House on Fire

The film is set in Japan in the fifties. At the centre of the story is a well known writer. The man is trying to clear space for himself to write. His life, though, is split three ways at once. On one side there is his wife and his children. On another there is more than one lover. On the third there is his work. He cannot keep up with any of them properly. Staying at home weighs on him. He feels crushed under the burden of fatherhood. Because of it he keeps going away. Each time he returns, things have come apart a little more. The film was adapted from a writer’s account of his own life. The story moves from inside a disintegration. Ken Ogata and Ayumi Ishida appear in the hundred and thirty three minute film, a Japanese production Kinji Fukasaku finished in 1986.