General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20265 min read

Unagi (1997 film)

Unagi (うなぎ, released in English as The Eel) is a 1997 Japanese drama directed by Shohei Imamura, in which a man paroled after eight years in prison for killing his unfaithful wife rebuilds his life as a barber whose only confidant is a pet eel he kept during his incarceration.¹ It shared the Palme d'Or at the 50th Cannes Film Festival with Abbas Kiarostami's Taste of Cherry, giving Imamura his second Palme d'Or after The Ballad of Narayama (1983).¹^•²^•³

Key fact	Detail
Director / country	Shohei Imamura; Japan, 1997¹
Source material	Akira Yoshimura's novel Yami ni Hirameku (闇にひらめく, "Glistening in the Dark")²
Screenplay	Motofumi Tomikawa, Daisuke Tengan, and Imamura⁴
Cannes	Palme d'Or (ex-aequo), 50th Festival, 1997¹
Japan release	24 May 1997; 117 minutes; distributed by Shochiku = Shochiku Fuji²
Lead cast	Koji Yakusho (Takuro Yamashita), Misa Shimizu (Keiko Hattori)¹
Japanese honors	Kinema Junpo Best Ten first place for 1997; multiple 21st Japan Academy Prizes including Best Director and Best Actor²

Spoilers

Plot

In the summer of 1988, office worker Takuro Yamashita receives an anonymous letter denouncing his wife's affair; after witnessing the infidelity himself, he kills her in a rage and turns himself in to the police.⁵^•² The story proper begins when he is released on parole eight years later. Placed under the supervision of a Buddhist priest in a small town by the Tone River in Chiba Prefecture, he opens a small barber shop, avoids contact with his neighbors, and speaks almost only to the eel he befriended in prison.⁵^•²

One day, gathering food for the eel on the riverbank, he finds Keiko Hattori unconscious after taking a large dose of sleeping pills in a suicide attempt. He saves her, and the priest's wife presses him into hiring her at the shop despite his reluctance.² Keiko, who carries wounds of her own, including ties to a financial company co-owner and lover, Dojima, and a mentally ill mother, gradually brightens the shop and softens Takuro.² A former prison acquaintance, Takasaki, appears and harasses Takuro, revealing his criminal past to Keiko and posting scurrilous notices at the shop.² When Keiko, pregnant with Dojima's child, leaves to settle her affairs and returns, Dojima tries to take back her money and drag her away; Takuro, knowingly risking a return to prison, protects her from Dojima. Sent back to prison over the incident, he resolves, through the human connections he has regained, to accept Keiko and her unborn child and to go on living.²

Production

Unagi was Imamura's first feature in eight years, following Black Rain (1989).⁵ The screenplay adapts Yoshimura's novel and was written jointly by Motofumi Tomikawa, Daisuke Tengan, and Imamura himself.⁴ During production the project carried the title Yami ni Hirameku, matching the source novel; Imamura changed it to Unagi shortly before the production announcement, telling producer Kazuyoshi Okuyama that he preferred the shorter title.⁶

The crew included cinematographer Shigeru Komatsubara, composer Shinichiro Ikebe, and editor Hajime Okayasu.¹ Production companies included KSS, Satellite Theater, and Groove Corporation, with cooperation from Imamura Productions; distribution in Japan was handled by Shochiku and Shochiku Fuji.⁴ The film was shot in color on 35 mm at an aspect ratio of 1.85:1.⁴

Cast

Koji Yakusho as Takuro Yamashita⁴
Misa Shimizu as Keiko Hattori⁴
Akira Emoto as Takasaki⁴
Tomorowo Taguchi as Dojima Eiji⁴
Fujio Tsuneta as Jiro Nakajima, the priest⁴
Mitsuko Baisho as Misako Nakajima⁴
Etsuko Ichihara as Fumie Hattori, Keiko's mother⁴
Sho Aikawa as Yuji Nozawa⁴

Reception and awards

At Cannes the film competed for the Palme d'Or and won it ex-aequo, shared with Kiarostami's Taste of Cherry.¹^•³ This made Imamura one of the directors with two Palmes d'Or, joining Francis Ford Coppola and others in that company.⁷

In Japan the film placed first in the 1997 Kinema Junpo Best Ten.² At the 21st Japan Academy Prizes (1998) it received Excellence awards for film, screenplay, lead actress, supporting actor, and supporting actresses, and Excellence (top) awards for Director (Imamura), Screenplay, Lead Actor (Yakusho), and Supporting Actress (Baisho), along with technical awards for music, cinematography, lighting, art direction, sound recording, and editing.²

Overseas, the film screened at festivals including Rotterdam 1998 and San Sebastian 1997.⁵^•⁸ In the United States, New Yorker Films distributed it, and it grossed $413.8 thousand; on Rotten Tomatoes it holds an 83% critics score from 29 reviews and an 81% audience rating.⁹ Critics noted Imamura's frank treatment of sex and sexuality with an emotional detachment likened to an anthropological study, and David Stratton, writing in Variety, praised the "rich tapestry of characters and situations" and the performances of Yakusho and Shimizu.⁹^•¹⁰

Themes

The eel functions as the film's central metaphor. Imamura described the story as a portrait of a small community built around an eel that, born in the Sargasso Sea, swims thousands of miles to live in cold mud, an image that mirrors Takuro's wish to withdraw from human society.⁵^•¹⁰ In Japan eels are regarded as a vitality-restoring delicacy, a resonance the adaptation keeps in view.¹⁰ Imamura called his own films "heavy comedies" (重喜劇), a coinage he opposed to light comedy, arguing that laughter can be grounded in a truthful, weighty depiction of human beings; Unagi is an example of this approach, a human comedy about a man whose distrust of others is broken down by ordinary encounters.²^•⁷ Imamura said he made the film because he wanted to understand "the unique workings of this man's thoughts."¹⁰

Later availability

The film was released on a Radiance Films limited-edition Blu-ray in the United States on 25 March 2025, with interviews with critic Tony Rayns and screenwriter Daisuke Tengan and a visual essay by Tom Mes on 1997 as a turning point in Japanese cinema.¹¹ It has also streamed on the Criterion Channel and Netflix.³^•¹²

References

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026