

A truck driver's midlife crisis crashes harder than any collision on the highway.
A married long-distance truck driver falls for a significantly younger waitress at a roadside diner. Their affair brings tragedy to themselves and those around them.
Acting
Tatsuya Nakadai's slow-burn collapse is masterclass in repressed devastation.
Cinematography
Highway loneliness captured in endless asphalt and neon-diner gloom.
Direction
Kurahara transforms pulp premise into genuinely tragic opera.

Director
Koreyoshi Kurahara
Trivia, insights & behind the scenes
Part of Japan's 1980s 'jun-ai' (pure love) boom, which paradoxically fetishized destructive passion while moralizing against it. The genre's contradictions are on full display here.
Miwako Fujitani was 20 playing opposite 55-year-old Nakadai; the 35-year age gap was controversial even in 1986 and sparked debates about the male gaze in Japanese cinema.