Yoichi Higashi has made everything from commercial hits to festival favorites in his five-plus decades as a director, while taking up politically sensitive subjects and unpopular issues. His 1992 smash "The Bridge with No River" ("Hashi no Nai Kawa") depicted the raw prejudice endured by burakumin outcasts in early 20th-century rural Japan. Also, in 2009 he joined the "barrier free" movement, dubbing and subtitling his films for the hearing-impaired, an audience the industry at the time virtually ignored.
Abroad, however, Higashi's profile has never been as high as such contemporaries as Koji Wakamatsu and Nagisa Oshima who also courted controversy, if with arguably more talent for self-promotion. In Japan he has become known for drawing career-peak performances from his leading ladies, including Kaori Momoi as a drifting college student in the hit "No More Easy Life" ("Mo Hozue wa Tsukanai," 1979) and now, veteran Takako Tokiwa, the queen of television "trendy dramas" in the 1990s who has matured into an accomplished, in-demand film actress.
In Higashi's new drama "Someone's Xylophone" ("Dareka no Mokkin"), Tokiwa plays Sayoko, a seemingly happy middle-aged housewife in a Tokyo suburb, who is blessed with a kindly salaryman husband (Masanobu Katsumura) and a sweet-natured teenage daughter (Mikoto Kimura) — two rarities in the local family drama genre.