Killers, Clients and Kindred Spirits

Lindsay Coleman is an independent film producer, and is completing his phD thesis at the University of Melbourne David Desser is Emeritus Professor, University of Illinois. He is a well-known scholar of Japanese cinema, author or editor of eight books on the subject. His latest publications are The Blackwell Companion to Japanese Cinema (2023) and, with Lindsay Coleman, Killers, Clients and Kindred Spirits: The Taboo Cinema of Shohei Imamura (2019). He has worked on a number of Blu-ray commentaries for Criterion (including Tokyo Story) and Arrow Academy, including a boxset of the films of Yoshida Kiju.

• Chapter 1: IntroductionChapter 2: The Making of An Auteur: The Early Films (1958-1959); Jennifer CoatesSection I: KillersChapter 3: Confronting America: Pigs and Battleships and the Politics of US Bases in Postwar Japan; Hiroshi KitamuraChapter 4: Insect Men and Women: Gender, Conflict and Problematic Modernity in Intentions of Murder; Adam Bingham Chapter 5: Hidden in Plain Sight: The False Leads and True Mysteries of Vengeance Is Mine; John Berra Chapter 6: The Eel: Trauma Cinema; David DesserSection II: ClientsChapter 7: The Insect Woman, or: The Female Art of Failure; Michael RaineChapter 8: The Obscene in the Everyday: The Pornographers; Lindsay ColemanChapter 9: Shōhei Imamura’s Profound Desire for Japan’s Cultural Roots: Critical Approaches to Profound Desires of the Gods; Mats Karlsson Chapter 10: ‘Products of Japan’: Karayuki-san, The Making of a Prostitute; Joan Mellen Chapter 11: The Female Body as Transgressor of National Boundaries: The History of Postwar Japan as Told by a Bar Hostess; Bianca BriciuPart III: Kindred SpiritsChapter 12: Better off Being Bacteria: Adaptation and Allegory in Dr Akagi; Lauri Kitsnik　Chapter 13: Time out of Joint: Shōhei Imamura and the Search for an ‘Other’ Japan; Bill MihalopoulosChapter 14: Promotional Discourses and the Meanings of The Ballad of Narayama; Rayna DenisonChapter 15: Boundary Play: Truth, Fiction, and Performance in A Man Vanishes; Diane Lewis　Chapter 16: Why Not? – Imamura, Nietzsche and the Untimely; David DeamerChapter 17: Kuroi ame: An Anthropology of Suffering; Dolores Martinez Chapter 18: The Symbolic Function of Water; Tim Iles Notes on Contributors