Above: MandalaOnly up until the last few years has Akio Jissoji remained on the margins of canonical Japanese cinema of the late 1960s and early 1970s. The director’s status as an outlier—not dissimilar to those of his two closest contemporaries, Koji Wakamatsu and Masao Adachi—had, perhaps, not as much to do with his deployment of the staples of exploitation cinema or subject matter that addressed cultural taboo, but with how his films addressed each through the prism of European new wave aesthetics that had reached Japan by the 1960s that has come to be known as the Japanese New Wave.The opening sequence of Jissoji’s 1971 Mandala—a series of sex images set against what appears to be a field of white, followed by a fade-in to a montage of Buddha wall paintings—establishes a thesis of sorts for his de facto “Buddhist trilogy.” The films explore...