Contemporary social issues in Japan have received considerable popular and scholarly attention. The nation's postwar economic changes are often linked to social tensions: the decline in traditional values, the lack of socialization among children, and so forth. Cinematic images of troubled youth, generational conflict, and urban alienation accompany these contemporary problems, and it is not uncommon for scholars to analyze recent Japanese films in relation to real-world social ills. Timothy Iles takes up this connection with a broad audience in mind, not assuming the reader's knowledge of either Japanese culture or film. As such, the book is appropriate for students interested in contemporary Japan, and Iles should be commended for discussing a diverse assortment of recent films, most of which may be easily acquired outside Japan. It is also refreshing to see that the volume bypasses extratextual details, including production and reception history, to instead make the film texts themselves the centerpiece of the investigation.
The book is not, however, a study of Japanese cinema per se, nor is it an inquiry into contemporary identity in Japan. Rather, Iles is interested in exploring the ways in which discrete films stage Japanese identity. His central premise is that Japanese identity is in crisis because modernization (viewed here as Westernization) has promoted values of individual selfhood that conflict with traditional notions of identity; Iles selects for analysis films that portray this very tension. The chapters engage various topics, loosely tied together by an expansive notion of identity, to observe how film narratives depict individuals situating themselves, or being defined by others, in relation to their community. Iles's conception of identity thus encompasses traditional categories such as gender (chapter 3) and familial roles (chapter 2), as well as identity in a more dispersed sense: for example, how global influences disallow people a coherent sense of self by isolating them from their personal and national past (chapter 1), and how the trope of travel facilitates self-discovery in characters who, because of the realities of contemporary urban life, are otherwise alienated from themselves and others (chapter 5). Three other chapters address how individual genres or modes of filmmaking—namely, horror, science fiction, and animation—portray people's connections to the surrounding world in various ways.
That each chapter limits its analysis to only a handful of films is useful in that it permits close attention to the selected texts; nevertheless, there are some key drawbacks to this approach. It sometimes prevents Iles from providing substantial evidence for his assertion that the narrative characteristics he uncovers—for instance, that parents rather than children are blamed for domestic instability—are reflective of a larger cinematic trend. Yet closely connected to this is a more significant methodological shortcoming: because Iles does not consistently engage with Japanese film history to build arguments of consequence to Japanese cinema in general, the book often reads as simply a description of a few carefully chosen examples that validate the book's premise of identity being fraught with myriad tensions. A helpful addition would have been a clear articulation of each section's discursive intervention—for example, what it contributes to how we think about a particular genre. Conversely, the book is most successful where Iles contextualizes how the films work as social reflection by fleshing out cultural and historical conditions at the root of these cinematic images. For instance, he suggests in chapter 4 that moments of public violence such as the 1995 sarin gas attack and the 1997 Shônen A murders provide an important backdrop for understanding horror films that depict the familiar, the everyday, as a site of terror and unease. In such a destabilized setting, identity itself is imagined onscreen as threatening, uncontrolled, and unknowable.
Iles is careful to say, however, that he is not using films to construct a social portrait, and he often abbreviates this kind of contextualization. The main goal of his observations is not to shed light on social issues, but rather to investigate how each film connects individual self-articulation to its own principal theme, be it madness, the family, nature, and so forth. Just as the section on horror is ultimately interested in how films deploy notions of “the monstrous” in relation to identity, the chapter about gender roles is intended not to augment a discussion of gender in Japan but instead to show that film narratives are often complicit in gender inequality, by reinforcing “gender as a determinant of the range and types of choices available to an individual in the process of identity formation” (p. 53). Here, Iles's main argument, demonstrated through the film example of Kawase Naomi's 2003 film Sharasôju (Shara), is that despite this tendency to reinforce male privilege, Japanese films are in fact capable of adopting a feminist sensibility that resists social oppression of women. Although this interpretation is but one of Iles's many interesting ideas, without pinpointing a core site of significance for his assertions—whether it be uncovering a widespread cinematic trend or recasting a pervasive social problem—he dilutes his contribution with a series of unrelated points.
In a similar way, the book's free-flowing framework, while making it of interest to a wide range of readers, just loosely holds the chapters together under the sizeable umbrella of identity. This broad thematic structure threatens the development of a clear, coherent argument, and at times, the claims seem only tangentially relevant to one another. Chapter 7, for example, uses several of Miyazaki Hayao's animated films to argue that animation is naturally suited to provide social uplift because it can present idealized models of space and (unproblematic) identity that inspire spectators to envision their potential. This is a compelling idea, but Iles does not provide convincing evidence to substantiate animation's uniqueness on this matter, nor is it clear what this adds to an understanding of identity, of film, or of Japan. And the premise in chapter 6 is that the relations between human, machine, and nature that are posited in Shinto and Buddhist beliefs—and that appear in science fiction films such as Oshii Mamoru's 1995 animation Kôkaku kidôtai (Ghost in the Shell)—function to mitigate the otherwise alienating social conditions brought about by technological developments. However, these ideas are introduced not to enrich our thinking about the films but for a wholly unrelated end: to correct for what Iles considers an anthropocentric bias in Western academic discourse on the posthuman. Although the disconnected nature of these arguments makes the book read like a collection of separate essays, a benefit to this structure is that it enables each chapter to more or less stand on its own. And because any one of the themes Iles tackles could fill the pages of an entire volume, he should be praised for lending a sparing approach to his presentation of such a monumental topic. The ambitious scope of the work, with its suggestive exploration of the ways in which films speak to issues of identity, lays a valuable foundation for further investigation into cinema's relation to contemporary Japanese society.
