Star, Scorpion, and the Snowblood: Kaji Meiko’s multiplicities and the Japanese culture industry

Abstract

Abstract This article revolves around recurrences that run through Japanese cinema and related media cultures from their early twentieth century through the late post-war decades. It posits a conspicuous, although not unique, compulsion to repeat that manifests itself as diffracted into different orders of ‘returns’ or ‘iterations.’ These pertain to successful narratives and motives, as well as to production strategies, gendered role compartmentalisations and the political economy of patterned synergies across different media forms and channels. The article thus seeks to unravel multiple fils rouges traversing Japanese cinema in the twentieth century by first focusing on early media tie-ins in the 1920s in the context of the development of mass literature and systematic adaptation of serialised period novels into competing film versions. Then, it illustrates how the Kaji-centred multiplicities of the early 1970s, especially in relation to the manga-based Female Prisoner Scorpion (1972–73) and Lady Snowblood (1973–74) film mini-series, show the entrenchment of those practices and persistent links to the jidaigeki (period) genre, with its associated tropes of the wandering outlaw and warrior’s training journey motifs. Finally, Kaji’s intertwined careers as singer and actress are seen to include all such iterations and incarnate a transmedia, transhistorical and cross-cultural journey.