Page 137 - Nightmare Japan Contemporary Japanese Horror Cinema
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124 Nightmare Japan
Furthermore, Kikuo’s clinical examination of his fellow humans,
achieved through a painstaking cataloguing of their corporeal minutia,
reduces the women over which he obsesses to disposable objects for
study. At the same time, however, Kikuo’s willful collapsing of the long
held cultural distinction between ‘inside’ and ‘outside’, ‘purity’ and
‘impurity’, explodes notions of absolute binary difference. In other
words, spectators must, like Kikuo, navigate their way through a world
comprised by flexible economies of ‘contamination’. Containing several
instances of ijime and ‘dove style violence’, All Night Long 3: Atrocities
offers a despairing perspective upon contemporary life. Matsumura’s
lengthy exploration of Kikuo’s unconventional lifestyle choices reveals
an understanding of ‘contamination’ as an avenue for exploring the
potentialities of one’s world without falling back upon ‘binary categories
like black-white, east-west, and uchi-soto’ (65).
Image 12: Dove style violence in Matsumura Katsuya’s All Night Long 3: Atrocities (©
Tokyo Shock)
