# Throw Away Your Books, Rally in the Streets (書を捨てよ町へ出よう)
**Throw Away Your Books, Rally in the Streets** (書を捨てよ町へ出よう, *Sho o suteyo, machi e deyō*) is a 1971 Japanese avant-garde feature film directed, written, and produced by [Shūji Terayama](https://www.edgepedia.org/shuji-terayama), his first feature-length film. Released by the Art Theatre Guild (ATG) on 24 April 1971, it adapts Terayama's own 1967 essay collection of the same title and a documentary musical staged by his theater troupe Tenjō Sajiki, and it won the grand prize at the San Remo film festival.[1](https://eiga.com/movie/37159/) • [2](https://www.nfaj.go.jp/FC/NFC_Calendar/2010-4/kaisetsu_39.html)
| Key fact | Detail |
|---|---|
| Original title | 書を捨てよ町へ出よう (*Sho o suteyo, machi e deyō*)[1](https://eiga.com/movie/37159/) |
| Release | 24 April 1971, distributed by ATG (Japan)[1](https://eiga.com/movie/37159/) |
| Runtime and format | 137 minutes, 35 mm, color[2](https://www.nfaj.go.jp/FC/NFC_Calendar/2010-4/kaisetsu_39.html) |
| Directorial debut | Terayama's first feature; he had made the 16 mm experimental short *Emperor Tomato Ketchup* the previous year[1](https://eiga.com/movie/37159/) |
| Source works | Terayama's 1967 essay collection and the Tenjō Sajiki documentary musical of the same title, performed more than a hundred times across Japan[1](https://eiga.com/movie/37159/) |
| Key personnel | Cinematography Masayoshi Sukita (his first film); music credits include Shimoda Itsuo, J. A. Seazer, and Yanagida Hiroshi[1](https://eiga.com/movie/37159/) • [3](https://www.laputa-jp.com/laputa/program/terayamashuji/) |
| Award | Grand prize, San Remo film festival, 1971[2](https://www.nfaj.go.jp/FC/NFC_Calendar/2010-4/kaisetsu_39.html) |
## Spoilers
### Story and form
The film opens with a line telling the audience that there is nothing inside the movie and inviting them to go out and breathe the outside air.[1](https://eiga.com/movie/37159/) Its protagonist, called "I" (Watashi), is Kitamura Masaru, a press-factory worker earning 28,000 yen a month who sometimes fantasizes about flying a human-powered aircraft. He lives in a cramped Takadanobaba apartment with a [shoplifting](https://www.edgepedia.org/shoplifting) grandmother, an unemployed 48-year-old father who once ran a ramen stall and served as an army sergeant, and a nearly silent younger sister, Setsu, devoted to her pet rabbit.[1](https://eiga.com/movie/37159/) The story follows the son's frustrated attempts at escape through a soccer-team idol, a prostitute named Midori, and fantasy, while the family disintegrates; it ends with the protagonist breaking with his "acting" self inside the film.[1](https://eiga.com/movie/37159/)
The film's form is deliberately anti-narrative. It mixes staged, frontal compositions with handheld street footage shot in Tokyo, direct addresses to the camera, sequences flooded with a single tint such as red, musical interludes, and guerrilla performance in the Shinjuku pedestrian zone.[7](https://www.kotsu.metro.tokyo.jp/project-toei/column/movie_drama/171011_132001.html) The National Film Archive of Japan describes it as a provocative "Terayama film" that leaps over the norms of conventional narrative cinema and plays with outlandish images.[2](https://www.nfaj.go.jp/FC/NFC_Calendar/2010-4/kaisetsu_39.html) A Harvard Film Archive note describes the street rallies as documents of an anarchist moment in Japanese history, seen through colored gels and graffiti bearing literary references, and links the film's reflexivity to Terayama's concurrent experiments in expanded cinema.[8](https://harvardfilmarchive.org/public/upload/print/663bdfaadfb59.pdf)
The title functions as the film's thesis. Terayama, in a passage quoted in scholarship on his cinema, said that when he threw away books and rallied in the streets he was thinking of turning the city into a book, so that by abandoning printed books the books paradoxically took on greater and wider meaning in his thought.[9](https://1library.net/document/y44m3jvy-throw-streets-relationship-intellectuals-masses-terayama-shuji-cinema.html) A Japanese-language review of the film reads the closing address as Terayama's accusation that the passive spectator, satisfied to sit in a cinema without acting, is himself one of the hapless masses the film indicts.[10](https://nanaelibrary.jpn.org/movie/nihon/1971_n.html)
## Origins: essay, stage, film
The title phrase did not begin as a film. Terayama published an essay collection under the title in 1967, staged a play of the same name in 1968, and ran a long-run engagement of the stage version in 1969 before the work became a feature film in 1971; the Shūji Terayama Memorial Museum in Misawa treats this sequence as the transformation of a single work across media.[4](https://www.terayamaworld.com/museumnews/2021/10/09/960/) A scholarly account of Terayama's career describes the same trajectory, saying he treated the title as a work that was dismantled and transformed from essay to drama to film over four years.[5](https://kyouyou.agu.ac.jp/laboratory/file/GokenKiyou-32.pdf)
