Page 135 - Nightmare Japan Contemporary Japanese Horror Cinema

122 Nightmare Japan

As is the case with many horror films, such larger, socio-national
reconsiderations emerge from more immediate, intimate, and visceral
portrayals of the human body as porous, leaky and violable. Hence, from
the film’s earliest moments, garbage in the form of potentially infectious
human waste (semen, blood and saliva), trash in perilously thin plastic
bags, and towering junkyard mountains punctuate the film’s visual
landscape. Likewise, for a national audience steeped within a history
influenced by symbolic cultural codes that equate ‘the inside with purity
and the outside with impurity’ (Ohnuki-Tierney 1987: 21-2), such images
possess the potential to be unnerving, if not overtly repellant. In
particular, several of Kikuo’s more obsessive behaviors, from his feasting
upon Nomura’s ‘edible’ refuse to his incessant sucking upon the mangled
bristles of her discarded toothbrush, function as perhaps two of the film’s
most explicit disruptions of the ‘inside’-‘outside’ distinction.
Comparably, Kikuo’s obsessive charting of Nomura’s menstrual cycle
through his collection of her discarded maxi-pads and tampons seems
specifically orchestrated to disgust and/or horrify spectators socialised to
understand biological and spatial violations of this kind as abhorrent or
horrific. This reaction certainly seems in keeping with Emiko Ohnuki-
Tierney’s sociological study, Illness and Culture in Contemporary Japan:
An Anthropological View, in which she explores ‘[t]he symbolic
equation…of the inside with purity and the outside with impurity’ (1987:
21). The ‘outside’, Ohnoki-Tierney argues, ‘is equated with dirt and
germs because that is where the dirt of others is seen to be most
concentrated’ (21-2). This notion of ‘germs’ and infection is not only
expansive, extending outward to incorporate ideologies informed by the
fear of an externalised cultural impurity (also known as ‘cultural germs’
or ‘people dirt’), but also turns inward, where ‘germ-sharing’ (like kissing
or inviting someone to eat from the same bowl) becomes not a threat but,
rather, ‘an index of social intimacy’ (29).
Given this rubric, then, to what extent does Matsumura’s third
All Night Long film’s increasing focus upon biological and social
contamination, as well as the cultural fears connected thereto, constitute a
reconsideration of the rigid, binary division between ‘inside’ and
‘outside’? In other words, how might the third All Night Long film locate