Page 139 - Nightmare Japan Contemporary Japanese Horror Cinema

126 Nightmare Japan

supplemented by deadly razors that spring forth from the heels of his
boots. A killing machine extraordinaire, Ichi is a sadist who, manipulated
by an engine fuelled with largely erroneous memories, clearly receives
ample gratification by not only personally applying undesired pain upon
others, but also – as his title-inducing orgasm illustrates – voyeuristically
and enthusiastically observing acts of extreme violence and torture.
Secondly, the opening sequence immerses viewers within a world in
which the implementation of physical and psychological violence proves
a crucial motivator in characters’ social and sexual lives. This distribution
of power becomes ever more apparent as the film progresses and we are
introduced to Kakihara, an up-and-coming yakuza whose savage quest for
someone to fill the void left by the absence of his former boss/dominator,
Anjo, drives him not only to torture and brutalise others, but to seek out a
confrontation with Ichi – an encounter that, as we shall soon see, is
doomed to frustrate his expectations from the very start. Lastly, Ichi the
Killer’s opening sequence prefigures Miike’s neoconservative
deployment of violent images, an approach to filmmaking that conjoins
the masturbatory playfulness of ‘over-the-top’ splatter film aesthetics
with a serious consideration of sadism’s all-too-real consequences.
In his book, Agitator: The Cinema of Takashi Miike, Tom Mes
advances a compelling, often brilliant reading of this controversial and
frequently censored fusion of two of Japanese cinema’s enduring genres:
the gangster film (yakuza eiga) and the horror film. Mes astutely
recognises Ichi’s (tor)mentor, Jijii, as ‘the film’s biggest sadist’ (2003:
234). Jijii is, according to Mes, a ‘manipulator…who pulls the strings and
determines the flow of the other characters’ lives either by proxy (through
Ichi) or occasionally in person’ (234). This point is crucial, for as the
sadist behind Ichi’s sadism, Jijii annihilates Ichi’s initial persona
(whatever that may have been) and, in its place, posits a new identity. The
Ichi that Jijii constructs finds his primary motivation through false
memories of having been a victim of ijime (a practice grounded, as we
have seen, in the sadistic drive to impose one’s power over a weaker
individual), and of having been forced to witness the rape of a young
school girl, an act of violence by which he believes he was titillated.
Consequently, Jijii functions as a kind of Dr. Frankenstein whose