Successful film remakes can become truly transnational phenomena, reaching across and beyond East Asia. This chapter explores the diverse and continued remaking of the ‘Miss Granny’ story, from its first iteration in South Korea to the multiple versions across East and Southeast Asia. The ‘Miss Granny’ story began as Suspicious Girl (Susanghan geunyeo, 2014), a romantic comedy, directed by Hwang Dong-hyuk, in which a difficult elderly woman struggling with her family relationships finds herself transported by a magic photobooth back into her twenty-year-old body, while retaining her knowledge and memories in the contemporary setting. After generating high box-office earnings of $51.7 million USD and significant critical acclaim, the story was quickly retold for Chinese-speaking audiences as 20 Once Again (Chóng fǎn èrshí suì, 2015), directed by Leste Chan; for Vietnamese audiences as Sweet 20, aka You Are My Grandmother (Em là bà nội của anh, 2015), directed by Phan Gia Nhat Linh; and for Japanese audiences as Suspicious Girl, aka Sing My Life (Ayashii Kanojo, 2016), directed by Mizuta Nobuo. Spreading further, a Thai remake titled Suddenly Twenty (Suddenly 20, Araya Suriharn, 2016), an Indonesian remake titled Sweet Twenty (Sweet 20, Ody C. Harahap, 2017), a Philippine remake titled Miss Granny (Joyce E. Bernal, 2018) and a Telugulanguage Indian version titled Oh Baby! (B. V. Nandini Reddy, 2019) are also part of this transnational phenomenon. The South Korean version's box-office success overtook that of Frozen (Jennifer Lee and Chris Buck, 2013), while the Chinese adaptation grossed $57.4 million and the Vietnamese version was the highest-grossing domestic film in Vietnam at the time of its release.

An examination of these ‘Miss Granny’ films, which have become a remarkable global phenomenon, is timely for many reasons. First, the director of the original, Hwang Dong-hyuk, has recently achieved global fame via his Netflix show Squid Game (Ojingeo Geim, 2021), and audiences who had not previously watched his earlier films such as My Father (Mai Padeo, 2007), Silenced (a.k.a The Crucible, Dogani, 2011) and The Fortress (Namhan sanseong, 2017) are now discovering them.

So far, I have established that the text of the work I have called the Apocalypse of the Birds appears for the first time in our material record in fourteenthcentury Ethiopia. From there, we can imagine ourselves walking along a timeline backwards, looking for hints that a version of the work has come into existence. The material shape of the work we are looking for is something like the Animal Apocalypse we have attested in Gəʿəz; I have suggested above that the Apocalypse of the Birds most likely functioned as an addendum to the Vision of the Beasts, and did not circulate as a freestanding work. But we are looking in particular for references to the distinctive content and traditions of the Apocalypse of the Birds, since it is also possible to imagine the circulation of a version limited to the Vision of the Beasts, akin to what our Qumran manuscripts might have represented. This chapter will collate evidence from early readers of the Apocalypse of the Birds – Barnabas and the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs – to establish a terminus ante quem in the second century ce.

Moving backward from the fourteenth-century, we can begin with our next available evidence: a tenth-century Byzantine codex featuring not only an extract from the Vision of the Beasts, but also a summary of the work from which the extract was drawn that seems to include the Apocalypse of the Birds. This document, the Codex Vaticanus Graecus 1809, features an extract from 1 En 89.42–9 in the margins of excerpts from the letters of Maximus the Confessor. The quoted section of the Vision of the Beasts tells the tale of David's conflict with the Ammonites, Amalekites, and Philistines.

When I awoke in the morning, I had a queer dread of having done something, I knew not what. “Surely I was far left to myself,” said I, “to be so overcome by wine, as to treat a decent, elderly gentlewoman with so little ceremony.” I was ready to sink through the floor.

“It was in fun: fun! a man of my years and prudence to do what my son would not have ventured; and if she makes a complaint? Shall I be carried before the magistrates? Who could have thought such would ever have happened to me? I, a man of the correctest of conduct—a moral neighbour, charitable, and all that.”—I was in despair.

“She spoke of marriage as the only compensation she would accept. Marriage, alas!—I had a foreboding she would somehow ensnare me; she has done it, and I am for life a miserable man. Mrs. Bell, the minister's wife, had bodily beauty; but mine—my bride's an atomy from the tomb.

