Crossing the Threshold: Home-Leaving and Home-Making in the Works of Japanese Female Directors 

In this talk, Dr. Laird will introduce her current work in progress: a study of home in the works of contemporary Japanese women directors. One could say that “home” is the heart of Japanese cinema. There are genres and sub-genres of the home in Japanese film, particularly of melodrama and, later, melodrama’s kissing cousin horror. We may easily list genres such as haha mono, tsuma eiga, homu dorama, kateigeki, and shōshimingeki as exemplary sub-genres of drama just, but movies about home, homecoming, and the family in their home form the very pillars of Japan’s film history. In the works of contemporary Japanese female filmmakers, we see a consistent and intentional restructuring of domestic spaces and a return to home as both a physical and emotional manifestation that builds on a legacy of home in Japanese cinema. Depictions of home-leaving and home-making feature largely in the early works of this generation almost uniformly expressed through the motif of leaving a perceived traditional home in order to make a new familiarity to call one’s own.