In this book, Prince describes and analyses all of Kurosawa’s films, giving attention to their narrative and formal construction and their thematic concerns. He has tried to situate the films in their historical, social and cultural context, making recourse to the English-language literature on Japanese history and Japanese culture, as well as Kurosawa’s own writings and comments. But his familiarity with Japanese cinema apart from Kurosawa is very limited. So he focuses exclusively on Kurosawa’s films, which are explicated with reference to Kurosawa’s autobiography, samurai ethics, Zeami and Zen aesthetics, Dostoievsky, Brecht and Eisenstein.  

Sessue Hayakawa was the first Asian-American star of Hollywood cinema. He may not have been as popular as Charlie Chaplin and Douglas Fairbanks, but he was celebrated as a supremely subtle and accomplished actor who was type-cast as a charming villain, as the most civilized of primitive people, and as a cultured and principled Japanese man who was prepared to sacrifice himself for the benefit of white America. Daisuke Miyao, a graduate of Tokyo University who gained his doctorate in the Department of Cinema Studies at New York University, has undertaken the first major study of Hayakawa’s career in silent cinema.

We all know that the cinema chains make more money from candy bars than from ticket sales.  No visit to the cinema is complete without the obligatory choc-top or  packet of pop-corn. Similarly, going to the theatre, like all religious rituals, has always been associated with food and drink consumption. The kabuki theatre is surrounded by a nest of restaurants and sake bars; patrons can thus conveniently sip and sup before, during and after the five-hour performance. Like the Japanese, we too survive Wagnerian operas, Indian epics and Western Australian family epics only with the sustenance of catered meal breaks. Even gallery directors have learnt that attendance at exhibition openings is rendered more palatable when accompanied by generous serves of sushi,  sea-food snacks and champers. There is, and always has been, an intimate connection between the consumption of food and the consumption of culture.

This book adopts a Cultural Studies approach to Japanese studies. It examines the representation of the female criminal in Japan over the last 130 years - from early Meiji to the present; and embraces a wide variety of media – trial records, newspaper reportage, serialized fiction, popular fiction, autobiographical memoirs, confessional literature, the academic essay, medical and psychoanalytic texts, the short story, theatre and film. It documents major shifts in her representation and relates these shifts to dominant political agendas and intellectual trends of the time in question.   

This book fits into the category of Australian studies rather than Holocaust studies. Its central focus is not on the Holocaust itself but on the ceremonial, educational and institutional forms devised by Australian Jews to perpetuate its memory. It thus belongs alongside studies of other Australian ceremonies and institutions that perpetuate memory of atrocities, war and suffering and enable survivors to mourn the victims – Anzac Day ceremonies and war memorials, Sorry Day marches and museums documenting the dispossession and suffering of the Aboriginal peoples. 

Film scholars have rightly become sceptical about the value of books published under the imprint of an American academic institution. Too often we encounter yet another in-house doctoral dissertation dutifully displaying familiarity with current theoretical issues and mechanically deploying the grid on the chosen field of research. The realists among us know that most of these publications are discursive exercises tailored to the tenured track in the institution, and that they have little to say that is new or interesting. It is therefore a pleasant surprise to come across a publication that betrays not just academic credentials but personal conviction and a passionate commitment to its subject.

Like the English word black, the French adjective noir embraces aesthetic, moral, emotional and racial categories. It can refer to the absence of light, the darkness of night, in which the outlines of things are obscured,  and identity is difficult to discern. A gloomy mood,  a macabre imagination and immoral behaviour are all described as noir.  In painting, literature and film, white artists have long exploited the association of blackness with villainy, corruption, decadence, depression, and death, creating potent melodramatic and expressionistic effects. Only recently have the racist implications of these associations become apparent - what noir might mean for les noirs, black people.

Many of the classic women’s melodramas produced in Hollywood studios were adapted from best sellers written by women. The male directors who specialized in this lowly genre have been elevated to the movie canon and their movies are widely accessible through theatrical screenings, video rentals and DVD sales, but the female authors have been forgotten and their works have been long out of print. You will not find the name of Olive Higgins Prouty or Fannie Hurst in surveys of American literature, despite the fact that the former is the author of Stella Dallas and Now Voyager, and the latter the author of Back Street, Humoresque and Imitation of Life. In biographical sketches of literary women it may be briefly noted that Sylvia Plath and Zora Neale Hurston benefited from the material assistance and professional patronage of Prouty and Hurst, respectively, but Plath bit the hand that fed her while Hurston’s more grateful attitude was undercut by later commentators attributing snide motives to Hurst’s patronage. Finally, after 50 years of neglect, the tide appears to be turning. In 2004, The Feminist Press at the City University of New York re-published Prouty’s Now Voyager with an essay by Judith Mayne as Afterword, in their series Femmes Fatales: Women Write Pulp. (The series to date includes In a Lonely Place by Dorothy Hughes and Bunny Lake is Missing by Evelyn Piper.)  In the same year, Duke University Press re-published Hurst’s Imitation of Life, with an introductory essay by Daniel Itzkovitz.

The English-language literature on Japanese cinema has in recent years benefited from the arrival of a new generation of scholars with bilingual (if not multilingual) skills. These scholars include Japanese men and women with American doctorates in film studies who now work in American universities, such as Mitsuhiro Yoshimoto, Daisuke Miyao, and Mitsuyo Wada-Marciano; and American and English film scholars with fluency and literacy in the Japanese language, following long residence there, such as Mark Nornes, Aaron Gerow and Alexander Jacoby. These young scholars are not only conversant with the academic debates in cultural studies and cinema studies; they are also assiduous researchers of Japanese archives, and have unearthed a wealth of material hitherto unavailable to film scholars outside Japan. As a result, they have often been led to question the pronouncements and interpretations of the older generation of film scholars who did not speak or read Japanese and did not value Japanese film theory or criticism.