“She may, however, cool, and be content with a lesser solacium, money—cannot I try her with money? any thing but marriage. A matter of money let it be, but no matrimony. No, no, of two evils let me choose the least: I would give half my fortune to squabash this joke. Oh! it is a black joke.

“Cannot I run away, abscond? the sun is but newly risen, a postchaise may soon be got ready. But whither can I fly? the shame will remain, or follow.

“Shame? there was no great shame in it, after all; it was just an after-dinner prank, a thing to be laughed at. I wonder what makes me so agitated; I must treat it lightly; I had a little wine in my head for the first time, and Miss Beeny had placed herself in a comical recumbency; I but just kittled her knee. It's a thing every body will laugh at.

“Laugh at!—but will they, will they laugh? will they not rather blazon the outrage, and deem it due to the offended laws?—Oh, impossible.”

These lines, which so cleverly and concisely summarise D’Annunzio's varying and ambiguous achievements, were written in July 1942 by the poet, theatre practitioner and convinced Communist Bertolt Brecht – an author one would struggle to identify as a D’Annunzio admirer. Indeed, Brecht himself was the literary hero and friend of none other than Walter Benjamin, who in his essay on ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility’ (1935/6), named D’Annunzio as one of the primary instances of the ‘aestheticizing of politics’ practised by Fascism, grouping him with Marinetti and Hitler. Despite their evident ideological differences, Brecht showed surprising respect for D’Annunzio's work, defining his 1923 Maritime Workers Union Charter, the Patto marinaro that regulated the rights of seafarers following the libertarian principles of Fiume's ‘Carta del Carnaro’, as an ‘interesting document’. He also extended D’Annunzio a certain ‘feudal dignity’. And while there is no evidence that he even knew Italian, Brecht's fascination with D’Annunzio's poetry was such that he went as far as translating into German, probably using another German version or a French intermediary translation, one of D’Annunzio's most iconic poems, ‘La pioggia nel pineto’ – a work that can certainly be grouped amongst the aestheticising literary feats of the Italian fin-de-siècle. D’Annunzio's ‘vanity’, ‘taste’ and ‘lifestyle’ all align, in Brecht's reading, with the unforgettable verse that makes this ‘charlatan’ a figure of interest and importance.

After the ague-fit had gone off, I obtained some refreshing sleep, and awoke in the morning with no other consciousness of malady than a slight degree of languor: it amounted to nothing more. In the course of the day my dear child was buried, and we spent the afternoon in worship and resignation. On Monday we again rose early to our labour, and our work proceeded cheerily; but for upwards of a fortnight I had a return every third day of the nauseous and depressing ague, which so impaired my strength, that I began to lose my relish of life. My arms, which were never strong, became almost powerless, and I often wept from weakness.

At last our new house was finished; less completely so than the first temple, but still it was a place of refuge, it was home; and, as soon as we were fairly in possession, we cast about us, and began to make it so indeed. My health, about the same time, improved, so that towards the end of October, when the public works of the settlement were suspended for the season, we were in some condition to encounter the winter without dread.

The long nights and the wet weather, in which no man could work, set me to reflect on the melancholy want we were in of a schoolmaster. I had thought of it often before, but it pressed stronger and stronger for consideration, when I saw my two industrious sons hanging listlessly on the wet days over the fire, and the evenings wasted in unprofitable conversations. Sometimes I thought of addressing the agent with a petition on the subject, signed by the generality of the inhabitants, begging his mediation with the speculators or some help to pay one; at others, I proposed to call a public meeting, to see what could be done among ourselves in the way of subscription.

Folk horror – seemingly committed to the small-scale, the insular, the local and the pre-industrial – is, in fact, a product of globalisation, and manifestation of the globalgothic. The genre is part of a wider ‘hauntological’ turn in popular culture (see Fischer 2017) which excavates the pop cultural materials of the past, turning them to present needs. Folk horror strategically rereads the twentieth-century gothic to produce an imaginary paganism and a subjunctive national history as a response to the discontents of an increasingly globalised cultural economy. Folk horror’s canon is freshly assembled, and while it has been framed as a natural, pre-existing category, this chapter will argue that it is a contemporary imaginative resource which reassures its audiences as much as it horrifies. For Fred Botting and Justin D. Edwards, globalisation ‘engenders a context of unbelonging through the rupture of communities’ and ‘registers the anxieties that arise from national, social and subjective dissolution, including an endless mediacritical interrogation of identities, genders, races and classes’ (Botting and Edwards 2013, 23). Folk horror is not that interrogation; if anything, it provides relief from it, reinstituting a sense of stability and even belonging. While Botting and Edwards argue that globalgothic shreds ‘the nostalgic fantasy of a return to an untainted local culture’ (Botting and Edwards 2013, 18), folk horror responds to globalisation by imagining exactly this return.

