Mitsuhiro Yoshimoto, Kurosawa: Film Studies and Japanese Cinema, Durham NC, Duke University Press, 2000, 485 pp inc introduction, bibliography and index, US$21.95 (paper), US$64.95 (hardback).

Keiko McDonald, From Book to Screen: Modern Japanese Literature in Film, M.E.Sharpe Inc., Armonk NY, 1999, 326 pp inc bibliography and index, US$62.95 (hardcover), US$25.95 (paper).

Review by Freda Freiberg for Asian Studies Review

Unlike most of the literature on Japanese cinema in English, these two books are written by native speakers of Japanese and make substantial use of Japanese sources. Trained and teaching in American academic institutions, both authors seek to fill gaps in the understanding of Japanese cinema and redress the formalist and culturalist biases of American film critics, by stressing the significance of industrial issues, literary sources, theatre practices and social issues in their analyses of film texts.

However, they have quite different agendas. Yoshimoto was a student of Masao Miyoshi at San Diego and his approach, like that of his mentor, is highly polemical. He sets out to attack the marginalisation and de-politicization of Japanese cinema in the American academy, which he attributes to the ideological project underpinning institutional structures – that of serving U.S. interests and conservative Japanese exceptionalist views. McDonald is a political conservative who teaches Japanese literature and film in a traditional manner. She explores the narrative and thematic construction of texts without reference to contemporary theories of class, race or gender, or even of literature and film. Her major authority on literary adaptation is George Bluestone, who published his book on this subject in 1957.  Her stated aim is “to enlarge the Western audience for my native country’s rich cinematic heritage. I do this by helping viewers “read” pictures arising out of a culture so different from theirs.” (Conclusion, p 313)  This aim can be achieved within existing structures, unlike Yoshimoto’s asserted aim, which is to reveal “how the institutional limits of established disciplines make them unable to deal with fundamental questions of Japanese cinema productively.” (Epilogue, p 376)       

Despite her conservative stance, McDonald has performed a considerable service to students by extending the range of texts under discussion in the English-language literature on Japanese film. She began writing on the largely well-known masterpieces of the masters of Japanese cinema (in Cinema East: A Critical Study of Major Japanese Films, Associated University Presses, 1983); but has since moved on to studies of popular genres, the adaptation of theatrical and literary classics, and the works of lesser known directors.^[1] Unfortunately, many of the films she discusses are not available for hire by teachers in the US or Australia, in either print or videotape form, so that her aim to familiarise students in the West with a wider range of Japanese films cannot be achieved without changes to film distribution practices. We have only her accounts of the films to go by, without being able to verify or contest her readings by studying the films directly for ourselves. Teachers of Japanese literature in translation will have fewer problems, as she references English translations of the works she discusses in footnotes, and in any case she concentrates mainly on canonic texts of modern Japanese literature.

 After three introductory chapters, which survey in turn the debt of the silent cinema to Meiji melodramatic literature, via shimpa theatre; the “pure literature” movement in late Thirties’ cinema; and the range of literary adaptations made in the 1950s;  McDonald proceeds to dissect twelve particular novels and twelve films adapted from them. She devotes a chapter to each pair, describing in detail the variations in narrative construction between novel and film. Most of the novelists – specifically Kawabata Yasunari, Endo Shusaku, Mishima Yukio, Abe Kobo, Natsume Soseki, Mori Ogai, Tanizaki Junichiro and Nagai Kafu – are well represented in translations of Japanese literature. The film directors represented here are not all great masters of Japanese film, and these literary adaptations are not necessarily representative of their best work.

Yoshimoto spends his first fifty pages and Epilogue in polemics; the rest of the book is devoted to a study of the films of Kurosawa Akira. Unfortunately, his discussions of the films do not have the vitality and verve that his polemics promise. He is not particularly skilled at textual analysis, and unable to provide much in the way of new insights. In fact, he ends up endorsing, if for different reasons, the critical judgements of Western critics, valuing much the same films – Stray Dog, Ikiru, The Seven Samurai, and High and Low - while dismissing or giving cursory attention to the rest of Kurosawa’s output. Some of his asides, and his broadsides against other critics, are provocative. He really lets fly at those Western critics who persistently use bushido and Zen as keys to an understanding of Kurosawa and Japanese cinema in general; he is scathing about the conflation of jidai-geki with “samurai films”; and briefly insightful on the question of gender in Kurosawa. He disputes both the idea of Kurosawa as an author with a consistent vision, artistic or political, and the idea of Kurosawa as an artist indebted to his Japanese cultural heritage. However, ultimately, despite his efforts to situate the films within their diverse specific socio-political, industrial and historical contexts, by choosing to focus on Kurosawa as his case study, he ends up re-inforcing the status of Kurosawa as the one and only Japanese film director. 

Freda Freiberg,

Historian of Japanese Cinema  

^[1] Her publications include `The Yakuza Film: An Introduction’, in Arthur Nolletti & David Desser (eds), Reframing Japanese Cinema: Authorship, Genre, History, Indiana University Press, 1992, pp 165-192;  Japanese Classical Theatre in Films, Associated University Presses, 1994; the book on literary adaptations under review and a forthcoming book on the films of Hiroshi Shimizu, a classic director who specialized in children’s films.