Japanese Mythology in Film: A Semiotic Approach to Reading Japanese Film and Anime by Yoshiko Okuyama (review)

This good book harks back to pioneering studies of Japanese film such as Keiko MacDonald’s Reading a Japanese Film.¹ Yoshiko Okuyama focuses on the same key questions that MacDonald does: What do film viewers need to know to obtain a meaningful understanding of what they are watching? And, what do critical methods for interpreting film contribute to achieve that end? Like MacDonald, Okuyama comes to her project from long experience in the classroom. This book is designed primarily as a textbook for undergraduates interested in film and Japanese language and culture.

Part 1 is laid out as a primer of “Semiotics for Film Analysis.” Chapter 1 offers a general introduction answering the question: “What is Semiotics?” Some might question the need to do this. After all, great introductions to semiotics have long been available, such as Roland Barthes’s Elements of Semiology and Terrence Hawkes’s classic, Structuralism and Semiotics.² But Okuyama’s book is valuable for clearly introducing semiotics as a method for film analysis and for her excellent case studies of contemporary Japanese films.

Semiotics is the study of sign systems. Doing film analysis means delving into the rich interplay of signs woven into the structure of films and learning to “decode” a movie’s complex system of signs. That is exactly what Okuyama tries to do here, determining how a film’s “symbolic meanings are created and transmitted through the use of words, images, and so forth” (p. 3). What makes up the flow of signifiers forming a film? What combination of signifiers creates its world which audiences imaginatively inhabit? Rather than pointing to the signified—the beyond to which these sign systems of films refer for their authors, audiences, and even critics—semiotic analysis explores these systems in and of themselves. That analysis is crucial for ascertaining a film’s cultural significance. Okuyama would agree with Barthes’s key points in S/Z, that every text is a “galaxy of signifiers not a structure of signifieds” and that “to interpret a text is not to give it a (more or less justified, more or less free) meaning, but on the contrary to appreciate the possibility of plural readings.”³ The critical task, she reminds her readers, “lies in how to interpret the meaning embedded in the sign” while nonetheless realizing that films are “open texts” subject to interpretation by individual viewers given the relationship of the film and its viewers to other texts. “The fundamental idea of the theory of semiotics is that the meaning of a sign cannot be determined in the absolute” (pp. 18–19).

Chapter 2, “Reading Film: The Nature of Interpretation,” introduces key concepts that are basic to Okuyama’s approach, such as the distinction between message and meaning, textuality and intertextuality, cultural codes, interpretive communities, and so on. In this chapter, she makes a good case for the value of a semiotic approach to film analysis in addition to other methods, such as auteur analysis, psychoanalysis, and audience reception theory (p. 13). Chapter 3, “Mythology in Film,” asks “Why Study Mythology in Popular Film and Anime?” Chapter 4 asks, “What is in the Story?” and introduces narratology and the nature of film adaptation. Chapter 5, “Visual Literacy,” answers the question: “What do we get from watching film?” This chapter details the benefits of semiotic film interpretation for increasing critical thinking skills, visual literacy, and learning about foreign cultures through popular media. All these chapters are readable, are mostly pitched to beginners, and employ a wealth of examples to make difficult theoretical abstractions clear. For example, Okuyama draws on Hollywood films students will know, such as The Matrix, Star Wars, and The Simpsons, for her user-friendly explanations of concepts.

Okuyama concentrates on Japanese mythology in film—that is, analyzing the “mythological tropes and motifs embedded in recent popular cinematic productions...