Table Of ContentKillers, Clients and Kindred Spirits
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EDINBURGH STUDIES IN EAST ASIAN FILM
Series Editor: Margaret Hillenbrand
Available and forthcoming titles
Killers, Clients and Kindred Spirits: Th e Taboo Cinema of Shohei Imamura
Edited by Lindsay Coleman and David Desser
Independent Chinese Documentary: Alternative Visions, Alternative Publics
Dan Edwards
Tanaka Kinuyo: Nation, Stardom and Female Subjectivity
Edited by Irene González-López and Michael Smith
Worldly Desires: Cosmopolitanism and Cinema in Hong Kong and Taiwan
Brian Hu
Th e Cinema of Ozu Yasujiro: Histories of the Everyday
Woojeong Joo
Eclipsed Cinema: Th e Film Culture of Colonial Korea
Dong Hoon Kim
Moving Figures: Class and Feeling in the Films of Jia Zhangke
Corey Kai Nelson Schultz
Memory, Subjectivity and Independent Chinese Cinema
Qi Wang
Hong Kong Neo-Noir
Edited by Esther C. M. Yau and Tony Williams
‘My’ Self on Camera: First Person Documentary Practice in an Individualising China
Kiki Tianqi Yu
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Killers, Clients and Kindred
Spirits
The Taboo Cinema of Shohei Imamura
Edited by Lindsay Coleman and
David Desser
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© editorial matter and organization Lindsay Coleman and David Desser, 2019
© the chapters their several authors, 2019
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Contents
List of Figures vii
Notes on the Contributors ix
1 Introduction 1
Lindsay Coleman and David Desser
2 Th e Making of an Auteur: Th e Early Films (1958–1959) 21
Jennifer Coates
PART I KILLERS
3 Confronting America: Pigs and Battleships and the Politics of
US Bases in Postwar Japan 41
Hiroshi Kitamura
4 Insect Men and Women: Gender, Confl ict and Problematic
Modernity in Intentions of Murder 56
Adam Bingham
5 Hidden in Plain Sight: Th e False Leads and True Mysteries of
Vengeance Is Mine 75
John Berra
6 Th e Eel: Trauma Cinema 92
David Desser
PART II CLIENTS
7 Th e Insect Woman, or: Th e Female Art of Failure 115
Michael Raine
8 Th e Obscene in the Everyday: Th e Pornographers 139
Lindsay Coleman
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vi Contents
9 Shohei Imamura’s Profound Desire for Japan’s Cultural Roots:
Critical Approaches to Profound Desires of the Gods 159
Mats Karlsson
10 “Products of Japan”: Karayuki-san, Th e Making of a Prostitute 177
Joan Mellen
11 Th e Female Body as Transgressor of National Boundaries:
Th e History of Postwar Japan as Told by a Bar Hostess 192
Bianca Briciu
PART III KINDRED SPIRITS
12 Better Off Being Bacteria: Adaptation and Allegory in Dr. Akagi 213
Lauri Kitsnik
13 Time Out of Joint: Shohei Imamura and the Search for
an “Other” Japan 228
Bill Mihalopoulos
14 Promotional Discourses and the Meanings of Th e Ballad of Narayama 246
Rayna Denison
15 Boundary Play: Truth, Fiction, and Performance in A Man Vanishes 267
Diane Wei Lewis
16 Why Not? Imamura, Nietzsche, and the Untimely 287
David Deamer
17 Kuroi Ame: An Anthropology of Suff ering 308
Dolores P. Martinez
18 Th e Symbolic Function of Water 326
Timothy Iles
Index 343
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Figures
5.1 Th e power of reconstruction and the potential for interpretation 80
5.2 Achieving upward mobility by adopting an academic persona 83
5.3 Breaking the rules to visualize the presence of the restless spirit 88
6.1 A long-take, deep-focus shot of the layout of the house 99
6.2 Th e priest’s traditional house, shot from the low level characteristic
of Yasujiro Ozu 102
6.3 Of eels and women; the longest take in the fi lm 105
6.4 It’s all done with mirrors 108
7.1 Newsreel footage of the demonstrations against the America–Japan
Security Treaty in June 1960, with superimposed text 118
7.2 Freeze frame of Tome counting her money after she has been
tricked into becoming a prostitute 119
7.3 Chūji’s sudden looming behind Matsunami creates a kind of
ironic visual punchline 120
7.4 Th e Insect Woman press sheet 121
7.5 Tome, followed by Nobuko, in the middle ground 128
7.6 Tome urinates in a mulberry fi eld 134
8.1 Ogata spies on Keiko through multiple frames-within-frames 150
8.2 An establishing shot of star Anthony Perkins, as the character
Norman Bates 151
8.3 Hitchcock then allows the camera to adopt the perspective of
Norman as we spy on an undressing Marion Crane (Janet Leigh) 151
