Page 106 - Nightmare Japan Contemporary Japanese Horror Cinema

Ghosts of the Present 93

and narrative motifs often associated with Japanese cinema? By
acknowledging the hybridity informing Shimizu’s technical approach to
cinematic horror, including his manipulation of mise-en-scène, we gain
critical insight into a larger socio-cultural economy of fear predicated
upon anxieties over the illusory integrity of the Japanese social body. As
Marilyn Ivy notes, this imagined wholeness is fundamental to modern,
and pre-modern, perceptions of cultural and national identity. The
Japanese social body, for Ivy, is a hybrid social entity that frequnelty
denies the complex amalgamations that constitute it:

The hybrid realities of Japan today – of multiple border crossings and
transnational interchanges in the worlds of trade, aesthetics, and sciences – are
contained within dominant discourses on cultural purity and nondifference, and in
nostalgic appeals to premodernity: what makes the Japanese so different from
everybody else makes them identical to each other; what threatens the self-
sameness is often marked temporally as the intrusively modern, spacially as
foreign. Although those discourses are being altered by the effects of advanced
capitalism they have proved remarkably resilient as they haunt the possibilities of
a postnationalist consciousness in contemporary Japan (1995: 9)

Ivy’s overarching motif of ‘haunt’ing, both in the above quote and
throughout her book, Discourses of the Vanishing: Modernity, Phantasm,
Japan, is instructive in that it represents, and contributes to, a discourse of
a returning repressed. Moreover, whether that which is sublimated and/or
temporarily contained takes the form of a potentially nation-effacing
globalism, or the increasingly important role of women who ‘manage the
home (even when they labor outside)’ (Allison 2000: 174), horror cinema
marks the ideal forum for the metaphoric expression of concerns over an
indiscrete (or hybrid) national, social, or corporeal body.
The grainy opening montage of Shimizu Takashi’s Ju-on: The
Grudge reveals this latter concern over the shifting role of women in the
home, a location which serves as the epicenter of the onryou’s
unquenchable rage. Beginning with establishing shots of a seemingly
anonymous residential street, followed by low angle shots of a vine-clad

Clover, C. (1992) Men, Women, and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film.
Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press.