Midori Osaki

Midori Osaki was a Japanese modernist writer who produced short stories, poetry, essays, a stage drama, film criticism, and a film script. Her work explored female subjectivity, queer sexuality, irony and black humor, and sensorial and bodily experiences beyond everyday life. Much of her work, including her film criticism and film script, remains untranslated into English. Like Tazuko Sakane, the country’s first female film director, Osaki ventured into an overwhelmingly male-dominated domain in a society where female engagement with cinema—whether it be directing or critiquing—was largely unimaginable to the general public. Not only do Osaki’s writings provide a precious glimpse into early Japanese thinking on cinema from a female perspective, but her absence from film history also invites us to interrogate the possibilities of theoretical writing about cinema outside the West, the perceived center of film theory.  

Osaki was the fourth of seven children born to a middle-class family in Iwami-cho, Tottori prefecture. Her father worked as an elementary school teacher while her mother was the daughter of a Buddhist temple’s chief priest. After completing her education at Tottori Prefectural Girls’ High School in 1914, Osaki briefly worked as a substitute teacher at Iwami-gun Oiwa Elementary School. During this time, Osaki began to publish poems, short stories, and essays in literary magazines such as New Currents (Shinchō), Literature World (Bunshō Sekai), and Girls’ World (Shōjo Sekai). Her 1919 story “From the Doldrums” (“Mifūtai kara”), published in Shinchō, garnered significant critical attention and helped establish her reputation as a writer. That same year, Osaki enrolled in Japan Women’s University with the intention of furthering her education. However, the university did not allow its students to contribute to commercial magazines. As a result, she withdrew from the university in 1920 and pursued a writing career instead.

In the decade that followed, Osaki began experimenting with a modernist writing style shaped by cinema while she simultaneously expanded her creative practice into screenwriting, playwriting, and film criticism. In 1927, she completed the film script The Lapis Lazuli Earrings (Ruridama no mimiwa), a detective story set in the vibrant, chaotic world of early Shōwa Tōkyō. The plot centered on Akiko Okada, a female detective hired by a mysterious woman to find her three sisters—who were separated in childhood and connected only by the lapis lazuli earrings their mother left them. Osaki submitted the screenplay to Bandō Tsumasaburō Productions in response to the studio’s open call. The call for submissions appeared in the February 1927 issue of Kinema Junpō, with a deadline of March 5. Osaki therefore had, at most, only a few weeks to complete the script (Kawasaki 321). Unfortunately, Osaki’s script was not chosen by the studio to become a film. However, the script was preserved by Osaki’s college friend from Japan Women’s University and was published by Chikuma Shobō in 1998, twenty-seven years after Osaki’s death. 

Although The Lapis Lazuli Earrings only survives as an unproduced screenplay manuscript, it is still a useful film historiographical object. For one, it demonstrates how Osaki translated the visual grammar of silent cinema into her writing, something that she would do throughout her short career. One striking example is her use of cinematic framing in describing a scene: “Halfway up the slope stood a Western-style villa. The curtains of the room at its far right were always drawn. Suddenly he noticed that one curtain had been parted slightly, and the face of a beautiful woman appeared” (Osaki, Osaki Midori shūsei, 198). Instead of introducing the character directly, Osaki progressively narrows the reader’s visual focus, creating the effect of a camera moving from a long shot to a close-up. Elsewhere, she employs continuity editing in her text; rather than simply stating that several automobiles arrived, she writes, “One automobile stopped. Then another arrived behind it. Then another—” (Osaki, Osaki Midori shūsei, 208). By breaking a single action into successive visual units, the screenplay generates the rhythm of film editing. These cinematic techniques animate a vivid vision of the modern metropolis that forms the backdrop of her story. The protagonist’s pursuit leads the reader through a series of sensational urban spaces—from an opium den in Chinatown to a movie theater and a grotesque sideshow circus tent—each saturated with sensual and sensorial stimuli, including sadomasochistic spectacle, homosocial eroticism, and other forms of excess. In doing so, the screenplay embraces the aesthetics of ero guro nansensu (erotic, grotesque, nonsense) that defined Japanese mass culture in the late 1920s and 1930s.

A year after penning her film script, Osaki began writing about the cinema. Her essays on film appeared from April to September 1930 in Women’s Art (Nyonin geijutsu), one of the most influential literary journals for women in Japan. Founded in July 1928 by Shigure Hasegawa, Women’s Art was written, edited, designed, and published entirely by women and was committed to the pursuit of women’s liberation. 

