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Suspect narratives: “Sinifying” an “Indianized” Japanese story

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 June 2022

Krista Van Fleit
Krista Van Fleit*
Affiliation:
Languages, Literatures, and Cultures, University of South Carolina System, Columbia, USA
*
Author for correspondence: Krista Van Fleit, E-mail: vanfleit@mailbox.sc.edu
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Abstract

In 2013, the Malayalam film Drishyam, a suspenseful story of the cover up of an accidental murder, became a huge hit in India that inspired remakes in many regional languages including one in Hindi that, as with other recent Bollywood hits, traveled to China. This time, though, instead of screening the Hindi film in theaters, the narrative reached Chinese audiences with a Chinese language remake, titled Sheep Without A Shepherd《误杀》. The original film has been accused of lifting its story from a popular Japanese detective novel, The Devotion of Suspect X, which was also made into films in Japanese, Chinese, and Korean. This essay traces the many versions of the narrative to explore how comparing the Indian and Chinese films can recenter our understanding of global cinema and film circulation. When considering the many version of Drishyam, instead of focusing on tensions between center and periphery, we can examine both the anxieties and the creative power of cultural borrowing and the retelling of narratives in an increasingly inter-connected Asian film market

Keywords

Inter-Asian ConnectionsAsian CinemaChinese CinemaHindi CinemaFilm AdaptationsGlobal Cultural Circulation
Type
Special Issue on Methods in China-India Studies
Information
International Journal of Asian Studies , Volume 19 , Issue 2 , July 2022 , pp. 303 - 317
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Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press

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