A Story Written with Water is a very significant film in Yoshishige Yoshida's career. It's the first of his six "anti-melodramas", the last one being Farewell to the Summer Light in 1968. These films, aside from offering kick-ass black and white photography, dealt with the themes of one's turbulent past, history, eroticism, psychoanalysis and basic human desires and passions.
This movie is a touching family drama about a young man torn between the love of his fiancée and his mother. The plot is intercut with various flashbacks, and sometimes the protagonist's dreams which successfully break the overall realistic tone of the film. After a turn of events, he becomes unsure whether or not his fiancée (now wife) is his own sister. This is not the only case of implied incest. His relations with his mother (played by Yoshida's wife Mariko Okada) complicates things further, and throughout the film it's implied that something is off between the two of them, even going as far to suggest a case of Oedipus' complex.
The title of the film comes from the fact that water plays an important part in the movie's structure. It ends on a lake (or some other huge body of water), the dream scene is set on a beach and the most important flashback, the bathhouse one, needs no explanation. Some scenes even suggest that water somehow personifies (motherly) love, such as the one where the protagonist feels ill and asks for a glass of water from his mother, or when the two of them bath together in the bathhouse.
Yoshida frames interior scenes in any way possible - basically any camera position goes. People are seen through multiple sets of doors and windows or through vertical bars, obscured by mesh and transparent curtains, seen through rear-view mirrors etc. The most prominent visual motif is the mother's white umbrella, which appears in almost every scene connected with her, down to the very final shot.
What can I say about this director... He's so unknown and under-appreciated that it makes me sad. The man is/was truly a genius.