Whether Osaki’s essays should be classified as “film criticism,” however, is open to debate. She titled her monthly column “Random Thoughts about Film” (“Eiga mansō”), signaling a deliberate distancing from how the predominantly male film critics were operating. As Aaron Gerow notes in a 2021 online lecture, the term mansō is neither in the dictionary nor Osaki’s own term, yet it captures the wandering sensibility, irony, and black humor that permeate her work—elements that are difficult to convey in English translation. Osaki offered her own definition of mansō in the opening paragraph of the first column:

By “manso,” I mean those wandering thoughts that drift, vanish, and shift like scenes on a screen. They resemble clouds, morning mist, fog, shadows, bubbles, or haze, yet remain far removed from any transparent critique tied to a single fixed viewpoint. In other words, those known as mansōka (ones who indulge in wandering thoughts)—rather than scientists of the screen—may even find their minds turning into cinema as they face the screen. (Osaki, Osaki Midori shūsei, 316)

Rather than adopting the authoritative stance of a traditional film critic, Osaki identified herself as a mansōka whose interest in cinema lay in the sensory and affective experience of viewing instead of the technical mechanics of filmmaking. She celebrated the moment when the distance between actor and spectator collapses: “He (the mansōka) mobilizes all his sensory faculties toward the entire body of the actor, and from there, a sentient spectator is born” (Osaki, Osaki Midori shūsei, 317). Osaki expressed a deep affection for Charlie Chaplin, yet when discussing the erotic charge that she experienced while watching him, she emphasized that this desire is directed not toward the actor as a real person but toward his projected image, remaining entirely detached from reality. Interestingly, Osaki used the Japanese masculine pronoun kare (he/him) to refer to this mansōka that she identified with, suggesting an attempt to move beyond the gender position assigned to her as a woman writer. 

The year 1930 marked a transitional period in Japanese cinema, as the industry shifted from silent films to talkies. Osaki wrote nostalgically about silent cinema as a safe refuge, a “world of black-and-white shadows” into which she could retreat (Osaki, Osaki Midori shūsei, 319). The coming of sound disrupted that refuge. “[The sound of talkies is] busy, raw, noisy,” she wrote, “an existence that makes one’s shoulders tense. With explanations, dialogue, and noise all layered on top of each other, my ears are kept incessantly occupied” (Osaki, Osaki Midori shūsei, 321). For Osaki, motion pictures should allow the spectator to “hear” what is there to be heard even without sound. 

Yet Osaki was not opposed to sound film per se. Rather, she objected to the rawness of early sound—a byproduct of technological constraints. She used the Japanese word namagusai to describe early talkie sound, which may be best translated as “fishy,” evoking an unpleasant synesthesia from hearing to smelling (Osaki, Osaki Midori shūsei, 333). She also likened synchronous sound to “canned food,” suggesting that its metallic, mechanical quality spoiled her pleasure (Osaki, Osaki Midori shūsei, 321). What she longed for instead was a sense of immediacy: sound emanating from a living body, like the singing voice in opera.

Her film essays display an impressively cosmopolitan vision, encompassing comments and analyses of the German silent masterpiece Asphalt (Joe May, 1929), American pre-Code comedies such as One Hysterical Night (William James Craft, 1929) and The Kibitzer (Edward Sloman, 1930), and Japan’s first feature-length talkie Fujiwara Yoshie’s Hometown (Mizoguchi Kenji, 1930), among others. In her discussion of the American short educational documentary Evolution (Max Fleischer, Dave Fleischer, and Ovide Decroly, 1923), Osaki described how the film allowed “the mind to leave the earth behind” and enter “a cool, oddly vacant world.” As she wrote, over the course of the film, “‘I’ become gas, ‘I’ become a star, ‘I’ become smoke, ‘I’ become a fragment of glacier, ‘I’ become moss, ‘I’ become a chameleon, ‘I’ become a primitive human” (Osaki, Osaki Midori shūsei, 367–68). For Osaki, films of this kind did not simply stimulate “intellectual curiosity,” but rather “draw the spectator into a naïve emotional identification” (Osaki, Osaki Midori shūsei, 368). Paying meticulous attention to the fleeting sensations, thoughts, and embodied experience of filmgoing, Osaki’s film essays could be read as some of the earliest theoretical reflections on cinematic spectatorship in Japan. One may even argue that her film criticism envisions possibilities for new affective relations between the spectator and cinema, echoing affect theory by Western thinkers such as Henri Bergson, Gilles Deleuze, and Félix Guattari, as Livia Monnet has noted (Monnet).

