Autumn Afternoons

This chapter explores the intertextual place and presence of Ozu Yasujiro in the 2004 comedy drama Dogs and Cats by the first-time female director Iguchi Nami. It considers how Ozu as well as the genre, the shomingeki (middle-class home drama) has frequently figured as a marker or signpost of a particular era of cinema, a sociopolitical juncture and/or an attitude to gender in Japan. Taking this intertextuality as a point of departure, the chapter explores how such a presence animates meaning in Iguchi’s film; it analyzes style and structure as a means of elucidating how this young filmmaker distinguishes both herself and the world of her characters through implicit comparison with Ozu. Moreover, it examines how its narrative—about two young women living together under fractious conditions—contributes to discourse on Japanese models of feminisuto filmmaking, the country’s specific sociocultural model of feminism.