Japan 394
Relatives for Rent
By Andrew Osmond. This April, an eye-poppingly extraordinary article about Japan appeared, not in a specialist otaku magazine, but in that august English-language journal, The New Yorker. Its opening line looks like it should start a science-fiction story, like Orwell’s clocks striking thirteen or Ballard’s protagonist eating dog in High Rise. The article, written by […]
Suffering of Ninko
By Jasper Sharp. Ninko is a zealous young Buddhist monk of the Edo era. The cause of his suffering, his cross to bear so to speak, is that he is catnip to the ladies. And oh, how he suffers! A simple trip into town on his daily alms round runs the risk of him being […]
Books: Coproducing Asia
By Jasper Sharp. Stephanie DeBoer’s scholarly study Coproducing Asia: Locating Japanese-Chinese Regional Film and Media is not the general overview of Asian co-productions that its title might suggest. Its focus is more on the construction of a new cinematic and televisual idea of “Asia” in the post-war and post-colonial era. It details how forces within […]
The Third Murder
by Jeremy Clarke. For a director usually associated with family dramas like I Wish, Like Father Like Son and After The Storm, Hirokazu Kore-eda’s The Third Murder might seem like a change of direction. It begins with a murder, and focussed on a lawyer trying to uncover what actually happened, a narrative template familiar from countless […]
Books: The Early Miyazaki
By Andrew Osmond. It’s been only months since the publication of Princess Mononoke: Understanding Studio Ghibli’s Monster Princess, an anthology of papers about Miyazaki’s fantasy blockbuster (reviewed here). Today Bloomsbury releases another Miyazaki book, Hayao Miyazaki: Exploring the Early Work of Japan’s Greatest Animator. This one’s by a solo writer, Raz Greenberg, who’s written on […]