8.4 Ogata is briefl y tempted by young Keiko 153
8.5 Kevin Spacey’s Lester Burnham invests in a complex erotic
fantasy life 154
8.6 Angela is eroticized not only for Burnham, but also for the audience 155
8.7 Th e fi nal seeming consummation of Burnham’s desire is framed
classically and romantically 155
8.8 A father’s incestuous relationship with his own daughter is
discovered in a blackly comic moment in Th e Pornographers 156
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viii Figures
8.9 Th e titular characters engage in a semi-absurd, and again blackly
comic, exchange on the relative virtues of incest 157
9.1 Rentaro Mikuni as an islander with his own ideas in Th e Profound
Desires of the Gods 159
9.2 Nekichi’s Sisyphean labor 160
9.3 Kariya goes native 165
9.4 Th e Rock appears to budge 166
9.5 Th e masked villagers closing in for the kill 167
11.1 Akaza and her daughter walking arm in arm with GIs 195
11.2 Newsreel footage shows General MacArthur descending from a
plane and Occupation troops marching on Japanese soil 196
11.3 Newsreels of violent protests show the divided nation and the
public opposition to Occupation in contrast to the discourse of
peaceful democratization 197
11.4 Akaza watching documentary footage showing people’s reaction
to the emperor’s announcement of defeat 198
11.5 Akaza tells how she explained to her American lovers that the
imperial family are not gods 199
11.6 Imamura shows pictures of atrocities committed by the Americans
in the Vietnam War but she denies their reality 200
12.1 Dr. Akagi running through streets to meet another patient 216
12.2 Dr. Akagi presenting the results of his research on liver disease 219
12.3 A dream sequence about Dr. Akagi’s son in Unit 731 221
12.4 Dr. Akagi and war prisoner Piet setting up research equipment 223
12.5 Witnessing the end of the war 225
13.1 Akeem, a former Japanese soldier who converted to Islam and
lives in a close-knit Muslim community in Malaysia 237
13.2 Th e “wild boy” from Nagasaki, Fujita Matsukichi 239
13.3 “Outlaw Matsu” returns to Japan 240
14.1 Location shooting 252
14.2 Imamura as the exaggerated center of Th e Ballad of Narayama 256
14.3 Tatsuhei and Orin in helicopter downdraft 259
15.1 An ad for A Man Vanishes in the August 1967 issue of Eiga hyōron 268
17.1 Yasuko with her aunt and uncle, making their way through
Hiroshima 317
17.2 Yasuko and her uncle Shigematsu see the king carp 318
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Notes on the Contributors
John Berra is a lecturer in Film and Language Studies at Renmin University of
China. He is the co-editor of the Directory of World Cinema: Japan (2010/12/15).
He has also contributed to World Film Locations: Tokyo (2012) and Ozu Interna-
tional: Essays on the Global Infl uences of a Japanese Auteur (2015). His articles
have been published in Asian Cinema, Film International, Geography Compass,
and Journal of Science Fiction Film and Television.
Adam Bingham is a Senior Teaching Fellow in Japanese Film Studies at SOAS
in London. He has taught fi lm at various institutions around the UK and has
published widely on Japanese and Hong Kong cinema. His book Japanese Cinema
since Hana-Bi was published by Edinburgh University Press in 2015, and he has
been a regular contributor to Film Comment, CineAction, and Asian Cinema. He
recently completed studies of Ozu Yasujiro and representations of prostitution
and of female fi lmmakers in Japan.
Bianca Briciu is an instructor in fi lm studies and communication at
Carleton University and St. Paul University, Ottawa. She has a PhD in Cultural
Mediations and an interdisciplinary formation in fi lm studies, gender studies,
and social psychology. She has done extensive research on the representation of
gender and sexuality in Japanese cinema and has published six articles in peer
reviewed journals. She is pursuing research on the representation of aff ect and
the body in cinema and other media.
Jennifer Coates is Senior Lecturer in Japanese Arts, Culture, and Heritage at
the Sainsbury Institute for the Study of Japanese Arts and Cultures, University
of East Anglia. She is the author of Making Icons: Repetition and the Female Image
in Japanese Cinema, 1945–1964 (2017). Her current ethnographic research
focuses on early postwar fi lm audiences in Japan.
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