Rokuro Mochizuki was a leader of the Japanese New Wave of the 1990s, making films such as "Shin Kanashiki Hitman (Another Lonely Hitman)" and "Onibi (The Fire Within)" that redefined the yakuza genre. His tough guy heroes may have had a lonely nobility as they fought for their own vision of happiness, apart from the gang world, but they loved and killed as, not romanticized exemplars of mahco cool, but as sometimes twisted, often desperate, human beings.
Mochizuki, however, had a hard slog to escape the porno industry, where he had spent his formative creative years, and establish himself as a legitimate director.
In the current decade he has struggled with failed projects and misfires, including 2004's "Kamachi," a stiff bio-pic about poet and painter Kamachi Yamada who died aged 17 in 1977.