“Mitani’s most overtly sf piece, Galaxy Kaidō (2015; trans as Galaxy Turnpike) is more concerned with mundane matters. Set in the year 2265, in a dilapidated burger bar somewhere between Jupiter and Saturn, it allegorizes Earthbound issues of smalltown ennui and relationship dramedy on a galactic scale. Mitani himself conceived of the film as a setting derived from the beliefs of 1950s American sitcoms of what the future would look like… Mitani’s conception of the film’s inspirations was also structural: he imagined it as if it were a single episode in a long-running and episodically interchangeable situation comedy.”

Over at the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, my entry on the dramatist and film-maker Koki Mitani, takes my contributions over the 200,000-word mark.