Page 118 - Nightmare Japan Contemporary Japanese Horror Cinema

A Murder of Doves 105

the West, second perhaps only to his much discussed art-house guignol,
Audition (Ôdishon, 1999), this hyper-kinetic, genre-bending spectacle
offers its audience nothing less than a self-reflexive, ultra-violent yakuza
eiga / splatter film jacked up on methamphetamines. Throughout Ichi the
Killer, Miike locates ‘dove style’ violence as a component of a larger
paradigmatic cycle of violence and suffering permeating contemporary
Japanese culture. In his tale of Kakihara, the masochistic sadist, and Ichi,
the film’s eponymous crybaby vigilante, Miike presents a counter-
cinematic spectacle that overthrows a multiplicity of ontological regimes,
exposing, in the process, the masochistic dynamics informing not only the
basest symbiotic exchanges in everyday human interactions, but also the
very construction of identity itself.

Ijime and the Popular Imaginary:
Iwai Shunji’s All About Lily Chou-Chou

2
In Iwai Shunji’s award winning All About Lily Chou-Chou, a tall, slender
high school student named Hoshino Shusuke 3 befriends an introverted
fellow student named Hasumi Yuichi. A victim himself of bullying at his
former school, Hoshino returns from a short vacation in Okinawa –
during which he almost drowns – with a frightening resolve. His angst
aggravated by the collapse of his family’s textile enterprise, Hoshino soon
physically defeats and subsequently humiliates the class bully. In short
order, Hoshino becomes not only class president, but also a mini-tyrant
whose brutal reign includes acts of physical violence directed towards
assorted ‘peers’, the blackmailing/pimping of a pretty young girl named
Shiori, and the brutal, chaotically-lensed gang rape of Kuno Yoko, a
talented pianist whose incredible skill and beauty have elicited the ire of a
collection of bitter and vicious classmates. A stunning and complex work

2
In 2002, Iwai Shunji’s All About Lily Chou-Chou won the C.I.C.A.E. Award at the Berlin
International Film Festival, and both the Special Jury Award and the Golden Goblet (for best
music) at the Shanghai International Film Festival
3
In keeping with the name his ‘peers’ use throughout the film, I hereafter refer to Hoshino
Shusuke as simply ‘Hoshino’.