The modes of magic realism and postmodernism are among the few recent generic trends in Japanese cinema that one could identify as a legitimately new phenomenon, a development in genre filmmaking that owes less to extant and established modes of (national) storytelling than to a broader interaction with and response to cultural paradigms and artistic practices. Of course, there are significant precursors to this sub-strata of Japanese filmmaking, both literary and cinematic – the novels and short stories of Murakami Haruki or Yoshimoto Banana for instance, or several early films by Itami Juzo, most especially Tampopo [Dandelion] (1986). However, the recent iterations of cinematic magic realism have worked towards a different model that actually bespeaks cross-fertilisation with postmodernism, a cultural condition with which it has not typically been perceived as coterminous by those few commentators who have written about and theorised both practices. This has resulted in a distinct, discrete cinematic form that has increasingly permeated Japanese cinema since the turn of the millennium, one that has incorporated facets of several different genres into a heterogeneous whole whose constituent parts or elements are often placed in opposition or tension in order to problematise representation and encourage an active spectatorship to question and interrogate the text. Self-reflexivity is typically understood to be a key feature of postmodern art, the calling attention by a text to its own artifice being a means of frustrating diegetic transparency and suture and thus potentially of disturbing dominant ideology and the implied empiricism of its prerogatives. However if it is true, as Max Weber notes, that ‘the highest ideals […] which move us most forcefully […] are always formed only in the struggle with other ideals which are just as sacred to others as ours are to us’ (Harvey, 1990, p. 1); and if we consequently accept that postmodernism by its very definition allows for (indeed facilitates) a refusal of any totalising theories or meta-narratives, then it must follow that it is not incompatible with other registers or frameworks of representation, that it can productively breed with other modes – as a means, perhaps, of better categorising and analysing the features of increasingly transnational cinematic products.