lying about it is an allegory for Ice's deceit, and so on.