Description: Bringing together a range of Japanese and western scholars, this is the first book in English dedicated to the actress and director Tanaka Kinuyo. Praised as amongst the greatest actors in the history of Japanese cinema, Tanaka's career spanned the industrial development of cinema - from silent to sound, monochrome to colour. Alongside featuring in films by Ozu, Mizoguchi, Naruse and Kurosawa, Tanaka was also the only Japanese woman filmmaker between 1953 and 1962, and her films tackled distinctly feminine topics such as prostitution and breast cancer. Her career overlapped with a transformative period in Japanese history, and this close analysis of her fascinating life and work offers new perspectives, subjectivities and modes of analysis for the classical era of Japanese cinema.
Brief description: Irene González-López is Lecturer in Japanese Studies at Birkbeck, University of London. Her research interests are Japanese Cinema and Visual Cultures, Gender Studies, and Women Filmmakers. She is the co-editor of Tanaka Kinuyo: Nation, Stardom and Female Subjectivity (2018), and of The Documentary Cinema of Haneda Sumiko: Japan in Transition through Gender, Arts, Nature and Society (2026).
Review Quotes: It would appear that English language scholarship on Kinuyo Tanaka is just beginning. In addition, this volume is helpful in better understanding some of the outside forces that also played a part in the history of Japanese cinema.--Peter Nellhaus "Coffee, Coffee and more Coffee"