The mainland Chinese director Jia Zhangke’s third film, Unknown Pleasures, has found an American distributor. This piece of news is, in its way, good news. Jia is arguably the most talented member of the group of directors known as the Sixth Generation.

“Roads…can no longer be identified solely with movement from one place to another.

This does in fact seem like the sort of advice that a vigilant agent or editor, concerned that Ishiguro’s stodgy image was becoming a liability, might issue. But there is a delicious Ishigurian irony to the possibility that the author concluded this all on his own, and decided that the answer lay in proactive plotting-a scenario all the more believable given what a disastrous piece of advice this appears to have been.

The Golden-Globe-winning, Oscar-contending Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon is all about a rigid, roughly linear object. It is long—two feet, nine inches long, to be exact. Fairly impressive by itself, it “needs skillful manipulation,” we are told, to really come into its own.