This chapter sketches the origins and shape of folk horror as a popular category, describing its concern with the local, and the imaginative uses it finds for both folk and paganism. While the genre is beginning to take on international dimensions, the chapter is not an attempt to describe folk horror as a phenomenon that appears naturally at various sites across the globe, where the folkloric and the macabre happen to meet. The genre seems to suggest engagement with a variety of global histories and cultures, yet present discourse on folk horror generally avoids African and Asian texts, downplays various indigenous traditions, and overwhelmingly focuses on Anglo and European folklores. This chapter argues that folk horror’s origins lie not in folklore per se, but in more recent British culture. The genre – especially in key texts like The Wicker Man (1973) – is concerned with developing a sense of tradition which allows audiences to imagine fantastical heritages and national or regional identities which disaffiliate from contemporary versions of these categories.

In the decade since Glennis Byron published her edited volume Globalgothic (2013), to date the most influential account of gothic fiction in the international context, the sense of ‘the global’ has shifted. For Byron, and the contributors to her collection, the ‘global’ was largely synonymous with ‘globalisation’, and specifically with ‘globalisation’ as a late-twentieth-century phenomenon. Hence, ‘globalgothic’ was theorised in respect to what, at this time, was taken to be the emergence of a ‘new world order’ (Byron 2013, 3), one that superseded and complicated a pre-existing set of global relations configured under the auspices of Western imperialism. In place of older critical discourses describing predatory transnational vectors of exploitation and domination, there appeared a different theoretical vocabulary, which focused on such issues as the transnational mobility of people and commodities; intertwining advancements in technology, media and global communication; the rise of immaterial work and speculative finance capital; and newly conspicuous forms of cultural hybridity and multidirectional exchange. Shaped by these ideas, globalgothic came to be understood as the product of a novel and multipolar geopolitical landscape, both reflecting new pluralities and intersections of cultural voices, and at the same time articulating anxieties that emerged from the disturbance of established identities and traditions. Above all, globalgothic appeared in the context of a world characterised, as Byron put it, by ‘flows’ (3) – flows of people, money, goods and cultures – the fluidity and complexity of which seemed to nullify now apparently too simplistic accounts of imperial capitalist expansion.

It may already be clear from this brief synopsis that the vision of the world underpinning globalgothic no longer maps seamlessly on to the global situation. At the time of writing this, just over two years into the Covid-19 pandemic and amid spiralling transformations to the Earth's biosphere, the trenchancy of ‘old’ lines of power is starkly and grimly evident. Covid and climate change need, importantly, to be understood as two linked dimensions of the same planetary shifts, since as Andreas Malm has pointed out, the instance of ‘zoonotic spillover’ (2020, chap. 2) out of which the novel coronavirus emerged is itself the effect of commercial deforestation across Southeast Asia, which – driving biodiversity loss and destroying habitats – channels novel pathogens directly towards humans as the most prominent remaining species.

Japanese literature followed a distinctive path of development where ‘the new did not replace the old, but was added to it’. In the late nineteenth century, after the Meiji Restoration in 1868, Japan was opened to the ‘world’ after 200 years of isolationist foreign policy and began to integrate into what was termed ‘modern civilisation’. The literature of the West had a great influence on Japanese writers in this process: Japanese intellectuals set out to create a literature that would develop modern ideas and shape a new image of themselves.

This chapter explores how Gabriele D’Annunzio's works introduced new images of ‘modern’ men and women into Japanese literature at that time: a femme fatale who reigned over men, and a new male figure with ‘keen senses’ who replaced the old ideal of the Japanese man. D’Annunzio's works thus functioned as a catalyst for the transformation of the values of Japanese youth.

