2026 Essays

Osaki Midori

Zhao, Xinyi

Osaki Midori 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 Sakane Tazuko, 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.