Are we there yet? Traveling toward the self in contemporary Japanese cinema

This paper will explore the ways in which the two dimensions of travel-outer movement through space and inner movement through time, memory, and the self-cohere in contemporary Japanese cinema, proposing, after Graburn and other anthropologists, that travel does indeed function as a multi-faceted secular ritual, here highlighting the process of identity-formation and self-discovery not situated, as in the works of pre-modern writers, in the natural world, but rather within the urban space of the modern, westernised Japan.I will draw on two films, Vibrator (Hiroki Ryuichi, 2003) and Drive (Sabu, 2002), utilising both narratological and visual/semiotic analyses, to examine ways in which directors have captured these complementing aspects of temporal, spatial, and psychological movement in works fundamentally concerned with the process of creation of self-identity, both to situate this self-identity within and to overcome the potentially alienating, modern, urban space. THE LINEAGE OF TRAVEL IN THE JAPANESE LITERARY ARTSTravel is certainly nothing new in the Japanese arts, from the earliest days of literary expression to the most contemporary notions of virtual travel in animated video games.With the haikai poet, Bashō (1644-1694), travel becomes an artform in and of itself, a source of inspiration for the poet as well as a means of reconnecting the artist with the antecedent classics of Japanese art.Travel existed for Bashō as something which he could not resist, as a force of nature within himself that compelled him to explore the literary lansdscape of Japan.As he himself has it in the famous opening lines of his most well-known work, Oku no hosomichi (Narrow Roads to the Interior, 1689), "I, too, now when would that have been-I, too, could not stop my thoughts of wandering, of drifting like a cloud blown by the wind…" What we have here is, on the one hand, a very personal account of the relationship between the poet and travel, and a very intimate connection between the poet and the natural world.I've left out for brevity's sake the continuation of this sentence which flows forward from idea to idea very

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