A Dedicated Life

Kazuo Hara’s interest in iconoclastic figures living in opposition to mainstream society led him to work on A Dedicated Life, a fly-on-the-wall portrait of the controversial novelist Mitsuharu Inoue, a sometimes charming, sometimes combative, often frustrating literary lion of postwar Japan. The project, however, soon spins off into unexpected directions, first when Inoue is diagnosed with terminal cancer, then when Hara discovers that the writer’s fictions extend to the fabricated details of his own life. As the ailing author confronts his mortality, Hara begins trying to separate the man from the myth, resulting in a layered portrait of a complex figure whose life was an extension of his art.