Films like Shoplifters and After the Storm have made Kore-eda Hirokazu one of the most acclaimed auteurs working today. Critics often see Kore-eda as a director steeped in the Japanese tradition defined by Yasujirō Ozu. Marc Yamada, however, views Kore-eda's work in relation to the same socioeconomic concerns explored by other contemporary international filmmakers. Yamada reveals that a type of excess, not the minimalism associated with traditional aesthetics, defines Kore-eda's trademark humanism. This excess manifests in small moments when a desire for human connection exceeds the logic of the institutions and policies formed by the neoliberal values that have shaped modern-day Japan. As Yamada shows, Kore-eda captures the shared spaces formed by bodies that move, perform, and assemble in ways that express the humanistic impulse at the core of the filmmaker's expanding worldwide appeal.|Acknowledgments

Shared Spaces of Filmmaking

Beyond Ozu and Loach: Kore-eda Hirokazu in Japanese and World Cinema

Nonorganized Labor and Shared Spaces of Collaboration in Kore-eda's Early Documentaries

Grifter Families and Networks of Exchange in Shoplifters

Reimagining Masculine Bodies in Hana; Like Father, Like Son; and The Third Murder

Body Moving: The Dynamics of Placemaking in Our Little Sister, Still Walking, and After the Storm

Private and Public Bodies of Memory in After Life, The Truth, and Distance

Interviews with Kore-eda Hirokazu

Filmography

Bibliography

Index

|"Marc Yamada reveals how Kore-eda's films connect to global audiences through their focus on figures like children suffering from neglect and families surviving at the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder. Yamada provides new approaches towards understanding Kore-eda's work in terms of a broader critique of neoliberalism."—Mitsuyo Wada-Marciano, author of Nippon Modern: Japanese Cinema of the 1920s and 1930s
"A close read of the works of one of the world's most deeply human writer-directors. The section studying 2018's Shoplifters is especially strong. But his entire corpus is shown to be well worth analyzing. " —Film Stage
|Marc Yamada is associate professor of Interdisciplinary Humanities at Brigham Young University. He is the author of Locating Heisei in Japanese Fiction and Film: The Historical Imagination of The Lost Decades.