As a cinephile, Osaki’s engagement with cinema was not limited to script writing and film criticism. As already noted, she also translated the language of film into her other literary products, deploying various cinematic techniques such as “rapid scene shifts, physical gags, pans, close-ups, and montage” (Selden and Freedman 4). This practice has often been associated with the New Sensationalist School (Shinkankaku-ha) in 1920s Japan, a literary group dedicated to exploring “new impressions” or “new perceptions” in Japanese literature. Osaki’s engagement with cinema in literature culminated in her 1931 novella Wandering in the Realm of the Seventh Sense (Dainana kankai hōkō), first serialized in the magazines Literature Party Member (Bungaku touin) and New Art Studies (Shinkō geijutsu kenkyū) and published as a book in 1933. Narrated in a humorous, sometimes mocking tone by the protagonist, the story follows Machiko Ono, a young woman who has left behind a rural life to live with her brothers and childhood love interest in an “odd household” in Tōkyō (Selden and Freedman 2-3). As an aspiring poet, Machiko attempts to write poems that capture the “seventh sense” (dai-nana kan), which entails a “foggy and intricate schizophrenic mentality” (Osaki, Teihon Ozaki Midori zenshū, 292). 

For Osaki, her writing was fueled not only by the unprecedented sensory experiences offered by cinema, but also by the very real mental conditions that she was personally experiencing. Starting in 1924, Osaki began using medications to treat migraine headaches, suffering from hallucinations and hearing loss as side effects of overdose. Several months after completing the novella Miss Cricket (Kōrogi-jō) in 1932, she was brought by her brother back to her Tottori home due to the deterioration of her mental health. She was subsequently hospitalized there.

Osaki’s life after her return to Tottori remains largely unknown, then and now. From 1932 until her death in 1971, she ceased writing, cut off contact with her literary acquaintances, and never returned to Tōkyō. Even a close literary friend thought that she had died during this period of inactivity (Mizuta 20). It is still a mystery why she never returned to Tōkyō. It is possible that she was pressured by family duties, including caring for sick relatives and her siblings’ children (Mizuta 19). Osaki died of pneumonia in Tottori at the age of seventy-four. 

Two years before her death, in 1969, however, she was rediscovered by literary critic Kiyoteru Hanada who included Osaki’s Wandering in the Realm of the Seventh Sense in the book series Discovery of Modern Literature: Collected Works (Zenshū—gendai bungaku no hakken). For decades since her death, Osaki’s work and her long period of silence and inactivity continue to captivate writers, filmmakers, and scholars. By virtue of Osaki’s short literary career and the fact that most of her work had been forgotten and rediscovered and republished posthumously, she came to be known as a “phantom writer” (maboroshi no sakka) (Clerici 272). The rediscovery of Osaki’s body of work seems to encapsulate the kind of black humor and irony that permeate the stories she wrote: her film script was never made into a film but instead rewritten into a novel by another writer, and her stories that were not intended to be film scripts were turned into films, posthumously. First, in 1998 and 2007, Japanese feminist filmmaker Sachi Hamano brought two of her stories to the screen: Wandering in the Realm of the Seventh Sense and Miss Cricket, respectively. The former film, In Search of a Lost Writer: Wandering in the Realm of the Seventh Sense (Dainana kankai hōkō: Osaki Midori o sagashite), mixes interviews about Osaki, dramatizations of her life, and staged scenes from Wandering in the Realm of the Seventh Sense (Selden and Freedman 4). More recently, in 2010, Japanese writer Yasumi Tsuhara reworked Osaki’s film script The Lapis Lazuli Earrings into a short story with the same title. 

In retrospect, Osaki’s life and career illuminate the intertwined histories of modern Japanese literature and cinema, a momentous dimension of Japanese modernity. She approached cinema, then a still new and rapidly changing medium, through literature, while cinema also transformed the way she wrote. Grounded in the sensory experience of a Japanese woman spectator, her film essays also expand our understanding of film theory beyond a Western-centered framework. To film historians, Osaki poses intriguing historiographical questions about the way in which we situate such a pioneer—who never participated in the making of a film and yet whose career had everything to do with film—within the history of cinema.

See also: Tazuko Sakane