The first part of the chapter explores D’Annunzio's reception in fin-de-siècle Japan. The first work to introduce the image of the femme fatale in Japan was Bin Ueda's (1874–1916) abridged translation of Trionfo della morte; and intellectuals of the time saw the influence of his novels in the 1905 attempted double suicide of Sōhei Morita (1881–1949) and Haruko Hiratsuka (1886–1971), as well as in Morita's novel based on the incident, Baien (Sooty Smoke, 1909). The second section introduces a comparison between D’Annunzio's works and Morita's Sooty Smoke, demonstrating the extent to which D’Annunzio influenced the new qualities of men and women in Japanese literature. The last section examines how Sōseki Natsume (1867–1916), a prominent writer inspired to read D’Annunzio by Morita's scandal, interpreted them to construct an image of a ‘new man’ with acute sensibilities. This chapter thus explores a complex network of influences across various literary works to argue that the fin-de-siècle image of modern people emerged in Japanese literature precisely under the influence of D’Annunzio.

Trionfo della morte as a Starting Point

Gabriele D’Annunzio was introduced to the Japanese literary world at the end of the nineteenth century through French magazines. French translations began appearing in Le temps, Revue de Paris and Revue des deux mondes from 1893.

As I did not propose to enter upon business until I had looked a little about me—seen what had been doing and what was to be done—I happened to be in a humour to meet the bailie in his own way when he came next morning.

“Ye’el be weel pleased, Mr. Todd,” said he, “to see what a grand prospering place this is. It's coining money for ye when ye sleep: ye have nothing to do but to gallant away to London town, and court blithe young widows, and come home and find thousands of dollars, begetting swarms of others, in the bank for you. But although it's no’ my fortune to lead captive captivity, I have yet not been without a share of luck—that I must acknowledge with thankfulness—but I stand in need of a hand with a weighty purse, like yours, to bring it to a bearing.”

“Then it's true,” cried I, a good deal amazed to hear this, “that you have discovered a silver mine in the wood?”

“What would ye think,” replied he, with a satisfied smile, “if it were a gold one? But whether mines be of silver or of gold, money is wanted to work them; and after all, they are precarious commodities, as some folks in London begin to find, to their impoverishment. No, Mr. Todd; to speak without delusion, what I have found is better than a mine. Silver and gold have I none, but I have much better.”

The bailie alarmed me a little by this, and I placed myself instantly on my guard, dreading he was at his hooky-crookies again. However, he continued, allowing for his oddity, seemingly to speak to the purpose.

“You know this is an unknown country; and therefore, as we are as ignorant of the treasures in the bowels of the earth as of the riches in the bottom of the sea, it requires no great skill to make a discovery by an accident. We have all heard of a cock that found a precious stone on a midden; well, I’m a cock, and just with as little sagacity as any other cock, maybe I have found a precious stone too?”

Interference in the exhibition and distribution of radically unconventional, non-commercial, or “problematic” artworks can be seen to be precipitated more explicitly by economic forces upon which the individual artist has little control. These forces include not only the practical considerations of supply and demand (inherent in any conception of a self-regulating market) but also, frequently, the systems of classification and ratings that have come to replace regulative vertical censorship of film in Western liberal democracies. Classification practices do not merely compound the effects of supply and demand, they also interact with and shape these effects in significant ways, namely by generating demand for content that is intended for as large a consumer base as possible.

What exacerbates the effects of classification processes is the increased privatization (more specifically corporatization and oligopolistic patterns) of the distribution channels by which consumers can potentially access artworks. As John Keane writes:

A particularly telling example of market censorship comes from the American music industry, which in the mid-1990s instituted “Parental Advisory” labels for albums containing what were goadingly referred to as “explicit” lyrics. Like contemporary film ratings, these labels were designed to inform consumers (particularly parents) as to the “severity” of the lyrical content of albums, thereby directing adults and children away from “inappropriate” products and toward others, for which they could be presumed to form a “suitable” audience. However, when, in keeping with the company's public image of family-friendliness Wal-Mart categorically refused to carry albums bearing the provocative “Parental Advisory” label, the result was de-facto censorship, in that the music was simply unavailable for purchase in many areas, particularly more rural communities where Wal-Mart had forced the closure of local record retailers unable to compete with the multinational company.

In the midst of all the bustle and to-do which so many things occasioned, as the old man and I were one evening sitting cheerfully on the bench at the door, conversing of what was to be done, that affliction, Mr. Waft, came with his peering eyes, and sat down unbidden beside us.

