Freer Gallery of Art,U.S. – förlag

Japanese film director Seijun Suzuki began his career making increasingly outrageous B movies for Nikkatsu Studios in the 1950s and 1960s (he was eventually fired for his stylistic excesses). More than ten years later, he reinvented himself as an independent filmmaker with a uniquely eccentric vision. He remains a cult figure outside of Japan and his influence can be seen in the work of directors as diverse as Jim Jarmusch, Baz Luhrmann, and Quentin Tarantino. Time and Place Are Nonsense, the first book-length study of his work in English, aims to enhance the appreciation of his films by analyzing them in light of the cultural and political turmoil of post-World War II Japan and the aesthetic traditions that inform them.

This innovative book narrates the history of a single object—a tea-leaf storage jar created in southern China during the thirteenth or fourteenth centuries—and describes how its role changed after it was imported to Japan and passed from owner to owner there. In Japan, where the jar was in constant use for more than seven hundred years, it was transformed from a humble vessel into a celebrated object used in chanoyu (often translated in English as tea ceremony), renowned for its aesthetic and functional qualities, and awarded the name Chigusa.Few extant tea utensils possess the quantity and quality of the accessories associated with Chigusa, material that enables modern scholars and tea aficionados to trace the jar's evolving history of ownership and appreciation. Tea diaries indicate that the lavish accessories—the silk net bag, cover, and cords—that still accompany the jar were prepared in the early sixteenth century by its first recorded owner.