Colette Balmain's book is an ambitious work that aims to carry out a historicized study of Japanese horror films from their “origins” in postwar films such as Tale of Ugetsu and Godzilla through contemporary films grouped under the name “J-horror”—Kurosawa Kiyoshi (Pulse) and Nakata Hideo (Ringu), just to name a few. As the title of the book suggests, it is an introduction to a number of films that Balmain classifies under the “Japanese horror” genre, and each of the nine chapters, arranged chronologically and thematically, offers brief analysis of some of the key films in categories such as Edo gothic, pink films, zombie films, techno-horror, and so on (except for the first chapter, which is a summary of the history of Japanese cinema).

Balmain, as she states in the introduction, calls out for an approach to Japanese horror cinema that rejects Hollywood-centered, Orientalist frameworks: “As the theoretical approaches to horror film criticism … operate almost exclusively using the form of American horror cinema as the paradigmatic example, it becomes difficult to adapt these wholesale to Japanese cinema without erasing historical, cultural and racial difference” (p. 6). She thus emphasizes the need for a historical approach that locates “cinematic texts historically and culturally rather than using a grand narrative that can erase differences” (p. 7), and her intentions deserve much praise. However, for this “historical” and “cultural” approach, she turns to one of the major theoretical muses of her book—the Japanese psychoanalyst Kawai Hayao—whose work The Japanese Psyche: Major Motifs in the Fairy Tales of Japan she finds to be “particularly insightful and can help explain the specific cultural context and intertexts of horror cinema” because, like fairy tales, horror cinema “manifest[s] culture-bound characteristics” (p. 7). Japan specialists may ponder at this choice: why use a psychoanalyst in order to carry out a “historical” study?

This paradoxical approach is the main problem with the book. Balmain is obviously very passionate about her topic, and she has an eye for conducting formalistic analyses of films, paying close attention to the camera positions and mise-en-scène; but because of her insistence on applying Kawai and other “cultural” terminologies that mainly belong to Doi Takeo in discussing these films, it often takes away from her own analyses. Let me cite an example from her chapter on “rape-revenge” films. She begins with a description of Rashômon, describing the Liberal Democratic Party's current political discussions on rape to establish the “ubiquity of rape” in Japanese art: “It would be too easy to say that the ubiquity of rape in Japanese cultural art forms, including but not restricted to cinema, has a direct correlation with the ‘real’ world, especially, after all, as we have seen Japanese society is predicated on female obedience and submission” (p. 95). She summarizes the debate between “pro-pornography” feminists and “anti-pornography” feminists and understandingly states, “it is still necessary to sketch [the debates] out in order to understood [sic] the cultural meanings of these violent expressions of (male) desire, rather than simply dismissing the films as inherently misogynist” (p. 96).

What follows is an interesting discussion of the Angel Guts series, which is largely regarded as misogynistic. Balmain pays close attention here to the “virginal white dress” of the girl, the strategically placed position of objects on screen, and how the films actually suggest that “rape is a type of homosocial, if not homosexual, bonding ritual” for the male characters (p. 99). As an attempt to analyze the group dynamic, though, she inserts Doi Takeo's (in)famous nihonjinron concept of uchi/soto: “The formation of the group identity over the traumatized bodies of women is particularly resonant in terms of Japanese societal structures, in which to be part of the in-group (uchi) is seen as preferable to being an outsider (soto),” and she concludes by stating that Angel Guts is a “criticism of Japanese society's oppression of woman” (p. 106). This formula is repeated for other “rape-revenge” films such as Freeze Me and Audition, and she concludes the chapter by stating, “Chihiro [of Freeze Me] and Asami [of Audition] are just one more face of the wronged women in Japanese culture … They are victims of repression and oppression, and only death and loneliness remain for them” (p. 112).

In a word, Balmain begins her analysis with careful formalistic attention, but veers away from it by bringing in psychoanalytic terms that flatten out the historical and sociological complexities of Japanese culture, which results in reductive psychoanalytic terms that essentialize Japanese culture. If her goal is to free these films from being cast as simply “misogynistic,” why end by interpellating their female characters as “victims of Japanese society”? Balmain's analysis would have benefited from an understanding of contemporary feminist works by Judith Butler or Elizabeth Grosz, who emphasize the need for multiplicity when reading the female body and warn us to pay attention to the power of language itself, that language has the potential to name a subject (“victims”) and bound the subject to it forever.

Again, her decision to insist on doing a “culturalist” reading of these films is unfortunate. Balmain relies purely on English sources that often seem to take away from her own voice. Instead of bringing in highly contextualized Japanese terminologies (such as on, mono no aware, ryôsai kenbo) that often become misplaced and misspelled, writing the book based solely on her own insight into the visual language of cinema would have been productive. In the moments when her voice comes through, the book is captivating. Students and nonspecialists would also benefit from her filmography and bibliography, for it is a comprehensive list, and the book offers nice summaries of each film and some of the key secondary sources on each topic.