“Weel, gentlemen,” said he, “I have been long wishing to fall in with you when you had half an hour to spare for conversation; but ye are always so constantly busy, making money, as I hear, that I begin to doubt if it's ordained ever to be, or come to pass. No’ that there's any thing particular pressing in what I had to say, farther than to indulge a wee wishee I have in the corner of my bosom, to know the name ye intend to bestow on that capital city, every body says ye are going to build. I have been thinking that Hoskinsville would be pretty and poetical; but this afternoon Mr. Herbert, the schoolmaster, has put a new one into my head—don't you think Todopolis would be prime?”

I could discern by the way in which Mr. Hoskins bit his lip, though his visage was unchanged, that he was in high dudgeon at this impudence: for myself, I was frying.

“You never were farther astray in your whole life, Mr. Waft,” said I; “what could lead you to think we were two such fools as to call cities after our own names?—no, no, we’re of sober imaginings. It's to be called Nineveh.”

There never had been such a thought between us; I just said so, I cannot tell wherefore, to set the conjectures of the meddling bodie on another tack; but scarcely had I uttered the word, when Mr. Hoskins, taking the cigar he was smoking from his mouth, and striking off the ashes on the edge of the bench, said,—

“Nineveh! well, I guess, that might be pretty partikler popular too;—yes! it might serve—no bad settler's trap would be ‘at ‘ere Neenivye; but I was a calculating that Samary would do better, for there ain't yet no Samary in all York state.”

About daybreak it began to rain, and continued to pour with increasing violence all the morning; no one thought of stirring abroad who could keep within shelter. My boys and I had for task only to keep the fire at the door of the shanty brisk and blazing, and to notice that the pools, which began to form around us, did not become too large; for sometimes, besides the accumulation of the rain, little streams would suddenly break out, and rushing towards us, would have extinguished our fire, had we not been vigilant.

The site I had chosen for the shanty was near to a little brook, on the top of the main river's bank. In fine weather, no situation could be more beautiful; the brook was clear as crystal, and fell in a small cascade into the river, which, broad and deep, ran beneath the bank with a swift but smooth current.

The forest up the river had not been explored above a mile or two: all beyond was the unknown wilderness. Some vague rumours of small lakes and beaver dams were circulated in the village, but no importance was attached to the information: save but for the occasional little torrents, with which the rain sometimes hastily threatened to extinguish our fires, we had no cause to dread inundation.

The rain still continued to fall incessantly: the pools it formed in the hollows of the ground began, towards noon, to overflow their banks, and to become united. By and by something like a slight current was observed passing from one to another; but thinking only of preserving our fire, we no farther noticed this, than by occasionally running out of the shanty into the shower, and scraping a channel to let the water run off into the brook or the river.

It was hoped that about noon the rain would slacken; but in this we were disappointed. It continued to increase, and the ground began to be so flooded, while the brook swelled to a river, that we thought it might become necessary to shift our tent to a higher part of the bank.

Racism is a world-defining byproduct of capitalism. It is the scientistic justification for the violent accretion of the Earth's abundant natural resources in the coffers of European nations and white North Americans after centuries of their enslavement of Black Africans and after their imperial conquest and colonial oppression of Africa, Asia and the Americas, that is, the 80% of the world that is non-white. Racism is not merely a stratifying ideology that is based on the presumption of white supremacy, the reverse claim of Black inferiority, and the relative inferiority/superiority of other people of colour. It did not originate in the realm of poorly framed, impious, prejudicial, hierarchical thoughts but in the concrete motives of European imperialism and the failed intention to establish, in perpetuity, chattel slavery as its means of wealth production.

Racial violence characterised the founding of North America and the colonisers’ structuring of the social order, labour force and police powers to advantage themselves; therefore, race, socioeconomic class and the nature of the justice system are linked in the lived experiences of Black, Indigenous and citizens of colour. In the USA, racist policies drive discriminatory practices in all its institutions of socialisation: the economy, government, education, religion and family, where the quirks of colourism allot each member metrics of worth based on degrees of brownness. Conscious and unconscious racism, especially the inclination to preserve its privileges (and, for some, the determination to defeat it), remains at the epistemological centre of all social relations in the postmodern era.

Racism has been sustained by the European colonisers wresting control of religious ideas, discourses and imagery from the peoples of colour who produced both the principles and principals of many of the world's religions and by religious supremacy accorded to white, Western versions of Christianity.

