This book examines generic developments in contemporary Japanese cinema since 1997. Through close analysis of numerous texts it considers and contextualises new films in the most prevalent genres in the country’s popular canon, placing them within historical, generic and authorial contexts and elucidating their formal, thematic and stylistic strategies and significance. It provides informed readings and analyses of a selection of important films by the country’s preeminent directors and further situates Japanese cinema within both western and Japanese discourse to consider how it has been vari ... More

This book examines generic developments in contemporary Japanese cinema since 1997. Through close analysis of numerous texts it considers and contextualises new films in the most prevalent genres in the country’s popular canon, placing them within historical, generic and authorial contexts and elucidating their formal, thematic and stylistic strategies and significance. It provides informed readings and analyses of a selection of important films by the country’s preeminent directors and further situates Japanese cinema within both western and Japanese discourse to consider how it has been variously conceptualised and canonized. Contemporary Japanese films are thus throughout placed within the lineage and tradition of earlier generations, and it is the ways in which the former either adheres and conforms to or subverts and transgresses these models that is the focus of this study. Patterns of repetition and variation are traced, alongside which the specific tenets of what, today, constitutes a national cinema are probed and questioned.