One thing to check out is Mark Schilling's "Yakuza Movie
Book." I think it's still in print. ISBN 1-880656-76-0.
Should be able to find it on Amazon just by punching the ISBN
into the search field, sans hyphens. About the best resource
your're likely to find in the U.S.
In a more historical vein, there's the immaculately
researched "Yakuza: Japan's Criminal Underworld" by David
Kaplan (0-520-21562-1), now in its second edition from U. of
California. A bit of a slow read for the first hundred pages,
but gets pretty spellbinding after that. The book also reads
a lot like political history, if you're into that sort of
thing, because (even though you don't see it in the movies)
the Yakuza is traditionally involved far more in the Japanese
political process than our mafia ever has been. While most
American mafias just want to make money, Japanese Yakuza, for
the most part, actually have political goals, and Japan's far
fringe right-wing groups--the ultranationalists who want
Japan to have a standing army again and to expel the U.S.
from Japan's borders (among other things)--are almost all
Yakuza groups or groups with heavy Yakuza ties.
The big wave of Yakuza movies was in the 60s and 70s, before
Japan's opinion of the Yakuza changed. They used to have a
much more forgiving attitude towards them, and you could even
find Yakuza gangs explicitly advertising in the phone book,
or putting up signs outside their meeting places effectively
saying "YAKUZA GANG HEADQUARTERS". Pretty brazen, but that's
because some Japanese turned a blind eye and some Japanese
romanticized them as the dark, violent heroes of the Yakuza
pics. But these days, the Japanese police is taking a much
more aggressive stance towards organized crime, and the
Yakuza's public image isn't what it used to be...so people
aren't so much interested in seeing heroic Yakuza anti-heroes
on the big screen.
David Moran
Mark Sullivan wrote:
> The other day, I saw Seijun Suzuki's Branded to
Kill, a Japanese
> thriller about a yakuza killer. The professional
killer likes to sniff
> rice, which throws him into an ecstatic trance. And
he's played by an
> actor with surgical cheek implants that make him
look like a cross
> between a chipmunk and Brando in The Godfather. He's
the #3 killer,
> given to asking, "Who is #1?" It came out in 1967,
the same year #6
> started asking that same question in The Prisoner.
And it's just as
> whacked out (in a good way) as The
Prisoner.
>
> Plotwise, it's a "program film," as Suzuki calls it
(of course, he got
> fired because the studio said this film didn't make
sense), a formulaic
> studio movie for nothing but entertainment, which
sounds a lot like
> those B movies that later came to be considered noir
classics.
> Stylistically, this black and white film also draws
from America noir,
> but even more from the French new wave.
>
> According to the movie notes, there are a whole
bunch of Japanese movies
> like this. Are there Japanese books like this? The
only one I can
> think of that comes close is Peter Tasker's series
featuring his PI
> Mori, but he's a Brit, even if he does live in
Japan. And they're far
> more recent. The Japanese mysteries I'm aware of are
higher class
> affairs, just as the Japanese movies I knew were,
such as Kurosawa's
> films. I know there are Manga of this sort, but are
there Japanese
> Yakuza novels, Japanese equivalents of Gold Medals?
And have any of
> them been translated?
>
> Mark
>
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