On Takashi Miike’s First Love

Abstract

Takashi Miike’s First Love (2019) revisits the yakuza film’s familiar opposition between giri (duty) and ninjō (humanity). This study argues that the apparent conflict rests on an exclusion that neither term names: women are left outside the moral economy through which male obligation and humanity are defined. Reading the film’s treatment of Monica alongside genre history and Marxist feminist accounts of patriarchal capitalism and social reproduction, the study asks how control of her body persists when older forms of authority appear to weaken. It also examines the limits of critical models used to classify the genre’s gender politics and considers the production history against which the film is read. The aim is to account for the film’s formal contradictions without calling it either a straightforward break with the genre or a simple return to its conventions.

This study has not been peer reviewed.

methods / verification companion

Verification materials and data: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.23355093

Scripts, archived outputs and an independently checkable Cinemetrics shot dataset (Zenodo, MIT licence); no film, subtitle or frame material is included. A frame-level audit of the author’s own Cinemetrics record found the curated headline figures (17 shots, ASL 8.7 s) correct but one internal cut displaced by seven frames; average shot length is insensitive to such boundary shifts.