Chapter 1: Introduction; Chapter 2: The Making of An Auteur: The Early Films (1958-1959), Jennifer Coates; Section I: Killers; Chapter 3: Confronting America: Pigs and Battleships and the Politics of US Bases in Postwar Japan, Hiroshi Kitamura; Chapter 4: Insect Men and Women: Gender, Conflict and Problematic Modernity in Intentions of Murder, Adam Bingham; Chapter 5: Hidden in Plain Sight: The False Leads and True Mysteries of Vengeance Is Mine, John Berra; Chapter 6: The Eel: Trauma Cinema, David Desser; Section II: Clients; Chapter 7: The Insect Woman, or: The Female Art of Failure, Michael Raine; Chapter 8: The Obscene in the Everyday: The Pornographers, Lindsay Coleman; Chapter 9: Sh?hei Imamura’s Profound Desire for Japan’s Cultural Roots: Critical Approaches to Profound Desires of the Gods, Mats Karlsson; Chapter 10: ‘Products of Japan’: Karayuki-san, The Making of a Prostitute, Joan Mellen; Chapter 11: The Female Body as Transgressor of National Boundaries: The History of Postwar Japan as Told by a Bar Hostess, Bianca Briciu; Part III: Kindred Spirits; Chapter 12: Better off Being Bacteria: Adaptation and Allegory in Dr Akagi, Lauri Kitsnik; Chapter 13: Time out of Joint: Sh?hei Imamura and the Search for an ‘Other’ Japan, Bill Mihalopoulos; Chapter 14: Promotional Discourses and the Meanings of The Ballad of Narayama, Rayna Denison; Chapter 15: Boundary Play: Truth, Fiction, and Performance in A Man Vanishes, Diane Lewis; Chapter 16: Why Not? – Imamura, Nietzsche and the Untimely, David Deamer; Chapter 17: Kuroi ame: An Anthropology of Suffering, Dolores Martinez; Chapter 18: The Symbolic Function of Water, Tim Iles; Notes on Contributors