Transnational, Transgeneric, Transgressive: Tracing Miike Takashi’s Yakuza Cyborgs to Sukiyaki Westerns

This paper explores the transnationalism of Miike Takashi’s approach to film genres. Film genre has often been held as a stabilizing and internationalizing paradigm of film production, distribution, and reception, likewise with the increasingly transnational focus of Miike’s work that has accompanied his growing notoriety and fame with critics and cineastes, predominantly those outside Japan, where his fame is marginal. The paper also explores ways in which Miike’s transnational approach to genre problematizes and intervenes in transnational cinematic struggles by offering challenges to existing and homogenizing structures of genre and language. By looking at Sukiyaki Western Django (2007) as the definitive example of Miike’s transcultural generic work, the argument will examine the role of “gatekeeper auteurs” such as Tarantino and Eli Roth, in establishing Miike as the nomadic figure in world cinema.