Styx can stick with Mr. Roboto but my domo arigato belongs to Madame Kawakita. Whether the film in question is a masterpiece whose place in the canon of world cinema is secure, or a rarely screened curio deserving of broader consideration, the contents of Cinematheque Ontario’s Summer in Japan series would be far more obscure if not for her. Through her efforts at various cultural organizations and film festivals, Kashiko Kawakita facilitated exposure of Japanese cinema abroad and introduced audiences in her country to the works of Renoir, Cocteau, Bergman and Fellini. She even helped scholar Donald Richie get his immigration papers, further ensuring that westerners would learn about the rich history of Japanese film.

Organized to celebrate the centenary of her birth (she died at the age of 85 in 1993), “A Wreath for Madame Kawakita” is a travelling retrospective of 24 films — three each by eight winners of the Kawakita Award for outstanding contributions to the medium. It launches at Cinematheque Ontario with a movie that’s as canonic as canonic can be: Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon (*****; July 4, 7pm) remains remarkable for reasons other than its widely copied structure, in which the story behind a crime in the woods is retold from several very different perspectives. None of the imitations it spawned are anywhere near as starkly stylish in its look or as lacerating in its portrayal of us human folk’s capacity for acting out of self-interest.

Though masters such as Kurosawa, Kon Ichikawa and Shohei Imamura are all well represented, the series also fetes the less celebrated likes of documentarian Sumiko Haneda — whose Into the Picture Scroll: The Tale of Yamanaka Tokiwa, a sort of action movie on ancient parchment, makes its Toronto premiere on July 5 — and Kaneto Shindo, who scored a major success in the west with 1964’s Onibaba (****; July 17, 8:30pm), an eerie and vicious tale of lust, jealousy and murder set in war-ravaged 14th-century Japan. Two poor swamp-dwellers — a middle-aged woman and her daughter-in-law — make their living by killing stray soldiers and selling off their gear. When a man enters the picture, their behaviour grows even more bestial in Shindo’s excoriating allegory about postwar amorality.

For sheer balls-out audacity, no movie here can match the trio of titles by Seijun Suzuki. In the ’60s, his succession of increasingly deranged and frenetic genre flicks would peak with Tokyo Drifter (****; July 19, 7pm) and Branded to Kill (*****; Aug. 16, 7pm), a one-two punch of pop-art style, lusty action and surrealistic excess. The latter tale of battling assassins travelled so far out there, Suzuki’s bosses at Nikkatsu fired his ass. He got the last laugh when his independently produced Zigeunerweisen (****; July 21, 7pm) — named after a musical work by Spanish composer Pablo de Sarasate — swept the Japanese Academy Awards in 1980 despite being every bit as bizarre. Recently voted the best Japanese film of the ’80s by critics, this elliptical story of male rivalry is far closer to the elegant mindfucks of Resnais and Robbe-Grillet (who get their own Cinematheque Ontario retro later this month) than the director’s more accessible crime pics. Even so, all the eyeball licking, blind-man beatdowns and crustacean hallucinations are proof that Suzuki is one of cinema’s most dyed-in-the-wool Dadaists. Thanks be to Madame Kawakita for encouraging such weirdness to thrive.