Keiko McDonald is no stranger to the field of Japanese cinema studies, having written four important works prior to this volume, starting with her first book, Cinema East: A Critical Study of Major Japanese Films (Rutherford, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1983), nearly twenty-five years ago. She may be best known for her landmark study on Mizoguchi Kenji, titled, of course, Mizoguchi (Boston: Twayne, 1984), but this newest addition to her opus deserves to change that. Reading a Japanese Film brings together careful analyses of sixteen films relatively that are easily available outside of Japan, ranging from the 1930s to the 1990s, and culturally sensitive attempts to understand what is “Japanese” about Japanese cinema. It is an ambitious project but remarkably successful because of the lucidity and methodological simplicity with which McDonald embarks upon it.

The book moves quickly through an introductory history of Japanese cinema that serves only to...

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