The phrase itself is older than Terayama's use of it. According to the Misawa museum, it derives from the preface poem "Nathanaël" in the French writer [André Gide](https://www.edgepedia.org/andre-gide)'s *Les Nourritures terrestres* (1897); Terayama copied Gide's words extensively into an idea notebook he called *Zassui*, and his copy of the 1953 Kadokawa bunko translation by Uda Dai'gaku is held by the museum.[4](https://www.terayamaworld.com/museumnews/2021/10/09/960/)
The stage version was a "documentary musical" that Tenjō Sajiki, the experimental theater troupe Terayama led, performed more than a hundred times around Japan; the film is an adaptation of that production.[1](https://eiga.com/movie/37159/) A BFI *Sight and Sound* account adds that the stage piece was a work of "theatre vérité" in which audience members were invited onto the stage to act out their desires and fantasies.[6](https://www.bfi.org.uk/sight-and-sound/features/where-mountain-meets-street-terayama-shuji)
## Production
The film was produced by Jinryō Hikōkishya (Terayama's own production company) together with ATG, the Art Theatre Guild, whose independent production and distribution model supported radical Japanese cinema as the major studio system declined.[3](https://www.laputa-jp.com/laputa/program/terayamashuji/) • [7](https://www.kotsu.metro.tokyo.jp/project-toei/column/movie_drama/171011_132001.html) Terayama took the four roles of production, original work, screenplay, and direction himself.[1](https://eiga.com/movie/37159/)
Cinematography went to Masayoshi Sukita, a photographer shooting a film for the first time, assisted by Seizō Motoyama.[1](https://eiga.com/movie/37159/) The music credits include Shimoda Itsuo, J. A. Seazer, Yanagida Hiroshi, Kuni Kawauchi, Katō Hiroshi, and Araki Ichirō.[3](https://www.laputa-jp.com/laputa/program/terayamashuji/) The lead, Hideaki Sasaki, was a non-professional young man chosen by audition who had recently come to Tokyo from Aomori, Terayama's home prefecture.[7](https://www.kotsu.metro.tokyo.jp/project-toei/column/movie_drama/171011_132001.html)
## Reception and legacy
The film won the grand prize at the San Remo film festival, a result reported in the Asahi Shimbun of 22 October 1971 and recorded by the National Film Archive of Japan.[2](https://www.nfaj.go.jp/FC/NFC_Calendar/2010-4/kaisetsu_39.html) • [11](https://www.terayamaworld.com/permanent/08.html) It established the template Terayama developed in his later features, including *[Pastoral: To Die in the Country](https://www.edgepedia.org/pastoral-to-die-in-the-country)* (1974) and *Farewell to the Ark* (released 1984, after his death in 1983).[6](https://www.bfi.org.uk/sight-and-sound/features/where-mountain-meets-street-terayama-shuji)
Contemporary audience response remains divided. Rotten Tomatoes records an 84 percent Tomatometer from a single review and more than 100 audience ratings, with reviewers split between praise for the film's color and cumulative power and complaints about its jump cuts and lack of cohesion.[12](https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/throw_away_your_books_rally_in_the_streets) The film's afterlife has grown through restorations and home-video releases, including an HD new-master DVD edition, and a 2021 exhibition at the Shūji Terayama Memorial Museum marked the fiftieth anniversary of the release by tracing the phrase's life as essay, stage work, and film.[4](https://www.terayamaworld.com/museumnews/2021/10/09/960/) • [13](https://tower.jp/item/6198037)
## References
1. [書を捨てよ町へ出よう : 作品情報・キャスト・あらすじ, 映画.com](https://eiga.com/movie/37159/)
2. [上映会情報 映画の中の日本文学 Part 3, National Film Archive of Japan](https://www.nfaj.go.jp/FC/NFC_Calendar/2010-4/kaisetsu_39.html)
3. [寺山修司の映画／ラピュタ阿佐ケ谷](https://www.laputa-jp.com/laputa/program/terayamashuji/)
4. [企画展「書を捨てよ町へ出よう」、10/30㈯からはじまります, 三沢市寺山修司記念館](https://www.terayamaworld.com/museumnews/2021/10/09/960/)
5. [愛知学院大学教養部 研究紀要 第32巻第1号](https://kyouyou.agu.ac.jp/laboratory/file/GokenKiyou-32.pdf)
6. [Where the mountain meets the street: Terayama Shuji, Sight and Sound, BFI](https://www.bfi.org.uk/sight-and-sound/features/where-mountain-meets-street-terayama-shuji)
7. [「下町の太陽」「書を捨てよ町へ出よう」, PROJECT TOEI, 東京都交通局](https://www.kotsu.metro.tokyo.jp/project-toei/column/movie_drama/171011_132001.html)
8. [Harvard Film Archive program notes, Terayama Shūji](https://harvardfilmarchive.org/public/upload/print/663bdfaadfb59.pdf)
9. [Throw away your books, rally in the streets: intellectuals and masses in Terayama Shuji's cinema](https://1library.net/document/y44m3jvy-throw-streets-relationship-intellectuals-masses-terayama-shuji-cinema.html)
10. [日本映画レビュー─1971年](https://nanaelibrary.jpn.org/movie/nihon/1971_n.html)
11. [第八章 書を捨てよ町へ出よう〜さらば箱舟, 三沢市寺山修司記念館](https://www.terayamaworld.com/permanent/08.html)
12. [Throw Away Your Books Get Out onto the Streets, Rotten Tomatoes](https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/throw_away_your_books_rally_in_the_streets)
13. [書を捨てよ町へ出よう ≪HDニューマスター版≫, Tower Records Japan](https://tower.jp/item/6198037)
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*Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Films and standalone screen works › Individual films by title and year › Drama and biographical films (individual works) › Drama films 1970s › Released 1970 to 1974*
*Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026*
*Copyright 2026 EdgeChat AI, a subsidiary of Biostate AI.*
License: Edgepedia Community License 1.0, https://www.edgepedia.org/edgepedia/license