Page 134 - Nightmare Japan Contemporary Japanese Horror Cinema

A Murder of Doves 121

establishment where couples rent out rooms for sexual encounters that the
congestion of urban life, with its relative lack of privacy, frequently
disallows. From repeated shots of the video monitors through which
employees keep tabs on the hotel’s numerous visitors, to scenes of Kikuo
and a female supervisor peeping through the ventilation grates at
copulating couples, voyeurism becomes a recurrent motif in All Night
Long 3: Atrocities. Through his careful yet ultimately subversive
direction, Matsumura obscures the viewer’s perspective of the love
hotel’s copulating customers, a practice conforming to Eirin’s restrictions
on the depiction of genitalia, even as in a subsequent scene a co-worker’s
amateur mixed-media illustration of a woman’s pelvis re-contextualises
Kikuo’s collection of shed pubic hair.
It is in its obsession with ‘filth’ and ‘waste’, both organic and
inorganic, that Matsumura’s third film ultimately differs significantly
from the works that precede it. Kikuo’s obsession with abject secretions
and corporeal states, from menstrual blood and feces to rotting food and
cadavers, modifies the inside-outside (uchi-soto) binary repeatedly
underpinning the practice of ijime and ‘dove style violence’, as well as
wider, nationalist notions of a coherent and possibly inviolable Japanese
social body/identity. All Night Long 3: Atrocities exposes the copious
hybridities that, as the cultural critic Yoshiko Shimada notes, have always
existed, revealing the conceptualisation of a Japanese history and culture
grounded upon a single ‘uniform national identity’ (Shimada 2002: 190)
as illusory at best. In some instances, Matsumura accomplishes this goal
through the subtle yet recurrent implications of a continued US military
presence in Japan, from the aforementioned images and sounds of US jets
taking off and landing at a local airbase, to the appearance of an ‘Uncle
Sam’ poster gracing the walls of one of the love hotel’s corridors. Such
representations corroborate Marilyn Ivy’s contention that, despite
‘nostalgic appeals’ to an illusory pre-modern wholeness, ‘[t]he hybrid
realities of Japan today – of multiple border crossings and transnational
interchanges in the world of trade, aesthetics, [and] sciences’ (1995: 9)
remain a persistent and haunting reminder that the Japanese social body
has never been as coherent and impermeable as some would like to
imagine.