Yōzō Tanaka
Writing
Biography
Yōzō Tanaka is a Japanese screenwriter. He was born in Nihonbashi, Tokyo. After joining the production department of Nichigeki Music Hall, he started writing radio scripts. While he was a student at Waseda University, he met Atsushi Yamatoya and Kaname Kawachi. Before becoming a screenwriter, Tanaka worked as a reporter, conducting a series of interviews with eccentrics in the magazine Weekly Sankei. After joining Nikkatsu, he joined a screenwriting team led by director Seijun Suzuki. Individuals in this group such as Tanaka, Yamatoya, and Chūsei Sone also contributed to various projects at Wakamatsu Productions during this period of the 1960s. He is also a driving force behind the heyday of Nikkatsu Roman Porno, writing numerous screenplays. He continued to collaborate with fellow veterans of the aforementioned series such as Shinji Sōmai and Kichitaro Negishi. His disciples include Haruhiko Arai and Miho Nakazono. In 2005, he worked as an associate professor at the Graduate School of Film and New Media, Tokyo University of the Arts. In 2017, a book of Yōzō Tanaka's essays and other archival materials such as interviews and screenplays was published.
Known For

After five years of service as a cop in San Francisco, Shunsaku Kudo becomes a private detective.
Detective Story

Hell manifests itself through the sins, shame and desires of an upper class rural family and a mother's grief from beyond the grave.
The Inferno

Filled with guilt over his forbidden desires, a young man leaves home and his studies. He finds a new smaller place to stay, a low-paying but satisfying job and a girlfriend. Then his mother, unable to fight her forbidden desires, shows up.
Moment of Demon

Shizuka is the aristocratic wife of the president of a large company. When she wants to divorce her domineering husband, he orders his employee Yoshi, the son of an adult toy store owner, to train his wife to become sexually submissive.
Flower & Snake

A former husband with a dark obsession returns to his ex-wife’s life, ready to unleash a torrent of cruel, perverse devotion.
Wife to Be Sacrificed

Natsu, the older of two sisters, has a relationship with Yonosuke, the local kimono trader. Unlike her more conservative sister Oshichi she tries to use sex as a means to climb to a better social position. To even attempt that she first needs to get out of the Buddhist monastery she is working at...
Story of a Nymphomaniac

A teacher, Sakiko Kurata, receives a phone call regarding one of her former students. Young Sueko is accused of being a prostitute and has requested Sakiko’s help. This minx seduces random strangers for sex, but does not ask for payment. Sakiko has moved to another town and barely remembers Sueko, but there’s something about her that awakens painful memories of her own secretive past. What is that strange paint thinner smell on Sueko? Who is the man in the nylon ski mask that violently assaulted Sakiko many years ago? In her search for answers, Sakiko discovers that her past may have inadvertently destroyed another family’s future.
Female Teacher: Dirty Afternoon

Horror Theater Unbalance is a 1973 Japanese Anthology television series created by Tsuburaya and Fuji TV to air on the Fuji TV network on Monday Nights for 13 episodes. Originally started in production in 1969, it was shelved and took years for its airing debut to begin its broadcast, before production was eventually completed at the end of 1972. It was then aired on Fuji TV in 1973.
Horror Theater Unbalance

A high-school girl inherits a declining yakuza organization, which seeks to repair its fortunes under her leadership.
Sailor Suit and Machine Gun

Zenjiro (Masaru Shiga) is a lowlife criminal, roaming the country with his merry band of crooks, gamblers and rapists. When he gets done with his latest escapade of banging a samurai's wife, he finds that his love Okoyo (Eiko Matsuda), has managed to be recruited as one of Shogun Tokugawa Ietsuna's (Kantaro Suga) concubines. While attempting to win her back, Zenjiro becomes involved in increasingly murderous palace intrigues.
The General and His Empire of Joy

A delightful and moving coming-of-age story. One summer, three young boys take an increasing interest in an eccentric old man who lives alone in a house surrounded by an overgrown garden. The boys form a bond with the recluse and set about weeding and replanting the garden.
The Friends

Yuko is in love with an old poet who happens to be also a married man. She waits patiently for him and only him, yet she is constantly being lust by others.
Love Letter

After botching his latest assignment, a third-ranked Japanese hit man becomes the target of another assassin.
Branded to Kill

A 1920s playwright meets a beautiful woman who may be the ghost of his patron's deceased wife.
Kagero-za

This enticing period melodrama depicts a long-suffering woman's relationship with her brilliant but self-destructive writer husband in postwar Tokyo. Based on a semi-autobiographical 1947 novel by Osamu Dazai, the story centers less on the womanizing, heavy-drinking, suicidal hero than on the wife who loves him. Written by Palm Springs International Film Festival
Villon's Wife

A young jazz musician's desire to advance in his career runs afoul of organized crime in this thriller from Haruki Kadokawa. After a saxophonist starts playing at a particular nightspot, a thug from the Yakuza adopts him as a special friend for no greater reason than he plays one of his favorite songs well. As the dangerous life of the gangster intertwines with that of the musician, it brings harm to the musician's girlfriend, who is raped. This changes the young saxophonist's attitude about his patron, but his Yakuza "friend" is still too embroiled in his own problems to worry about anything else.
Cabaret

16 years after the fateful "revenge of the Forty-seven Ronin," involving samurais from the Ako domain who avenged their leader and then commited seppuku (ritual suicide), the sole survivor of that incident, Kichiemon Terasaka (Koichi Sato) traverses the country on a mission. His purpose is to find the families of the fallen samurais and spread the truth of the ronin uprising.
The Last Ronin

A surreal period film following a university professor and his eerie nomad friend as they go through loose romantic triangles and face death in peculiar ways.
Zigeunerweisen

Following the life of Japanese artist and poet Yumeji Takehisa through the imagining of an encounter with a beautiful widow with a dark past.
Yumeji

The story of a courtesan that was once popular in Yoshiwara. She is good-looking, but for some reason, three of her customers died unnaturally, one after another. As a result, she is feared by potential customers, and no one cares for her...