Page 102 - Nightmare Japan Contemporary Japanese Horror Cinema

Ghosts of the Present 89

corpse, its flesh slipping off her decaying skeleton in damp chunks as she
extends her arms and lurches forward, an infant’s wail emerging from her
darkened, gaping maw. Rather than running away, Yoshimi cradles
Mitsuko in her arms. In a powerful medium-long shot, the lift’s doors
close, separating Yoshimi and Mitsuko’s ghost from Ikuko’s screaming,
tear-streaked face.
As powerful as any scene in Nakata’s breakthrough international
sensation, Ringu, this sequence from Dark Water likewise deploys
elements of the Japanese kaidan to advance a consideration of shifting
socio-cultural codes. As alluded to earlier, Dark Water’s narrative
engages the impact of economic transitions on both conceptualisations of
the Japanese family as a social construct, and on the social support
systems (or significant dearth thereof) available for single parents in
general and single mothers in particular. It is also a sequence that raises
several important questions. Given not only the film’s focus on the multi-
generational ramifications of divorce and the decline of the traditional
Japanese extended family, how are viewers to understand Yoshimi’s
rejection of Ikuko in favor of Mitsuko? Additionally, what is the function
of the film’s mysterious epilogue which transports the film’s spectators
ten years forward in Yoshimi and Ikuko’s lives?
To address these queries, let us first consider in some detail the
film’s puzzling dénouement. Following the title card that alerts us to the
passage of time within the film’s narrative, we meet a sixteen year old
Ikuko dressed in her high school uniform and accompanied by two
friends. As they walk home from school together, they pass the
kindergarten Ikuko attended when she was six. A lone, seemingly
forgotten child sits on the ground awaiting the arrival of her parent, an
image that immediately recalls both Yoshimi and Ikuko’s loneliness and
reiterates – if only momentarily (for the lone child’s parent soon arrives)
– the film’s cyclical theme of abandonment. Though we quickly learn
from Ikuko’s own words that she can barely remember the brief time she
spent living with her mother while her parents were in the process of
obtaining a divorce, the child’s momentarily disheartened visage has a
profound emotional impact on Ikuko. She parts ways with her friends and
walks to the apartment building she shared with her mother ten years