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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. Pp. xvii + 243, bibliography, index, 30 black-and-white illustrations.)
From Dog Bridegroom to Wolf Girl: Contemporary Japanese Fairy-Tale Adaptations in Conversation with the West. By Mayako Murai. (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 2015. Pp. x + 178, notes, works cited, index, 41 color illustrations.)
Japan's recent burst of interest in its indigenous folk narrative has led to an extraordinary production of literary, artistic, and cinematic works. An active exchange has begun in which Japanese-made animated movies and TV series have made previously esoteric motifs of that country's folk culture increasingly familiar among young patrons of these art forms in the West. While valuing its own folk traditions, though, Japanese culture has long been curious about parallel folk traditions in the West. So, as a parallel development, interest in Western tales has grown of late, with publications on their history and possible psychosexual meanings becoming so popular in the 1990s that Japanese publishers called the phenomenon a "Grimm Boom." These intersecting developments have led to increasingly complex works for audiences of both popular and formal art.
These two new books thus are both timely and welcome to scholars interested in this lively cross-cultural interaction. Folk-infused cinema and literature have become more widely available to English-speaking researchers in subtitled or translated versions, but these new analyses come from scholars fluent in the country's language and contemporary milieu. Such references provide lucid and detailed guides to levels of meaning not readily accessible to English-speaking audiences.
Okuyama's work, based on materials and units originally developed for an undergraduate course on Japanese mythology at the University of Hawai'i at Hilo, will be more accessible to readers unfamiliar with Japanese culture. It begins with clear definitions of the concepts and methods of semiotics, followed by brief discussions of the nature and scholarship of mythology and storytelling and a guide to how to apply these bodies of knowledge to watching film. This guide is intended to provide basic teaching material for undergraduates, but it is also helpful for scholars approaching film and anime from a social science or folkloristic perspective.
The heart of the book consists of chapters that "unpack"...