Introduction: Onna Monogatari

The introduction presents an overview of Tanaka’s life and career vis-a-vis the history of twentieth-century Japan, emphasising how women participated in and were affected by legal, political and socio-economic changes. Through Tanaka’s professional development, it revisits the evolution of the Japanese studio system and stardom, and explains the importance of women as subjects within the films, consumers of the industry, and professionals behind the scenes. This historical overview highlights Japan’s negotiation of modernity and tradition, often played out through symbolic dichotomies of gender and sexuality. By underscoring women’s new routes of mobility, the authors challenge the simplified image of Japanese oppressed women. The second part of the introduction posits director Tanaka as an outstanding, yet understudied, figure in the world history of women filmmaking. Her case inspires compelling questions around labels such as female authorship, star-as-author, and director-as-star and their role in advancing the production and acknowledgement of women filmmaking.

Panpan Girls, Lesbians and Post-war Women’s Communities: Girls of Dark (1961) as Women’s Cinema

Yuka Kanno uses the final chapter of the book to examine Girls of Dark (Onna bakari no yoru, 1961), a film which follows the lives of ex-prostitutes in a rehabilitation facility. Within an exclusively female community as diverse in age as personality, Japan’s first lesbian film character emerges, defying traditional representations of lesbianism in Japanese popular culture. Kanno argues that this unusual character is pivotal to understanding of the desire, solidarity and conflict which characterises the female community in the film. The female continuum is presented as both diegetic and relational by including the narrative space of the film and that embodied by the three women who collaborated to produce it: Tanaka Kinuyo (director), Yana Masako (novelist), and Tanaka Sumie (scriptwriter). Using queer and feminist theory, Kanno’s fascinating and innovative discussion seeks to relocate the concept of women’s cinema within Japanese film history and film theory.

Female Authorship, Subjectivity and Colonial Memory in Tanaka Kinuyo’s The Wandering Princess (1960)

Tanaka’s fourth film, The Wandering Princess (Ruten no ōhi, 1960), is the subject of Alejandra Armendáriz-Hernández’s chapter. Based on the autobiography of Saga Hiro (1914-1987), a Japanese aristocrat who married the younger brother of the emperor of Manchukuo, The Wandering Princess was marketed as a ‘women’s film’ by highlighting the three women who occupied key positions in the production: scriptwriter Wada Natto, star Kyō Machiko and director Tanaka Kinuyo. With this in mind, Armendáriz-Hernández examines Tanaka’s work against more prevalent representations of women and national history in postwar Japanese cinema in order to argue that the film and, crucially, Tanaka herself occupied a liminal gendered position within early 1960s Japanese cinema.

Meetings and Partings: How Tanaka’s Films End

Alexander Jacoby moves ahead to the 1940s and 50s in order to explore Tanaka’s second period of stardom as a mature actress. Shifting from the common auterist focus of Japanese film studies to analyse these canonical films as star vehicles for Tanaka, Jacoby argues that her star persona helped clarify the ideology of the films, thus advocating a ‘star-as-auteur’ approach. Examining the climax and endings of several films, the chapter contends that the ideological trajectory of each work is made explicit via the resolution of a narrative thread concerning Tanaka's relationship with a male – be they friend, lover or relative. Correspondingly, when the central relationship is with another woman, the ideological implications of the resolutions are more radical. Through an approach that places emphasis on the depiction of touch in Tanaka’s physical interactions with other characters, the chapter revisits classical works of post-war Japanese cinema from a new perspective.

Dancer, Doctor, Maiden, Mother: Tanaka Kinuyo’s Early Star Image

The chapter examines Tanaka’s early career as an actress in the 1930s and her star persona in terms of acting style and roles played within the Japanese studio system. The notion of ‘idiogest’ is introduced to analyse the gestural characteristics of Tanaka’s acting style, which constitute a fundamental element of her star image. Against preconceptions of a homogenised star image, it explores Tanaka versatile acting skills and roles in films, ranging from traditional girls to modern career women and athlete. The chapter argues that the recurrent link between her characters and tragic motherhood and romance is connected to contemporary social shifts in femininity and Tanaka’s real life. Because her star persona had a significant impact on the content, promotion and appraisal of the films as the chapter demonstrates, Kitsnik suggests talking about ‘joint stardom’ or joint authorship between Tanaka and the directors of the films.

Kinuyo and Sumie: When Women Write and Direct

Female authorship is the subject of this chapter, which concentrates on Tanaka’s third film, The Eternal Breasts (Chibusa yo eien nare, 1955). This was her first collaboration with scriptwriter Tanaka Sumie, and the chapter reveals the negotiation between two very different women of the same generation who worked together to articulate female subjectivity. Examining their distinct life experiences and approaches to the depiction of women (and female sexuality in particular) works to position Tanaka in the history of Japanese women’s cinema and melodrama. An exhaustive analysis of screenplays, shooting scripts, interviews, and contemporary reviews renders visible Tanaka’s authorial voice as a woman and her visual translation and intervention in Sumie’s script. The chapter makes a case of Tanaka’s creative directorial worth, while exposing why both the film industry and film studies may have hitherto overlooked her directed works.

The First Female Gaze at Post-war Japanese Women: Tanaka Kinuyo, Film Director

The chapter focuses on the production and reception of Love Letter (Koibumi, 1953) and The Moon Has Risen (Tsuki wa noborinu, 1955) –the first two films directed by Tanaka—to call into question the meaning and construction of the category of ‘woman director’. The chapter is divided in three parts. The first contextualises Tanaka’s decision to become a director within the post-war legal and social changes affecting women, illuminating how she positioned herself within trending discourses. The second offers a textual analysis of the representation of gender roles and power dynamics in both films to question whether Tanaka was offering new perspectives on the subject. The last part illuminates how the figure of ‘woman director’ was being defined, contextualised and negotiated in the public sphere by a detailed analysis of promotional material and reviews from the contemporaneous Japanese press.

Tanaka and Mizoguchi: Politics and Rebellion in the Early Post-war Era

Smith’s chapter uses My Love Has Been Burning (Waga koi wa moenu, Mizoguchi Kenji, 1949) as a case-study for an analysis of Tanaka’s embodiment of feminine subjectivity. Grounded by an examination of the postwar gender reforms and their application, he argues that Tanaka and Mizoguchi’s creative partnership is complex to define politically, often expressing conflicting ideas on gender equality which in turn reflected the moral, social and practical paradigms which underpinned gender politics in Japan. Although produced in the postwar period, the film’s plot is set in the Meiji era and the chapter bridges these crucial periods in the history of Japanese women, using Tanaka’s star image to illuminate ideological connotations within both settings. The close reading of Tanaka’s feminist character in the film complicates the critical conception of her star persona as being tied to the Japanese stereotype of yamato nadeshiko - a type of conservative, restrained, traditional femininity.