Page 109 - Nightmare Japan Contemporary Japanese Horror Cinema

96 Nightmare Japan

use) while ‘rewarding’ others (chastity, self-reliance, the willingness to
4
resort to violence when necessary), it remains possible also to view these
texts as engaging in ‘an unprecedented assault on all that Bourgeois
culture is supposed to cherish – like ideological apparatuses of the family
and the school’ (Modleski 1986: 158).
As with the US horror tradition that influenced Shimizu, it is
possible to interpret Ju-on:The Grudge as both conservative and
progressive; in this way, Shimizu’s film exposes a myriad of the socio-
cultural anxieties that permeate Japan’s increasingly hydrid, transitional
culture. At times, the film’s articulation of an apparent nostalgia for
disappearing ‘traditions’ in the face of an emerging ‘modern’ socio-
economic climate resonates with a conservative ideology that borders on
the reactionary. A somber, Ozu-like meditation on generational
differences and the collapse of the extended family finds expression in the
disquieting image of a neglected elderly woman sitting passively near her
own feces-soiled bedding, while in other scenes, incompetent social
workers and inept law enforcement officers suffer the demonic Kayako
and Toshio’s wrath. But Shimizu’s film also advances a critique of a
Japan still very much steeped in patriarchal conventions. While their
return to haunt the realm of the living evokes the ‘avenging spirit’ motif
familiar to viewers of Japanese horror cinema, Kayako and Toshio’s
ultimately uncontainable wrath suggests an irrepressible hostility towards
an abusive and antiquated ‘official culture, specifically…the norms and
values of patriarch[y]’ (Creed, 1995: 132). This latter gesture, as Barbara
Creed notes, recurs consistently in Western horror cinema, often
revealing a ‘symbolic’, anti-authoritarian hostility towards an inflexible
‘social body’ (146).
What sets Ju-on: The Grudge apart from other works of Japanese
horror cinema, and what might be most responsible for the film’s
international appeal, is the filmic and trans-cultural hybridity embodied
by the figures of Kayako and Toshio. Not quite ghosts in the strictest
sense of the onryou or kaidan tradition, but not quite conventional

4 For a more advanced and specific expansion of this premise, see Dika (1987) and Clover
(1992).