Sessue Hayakawa: Silent Cinema and Transnational Stardom.

SESSUE HAYAKAWA: Silent Cinema and Transnational Stardom. By Daisuke Miayo. Durham (NC) and London (UK): Duke University Press, 2007. xvi, 379 pp. (Illus.) US$23.95, paper. ISBN 987-08223-3969-4.

Those of us of a certain age remember the Japanese actor Sessue Hayakawa (1886-1973) for his Oscar-nominated supporting role as Colonel Saito in the David Lean-directed film The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957), but few of us are aware that Hayakawa was one of the world's leading silent film stars from the mid-1910s into the 1920s. Daisuke Miyao's compelling and essential study of Hayakawa explores the actor's early stardom with an analysis that situates him at the crossroads of a variety of cultural discourses that required a constant negotiation of his cinematic and personal identities.

The first chapter of the book discusses Hayakawa's films from 1914-1915, including his "breakout" film, The Cheat (1915), in which he played Tori, a cultivated art dealer, who befriends and then sexually assaults a white woman, thereby encompassing the two classic representations of Orientalism: a somewhat effeminate man of culture, and an out-of-control barbarian. Playing on a variety of attitudes towards Japan--ranging from the consumerist and exoticist fad of Japanese Taste to the hysteria over the Yellow Peril--this role struck a nerve that propelled Hayakawa into stardom. As the book continues through a consideration of Hayakawa's films under contract with Lansky-Paramount (1916-1918) and his breakthrough establishment of his own producing company, Haworth Pictures (1918-1922), Miyao presents a brilliant analysis of what came to be the Hayakawa persona: the cultured, genteel, disciplined and honourable (bushido and all that) Japanese gentleman who, while able to demonstrate a certain degree of Americanization (thus speaking to the obsession about the assimilation of immigrants), can never quite shake his essential Japaneseness, which contains a certain amount of primitive violence that can erupt at any moment. (The persisting power of the Orientalist representation of cultivation and brutishness is evident in Hayakawa's portrayal of Colonel Saito, the erstwhile art student who has a hanging scroll and flower arrangement in his quarters even as he tortures British prisoners of war.) In keeping with cultural stereotypes, some of Hayakawa's most memorable characters cannot control their desire to possess white women. Frustrated, they assault the women and then they die, both as a displacement of that desire and, for the audience, a removal of the threat they pose. Miyao discusses at length how many of Hayakawa's roles exploit the fear of miscegenation--characters both charmed and threatened but never won the white women--although there is room for a more expansive consideration of the forbidden attractiveness of such erotic fantasies of the male Other to the female audience. The final chapters of Miyao's book discuss Hayakawa's complex and awkward relationship with Japan and its film industry, and touch on various aspects of his post-silent-film career.

One particularly fascinating theme of Miyao's book is how Hayakawa the person had so little control over Hayakawa the actor despite the best of intentions, such as his ultimately failed aspiration to film "realistic" representations of Japan. The actor was a construct of his producers, the media and the sociohistorical climate of the times, which was consumed with the politics of race, gender, sexuality and class. At the same time, Hayakawa had to contend with the criticism, and the occasional praise, that emerged from the Japanese-American and Japanese audiences, who saw him as both a cultural hero and a traitor. These three elements constitute what Miayo calls Hayakawa's "triple consciousness": his negotiations among his American and Japanese audiences, and within his personal identity, with regard to cultural representation. Accessibly written and replete with impeccable scholarship and incisive analysis, Miyao's book constitutes a major contribution to film studies, Asian-American studies and cultural studies.

MATTHEW MIZENKO

Ursinus College, U.S.A.