'This is a lively and informative survey of recent trends in Japanese cinema that will interest a very wide readership of students and curious cinephiles. Bingham is an engaging and reliable critical cartographer whose mapping of the field is accomplished in an illuminating, adventurous and thoughtful fashion.'
Alastair Phillips, University of Warwick
Yakuza, samurai and horror films have been some of the most popular genres in Japanese cinema over the last two decades, with a clearly defined generic lineage in the country's cinematic tradition. Studying these and other genres through a close analysis of their most representative films, this innovative study examines the way individual films have either adapted to or drawn away from their own genre conventions, or, in the case of 'magic realist' films, have introduced significant new developments which have little real precedent in Japanese filmmaking.
With close textual analysis, this study looks at the prevalence of repetition and variation in these contemporary Japanese genres, offering for the first time in English an academic appreciation and overview of popular Japanese cinema in the new millennium. Looking at the work of directors as varied as Kitano 'Beat' Takeshi and Kurosawa Kiyoshi, and films as iconic as Hana-Bi and The Bird People in China, this book provides an invaluable resource for film students and scholars alike.
Adam Bingham teaches Film Studies at Edge Hill University and is a regular contributor to publications such as CineAction, Cineaste, Asian Cinema and others.
Cover image: still from Dolls by Takeshi Kitano, 2002 © Bandai Visual, Tokyo Fm, Television Tokyo and Office Kitano
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Adrian Bingham is Professor of Modern British History at the University of Sheffield. He has written widely about the popular press, including Gender, Modernity, and the Popular Press in Inter-War Britain (OUP, 2004), Family Newspapers? Sex, Private Life and the British Popular Press 1918-78 (OUP, 2009), and, with Professor Martin Conboy, Tabloid Century: The Popular Press in Britain, 1896 to the present (Peter Lang, 2015).

Acknowledgements; Introduction: Why 1997 and Hana-Bi?; 1: Jidai-geki and Chambara: the Samurai onscreen; 2: Yakuza Cinema; 3: Japanese Horror Cinema; 4: The Changing Japanese Family on Film; 5: Postmodernism and Magic Realism in Contemporary Japanese Cinema; 6: Japanese Documentary Cinema: Reality and its Discontents; 7: Modern Japanese Female Directors; Filmography