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Japanese Mythology in Film: A Semiotic Approach to Reading Japanese Film and Anime. By Yoshiko Okuyama. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2015. 244 pp.
Yoshiko Okuyama's Japanese Mythology in Film: A Semiotic Approach to Reading Japanese Film and Anime is a much-needed text that may well serve those who teach undergraduate-level courses on folklore, myth, popular culture, and film within the context of Japanese language, literature, and religious studies. The book is aimed at an undergraduate reading audience; Part I (Chapters 1-5) introduces basic vocabulary, concepts, and key theorists of semiotic film analysis, and Part II (Chapters 6-9) provides an in-depth semiotic film analysis of eight contemporary Japanese novel- and manga-inspired films and anime. Through this eclectic selection of visual texts, Okuyama reveals the rich intertextuality of referenced Japanese sacred texts, legends, mythological themes, symbols, and motifs shaped by Taoism, Shinto, Buddhism, animism, and other Japanese folk beliefs that are encoded in the works.
Chapter 6 explores the mythical elements of Taoist and Shinto beliefs balancing the opposing forces of darkness and light in the live-action films Onmyoji (2001) and Onmyoji II (2003) based on Baku Yumemakura's novels that inspired Reiko Okano's manga series. The films center on the friendship between canny Japanese folk practitioner Abe no Senmei and bumbling courtier Minamoto no Hiromasa, as Senmei battles evil spirits using spells based on Onmyo-do (yin-yang principles) to protect the Heian emperor and his son. Okuyama contrasts the Taoist cosmological concepts and key texts with the indigenous Shinto beliefs and symbols in her analysis of voodoo dolls, spirit possessions, exorcisms, and so on and the contentious link between humans and what goes on...