Japan’s Takashi Miike, whose new film “Gozu” plays at the Oak Street Cinema this week, has been the most prolific innovator in world cinema for several years now, averaging four to seven films a year and working in multiple styles with relative ease and consistent good humor. In his native country, Miike seems to be regarded as an eccentric craftsman of genre entertainment (best exemplified by the “Dead or Alive” trilogy, 1999-2002). Given his filmography this seems a fair assessment: ost of his films continue to be violent yakuza stories, many of them released directly to video. (This isn’t as shameful a fate as it is for American movies; video releases, or V-cinema, constitute a broad subgenre in Japan, comparable in certain ways to low-budget film noir of the ’40s and ’50s.)

In the West, Miike frequently gets pegged as a shock artist, a filmmaker who merits our prurient interest more than our legitimate respect. This is clearly a result of only his most outrageous films receiving major attention in these parts of the world. Indeed, when the Walker Art Center screened a 4 Miike films last year, it promoted the series as sort of high-class midnight movies—a gesture that prompted the pigeonholing of Miike in the local press.

Such measures should be regarded as little more than publicity, and needless to say, columns that simply list a film’s outrages do not make for adequate criticism. (Is content the only criterion we use in judging the arts?) It’s true that his “Visitor Q” is one of the most shocking films I’ve seen, but it should also be noted that Miike is not the John Waters who made “Pink Flamingos.” The hardest-working contemporary filmmaker, Miike grounds even atrocities in model craftsmanship, which only makes his films harder to shake off. Hence, the necrophilia, mass-murder and heroin use that comprise the climax of “Visitor Q” don’t stop the film dead in its tracks as do the shocking images in early Waters. There are principles of storytelling, performance and montage to be challenged, not merely taboos.

As Richard Linklater has noted of the great German director R.W. Fassbinder, a filmmaker this restless will take us years to catch up with. This isn’t just a matter of separating good films from bad, but determining what ideas are most pertinent in his work, which themes and images are most affecting. At present, Miike doesn’t offer much help in this pursuit: he prefers to carry himself in interviews as an innocent and a showman, referring to the first, particularly misanthropic “Dead or Alive” (in which gags concerning Chihuahua-bestiality porn and hookers wading in shit create the logical preface for a gangster and a cop blowing up the world) as a “good, healthy yakuza film.” He has also asked more than one interviewer why anyone would ever want to walk out on a movie.

I imagine the humor of Miike’s films—a combination of malice and free-associative curiosity—makes more sense to Japanese audiences than Americans, whose expectations that cinema reflect acceptable moral standards seem to stem less from a sophistication regarding film realism than from the Puritanical roots that continue to tug at the culture. Unlike most Hollywood entertainment (both high- and low-brow), the narratives of Japanese genre films don’t often concern themselves with redemption. While the protagonist of an American action movie or sex comedy will have a chance to prove himself heroic now matter how awful his behavior, the anti-heroes of Miike’s “Ichi the Killer” can remain as emotionally stunted in the last scene as in the first, which only enhances the film’s masochist allegory.

Miike’s willingness to carry a story’s implications to their most devastating conclusions proves more than his perversity; it reveals a deep commitment to his art. The closest American equivalent might be the dark fantasies in William Burroughs’ fiction—early proof that perversity in popular art, when depicted with enough honesty and wit, can cease to reflect real behavior and occupy a realm belonging solely to the imagination. When, in “Fudoh: The New Generation,” a teenage assassin who kills her victims by shooting darts from her vagina reveals herself to be a hermaphrodite, the development feels in keeping with the movie’s logic. It’s in part a result of Miike playing the revelation without irony, using longer static shots respectful of both his actors and spatial relationships. The ensuing scene, like much of his work, teeters between transgressive drama and deadpan comedy – a description many have used to describe Fassbinder’s films.

Perhaps Fassbinder, for all his concern with defying generic and social conventions, isn’t the best frame of reference for approaching Miike. Japanese professor Sarah Pradt has suggested we can also consider him the artistic grandson of Yasujiro Ozu, the undisputed master of Japanese film. The professional lineage, at least, makes perfect sense – Miike started out as a production assistant to Shohei Imamura, who in turn began as Ozu’s P.A – but the underlying similarities are more revealing. As in Ozu’s late work, the connecting thread through Miike’s filmography (or at least the 10 or so that I’ve seen, so roughly 15%) is a deep understanding of stasis. His patient long-takes evoke Ozu’s bemusement with human interaction; this can also be said, surprisingly, of his disorienting montages (which often appear at the beginnings of his films as a sort of immersion device). For Miike every composition, no matter how long it is held, presents a curiosity to be pursued.

Another of Sarah’s observations – in response to a video interview on the “Audition” DVD – is relevant here: “It looks like he’s on meth!” The surfeit of wild ideas in Miike’s canon inspires these kinds of remarks, but explication is also in order. Under the influence of drugs, many will note, euphoria is brief, albeit frequent. There’s always something to grab your attention for a spell, demand that you look at it differently. It’s not surprising, then, that Miike alternates so readily between Ozu-like contemplation and action-movie jumpiness (or, for that matter, between the dictates of genre and his own id). His is a cinema of whimsy in the most literal sense of the word, and from his impulsive choices ultimately emerges the playfulness the word typically connotes. Here’s hoping “Gozu” is as unforgettable as the other half-dozen movies Takashi Miike has made in the past year.

“Gozu” showing at Oak Street Cinema, 309 Oak Street S.E. Mpls. 612-331-3134. Friday, Sept. 24 through Thursday, Sept. 30. 7:00, 9:30 nightly; Fri and Sat at midnight also; Sat and Sun at 4:30.

Twelve Miike films are available at Box Office Video, 497 Selby Ave, 3 blocks east of Selby and Dale. 651-224-1687.