Page 136 - Nightmare Japan Contemporary Japanese Horror Cinema

A Murder of Doves 123

Japanese culture (like multiple cultures across the globe) as always-
already variably contaminated?
While searching through Nomura’s garbage, an intriguing
variation on his previously established theme of voyeurism, Kikuo
encounters a kindred spirit of sorts in the form of a grubby, self-
proclaimed ‘dusthunter’. While by no means a ‘friendship’ in the
conventional sense (Kikuo, after all, eventually murders the man without
exhibiting as much as a flicker of emotion), their bond nevertheless
represents Kikuo’s most profound human connection in this dark
examination of urban alienation. In a pair of brief soliloquies directed
towards our ‘hero’, the ‘dusthunter’ elaborates upon his theory behind his
unusual vocation. The first of these orations takes place during their
initial meeting; the latter homily occurs as the ‘dusthunter’ assists Kikuo
in burning Tane Kaoru’s dismembered corpse. Aware that Kikuo’s
‘experiments’ and ‘record-keeping’ included the meticulously archiving
of such ‘vital’ information as his prisoner’s ‘nipple circumference’, the
size of her ‘vulva lips’, and the length of her ‘clitoris foreskin’, the
‘dusthunter’ remarks:.

rubbish actually contains numerous amounts of information, address,
telephone number, if she’s single, hobbies, private life, period dates. These
dissatisfied women are chasing their dreams. The rubbish hunt is a wonderful
fantasy game […] [When] I was young…what others said was important. But
they were just living rubbish. People are just imperfect corpses. As long as
they live they will never reach perfection. The corpses are rubbish to burn.
Even when they are alive they’re still rubbish.

A careful examination of the ‘Dusthunter’’s discourses on the importance
of garbage – the abject detritus through which so much may be inferred
regarding an individual’s daily habits and personal preferences – raises
several compelling ideas regarding not only the previously broached
politics of contagion, but also the profound alienation that, ironically,
accompanies life within crowded urban cityscapes like Tokyo (or
London, New York, etc.). Perhaps most compelling of all, though, is the
‘dusthunter’’s evocation of a vague ‘dissatisfaction’, a response to a
transforming Japanese cultural edifice and the inevitable societal backlash
that reveals tensions surrounding shifts in conventional gender roles.