A Critical Handbook of Japanese Film Directors. Alexander Jacoby

her grandfather is a murderer. Again, this film revealed Higashi’s consistent sympathy for the outsider. Although his work is arguably more interesting in subject matter than in style, he commands respect for his intelligence and integrity.

      1963 A Face (short)

      1964 Higashi-Murayama-shi / Higashi-Murayama City (short)

      1967 Jōdō / Motion-Emotion (short)

      1969 Okinawa rettō / People of the Okinawa Islands (lit. Okinawa Archipelago)

      1971 Yasashii Nipponjin / Gentle Japanese

      1973 Nippon yōkaiden: Satori / Satori / A Japanese Demon / Spiritual Awakening

      1978 Sādo / Third / Third Base / A Boy Called Third Base

      1979 Mō hōzue wa tsukanai / No More Easy Going

      1980 Shiki: Natsuko / Natsuko / The Four Seasons of Natsuko (lit.)

      Rabu retā / Love Letter

      1981 Manon

      1982 Za reipu / The Rape

      Jerashī gēmu / Jealousy Game

      1983 Sekando rabu / Second Love

      1984 Wangan dōro / Coastal Road

      1986 Keshin / Metamorphosis

      1988 Ureshi hazukashi monogatari / A Tale of Happiness and Shame

      1992 Hashi no nai kawa / The River without a Bridge

      1996 E no naka no boku no mura / Village of Dreams (lit. My Village in the Picture)

      2000 Boku no ojisan / The Crossing (lit. My Uncle)

      2003 Watashi no guranpa / My Grandpa

      2004 Fūon / The Crying Wind

      HIRAYAMA Hideyuki

      (b. September 18, 1950)

      平山秀幸

      Hirayama has sustained parallel careers as a proficient craftsman of big-budget commercial entertainments and as an artist realizing small-scale, offbeat, and imaginative projects. After a long freelance apprenticeship to such directors as Jūzō Itami and Kichitarō Negishi, he made his debut, a comic horror film, for the Directors’ Company. Lighthearted horror continued to occupy him through much of the nineties, as he directed three installments of the popular Haunted School (Gakkō no kaidan) series, a sub-Spielberg exercise in thrills and spills for kids, with endearingly inept special effects. By this time, however, he had achieved critical notice with The Games Teachers Play (Za chūgakkō kyōshi, 1992), about a junior high school teacher trying to deal with delinquency by encouraging his charges to dispense their own justice. Mark Schilling praised the film’s “clear-eyed view of [the] teenage world, minus adult romanticizing, caricaturing, and demonizing.” Also well-received during the nineties was Begging for Love (Ai o kou hito, 1998), an account of a girl suffering abuse at the hands of her mother, which fixed its story in the context of the social instability of Japan after World War II.

      Since the millennium, Hirayama has won further acclaim for two remarkable black comedies. The Laughing Frog (Warau kaeru, 2002) was a droll, dry satire with a faintly Bunuelian touch to its cynical portrait of bourgeois life, the black sheep husband ultimately proving the most sympathetic figure among the venal and selfish, if respectable, characters who surround him. Hirayama’s precise framing, using a mainly static camera, observed the unfolding comedy with neither indulgence nor contempt, and the performances were superb. Out (2002) focused on a middle-aged woman who murders her husband and conspires with her colleagues at a boxed lunch factory to dispose of the body. Despite the melodramatic premise, its theme was the ordinary frustrations of female experience in a patriarchal society.

      Hirayama has continued to work in a variety of genres. Turn (Tān, 2001) was an engaging fantasy in which a woman finds herself doomed, after a car crash, to relive endlessly the same 24 hours in a parallel universe of which she appears to be the only inhabitant. Especially in the early stages, Hirayama intelligently dramatized the reactions of his heroine to her isolation, and the film was rather touching. Lady Joker (Redī Jōkā, 2004) used a thriller plot about a plan to kidnap a company president to launch an investigation into corruption in Japanese society. Samurai Resurrection (Makai tenshō, 2003), however, was a more purely commercial work: a large, dumb action movie which submerged story and characterization under a barrage of special effects. Still, while Hirayama remains an uneven director, he has been responsible for some of the more original and diverting Japanese films of recent years. In 2007, two films inspired by the style and tradition of rakugo comic storytelling confirmed his versatility: Talk, Talk, Talk (Shaberedomo shaberedomo) was a story about a modern practitioner of this old-fashioned art form training three reluctant recruits for a performance, while Three for the Road (Yajikita dōchū: Teresuko) was a lighthearted road movie reworking the oft-filmed eighteenth-century novel Shank’s Mare (Hizakurige).

      1990 Maria no ibukuro / Maria’s Stomach

      1992 Za chūgaku kyōshi / The Games Teachers Play (lit. The Junior High School Teacher)

      1993 Ningen kōsaten: Ame / Human Crossroads: Rain

      1994 Yoi ko to asobō / Let’s Play with the Good Children

      1995 Gakkō no kaidan / Haunted School

      1996 Gakkō no kaidan 2 / Haunted School 2

      1998 Ai o kou hito / Begging for Love

      1999 Gakkō no kaidan 4 / Haunted School 4

      2001 Tān / Turn

      2002 Warau kaeru / The Laughing Frog

      Out

      2003 Makai tenshō / Samurai Resurrection

      2004 Redī Jōkā / Lady Joker

      2007 Shaberedomo shaberedomo / Talk, Talk, Talk

      Yajikita dōchū: Teresuko / Three for the Road

      HIROKI Ryūichi

      (b. January 1, 1954)

      廣木隆一

      Of the directors who have graduated from “pink film” to the mainstream, Hiroki has remained perhaps the most faithful to his origins: he continues to make films on sexual themes, though titillation has given was to analysis. In the eighties, after serving as assistant to prolific “pink” director Genji Nakamura, he made pornographic films for both straight and gay audiences; likewise, his first mainstream feature, 800 Two Lap Runners (1994), explored both hetero- and homosexual feeling in its account of the awkward relationship between a teenage runner and the former girlfriend of the dead trackmate with whom he once had a sexual experience.

      Hiroki’s next film, Midori (Monogatari kara ashibyōshi yori: Midori, 1996), was another drama about adolescent emotions, focusing on a disaffected high school girl who feigns illness to spend time with her boyfriend. Female protagonists continued to be central to Hiroki’s most interesting work, which dealt with young adults and with their sexual conduct in the fragmented society of modern urban Japan. Tokyo Trash Baby (Tōkyō gomi onna, 2000), Vibrator (Vaiburēta, 2003), and Girlfriend: Someone Please Stop the World (Gārufurendo, 2004) were all moving, understated films about lonely, alienated women seeking solace in romantic fantasy and transient attachments. The heroine of Tokyo Trash Baby, obsessed with her neighbor, rifles through his garbage for mementos of his life; this rubbish, and the well-stocked but soulless convenience store where Vibrator begins, seemed metaphors for today’s prosperous yet rootless society, in which consumer goods fail to satisfy emotional needs. Hiroki shot these films on digital video, and his informal style, with its loose compositions and low-key performances, effectively dramatized the haphazard lives of his protagonists, insecure both in work and relationships. Darker and more melodramatic in plot was L’Amant (2004), a coolly observed account of a teenage schoolgirl who sells herself for a year as a sex slave to three brothers. By refusing to pass judgment on