72 - Japanese literature and cinema from the 1910s to the 1950s

Summary

Throughout the late Meiji and Taisho periods, movie theaters gradually grew in number around Tokyo's Asakusa entertainment district. Tanizaki Junichiro, who began writing in the same period, often wrote these spaces into his early fiction. Himitsu is set in the labyrinthine streets of Tokyo's Shitamachi area around 1910, still in the wake of the Russo-Japanese War. During the Taisho period, other novelists also wrote on the topic of film. Sato Haruo's Shimon uses the setting of a movie theater and incorporates filmic techniques of expression. Experiments with cinematic techniques can be seen in the early fiction of Hori Tatsuo, beginning with Bukiyona tenshi. As Japanese filmmakers moved to the era of the talkie, the greatest challenge for filmmakers was dialog and its enunciation. Following the end of the Allied occupation and the liberation of Japanese media from occupation censorship, Japanese film, as if in response to the renewed popularity of Japanese literature, entered a postwar golden age.