Page 140 - Nightmare Japan Contemporary Japanese Horror Cinema

A Murder of Doves 127

‘creation’, rather than abandoned and left to find his own way in the
world, operates almost exclusively according to his creator’s desires. In
this sense, Ichi, like the masochistic Kakihara who spends the duration of
the film searching for a person to dominate him as his former boss, Anjo,
once did, is a profoundly ‘rootless individual’ (228). Consistently unable
to achieve the personal fulfillment they desire, Ichi and Kakihara
contribute to a discourse of alienation recurrent throughout contemporary
Japanese horror cinema, especially those texts informed by ijime and
‘dove style violence’.
As Kakihara beholds the gruesome carnage Ichi leaves in his
wake, he envisions Ichi as both a threat to his role as a rising force within
the Japanese criminal community, and as a possibly ideal replacement for
Anjo. In other words, as a ruthless and seemingly remorseless
assassin/sadist who leaves a gory collage of disarticulated yakuza bodies
in his wake, Ichi appeals to Kakihara in that he seems the ideal figure to
satisfy Kakihara’s masochistic desires. This allure, however, is
misguided. As Gilles Deleuze notes in Coldness and Cruelty, sadism and
masochism derive from two very different impulses. ‘In every respect’,
Deleuze explains, ‘the sadistic “instructor” stands in contrast to the
masochistic “educator”’ because while ‘the sadist thinks in terms of
institutionalized possession, the masochist in terms of contracted alliance’
(1991: 20).

…a genuine sadist could never tolerate a masochistic victim…neither would
the masochist tolerate a truly sadistic torturer. He does of course require a
special “nature” in the…torturer, but he needs to mold this nature, to educate
and persuade it in accordance with his special project…Each subject in the
perversion (sic) only needs the “element” of the same perversion and not a
subject of the other perversion. Whenever the type of…torturer is observed in
the masochistic setting, it becomes obvious that she is neither a genuine sadist
nor a pseudosadist but something quite different. She does indeed belong
essentially to masochism, but without realizing it as a subject…The subject of
masochism needs a certain “essence” of masochism embodied in the nature of
a woman who renounces her own subjective masochism; he definitely has no
need of another subject, i.e., the sadistic subject. (41-2)

Like the bully, or the various social congregations – from high school
students to yakuza – that frequently comprise cinematic representations of