[KineJapan] Ishii Takashi

[Gerow Aaron]

In the taxi after landing in Japan yesterday, I read that it was announced that the film director and manga artist Ishii Takashi died on May 22.  He was 75.

In my experience, Ishii was one of the top directors working in Japan in the mid-90s, even if he was not getting all that much attention abroad. When I arrived in 1992, Shindemo ii had won a bunch of domestic awards, and Ishii followed that with hits such as Nudo no yoru and the two Gonin films. A number of his films left a big impression on me. While he had always wanted to be a film director, health issues made that difficult at first, and he first found success as a manga artist, penning adult tales of women who were all named Nami. One of those was adapted by Sone Chusei in 1978 as a Roman Poruno film, which started the Tenshi no harawata series that Ishii subsequently supported by writing scripts until he debuted as a director of one of the films in the series in 1988. 

He was not that productive a director, in part because of his health issues, but his influence was real and he is obviously a figure that one must discuss when considering the relation between manga and film in Japan.


Aaron Gerow
Alfred W. Griswold Professor of East Asian Languages and Literatures and Film and Media Studies
Chair, East Asian Languages and Literatures
Yale University
320 York Street, Room 108
PO Box 208201
New Haven, CT 06520-8201
USA
Phone: 1-203-432-7082
Fax: 1-203-432-6729
e-mail: aaron.gerow at yale.edu <mailto:aaron.gerow at yale.edu>
website: www.aarongerow.com





















-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mailman.yale.edu/pipermail/kinejapan/attachments/20220610/7796a7d4/attachment-0001.html>