Mishima Yukio (1925–1970) was one of the most vocal and controversial literati of post-Second World War Japan. Notwithstanding the five decades of diachronic gap between the lives of D’Annunzio and Mishima, the personality and aesthetic credos of the Japanese writer attest to undeniable synergies with his Italian Modernist predecessor, who was the paragon of fin-de-siècle Decadence and a zealous patriot for his home nation. Parallel socio-political conditions in Italy and Japan – countries that achieved their respective unifications in the 1860s and only at this time began to pave the roads to modern nationhood – surely fuelled the Japanese empathy for the Italian poet, but Mishima's admiration for D’Annunzio exceeded a simple matter of artistic emulation. For nearly three decades, Mishima tacitly restaged D’Annunzio's life through writing, public image and patriotic resolution, even though the historical gap between them made his attempt anachronistic. In order to analyse the untimely transcultural impact of D’Annunzio on Mishima, this chapter builds on the concept of ‘transmesis’, which I borrow from Thomas O. Beebee, a mode of translation that crosses diachronic, spatial and cultural gaps by means of imitation. While the notion of ‘mimesis’ involves mimicry, identification and verisimilitude, transmesis accommodates extra-linguistic dimensions of translation that go beyond a simple linguistic equation, encompassing cultural, historical and sociopolitical negotiations. I venture to suggest that Mishima's life and persona embody a translated Japanese rendition of D’Annunzio, which was made possible by virtue of various trans-mimetic attempts. The Japanese writer's act of transmesis shaped itself through literary adaptation, conversion, imitation, pastiche and the theatrical display of all these elements in his writing and actual life. Concretely, the following discussion focuses on three aspects of transmesis: Mishima's Modernist Aesthetic sensibility; his exaltation of the male body inspired by D’Annunzio's Martyre de St Sebastien; and, finally, his re-actualisation of D’Annunzio's public persona as patriotic poet and militant man.

D’Annunzio and the Japanese reception

Socio-political parallels between modern Italy and Japan played a key role in the Japanese reception of D’Annunzio. Both countries underwent a radical reformation to build a modern national polity and experienced transitions from a feudalistic ancien regime in the mid- through late-nineteenth century.

Stephen Chow's 2016 3D-fantasy extravaganza The Mermaid (Meirenyu) has reaffirmed the fact that Mainland Chinese-Hong Kong co-productions can continue to generate the kind of box-office largesse investors have been targeting. Outstripping director Raman Hui's mega-hit Monster Hunt (Zhuoyao ji, 2015), Chow's film crossed the US$419 million mark for Chinese ticket sales by 21 February 2016, two weeks after its Chinese New Year release date (Ehrlich 2016). The Internet Movie Database records its current global receipt at a staggering $553,810,228. If the accuracy of the numbers is anything to go by, the film is obviously doing right by Chinese audiences, since only one fifth of the box-office earnings seems to reflect international sales. However, it is probably not inaccurate to surmise that, like any major motion picture enterprise of this scale, The Mermaid must have had global aspirations, especially since Chow has chosen to rework a transnational fantasy subgenre, the mermaid film, which already occupies a prominent place in Hollywood history. One could potentially argue, as critics and scholars have done, that Chow's remake is, in part, a contemporary reimagining of the romantic comedy Splash (Ron Howard, 1983) and Disney's animated fantasy The Little Mermaid (Ron Clements and John Musker, 1989). This postulation raises the question as to why the film's international theatrical run was less successful than its outsized Chinese reception. My brief attempt at answers, here in this chapter's introduction, is unscientific and speculative at best, but it does gesture toward an interpretive experiment on how to read this uneven reception of The Mermaid, which I see as an entertainingly quirky remake of aesthetic, intellectual and political significance.

Critical reviews of the film in mostly US newspapers and popular magazines may not be the perfect barometers of public sentiment, but they collectively provide a functional index of possible reasons for the film's uphill attempts at audience appeal in certain global markets, especially those in the West. While the US-based critics I have read were generally positive in their reception, it is how they express their appreciation that is symptomatic of the challenges at hand. First, a couple of reviewers lament the botching of the film's release in the US market, placing the onus on the Sony Corporation for not ‘expect[ing] it to interest many people, outside of Chinese or Chinese-American film fans’ (Abrams 2016).