Page 148 - Nightmare Japan Contemporary Japanese Horror Cinema

Chapter Five:

Spiraling into Apocalypse:

Sono Shion’s Suicide Circle,
Higuchinsky’s Uzumaki, and

Kurosawa Kiyoshi’s Pulse

Apocalypse and Transcendence

Akin to the deluge of post-war daikaiju eiga (giant monster films) in their
depiction of contemporary civilisation under assault or in ruins, Sono
1
Shion’s Suicide Circle (Jisatsu saakuru, 2002 ), Higuchinsky’s Uzumaki
(1997), and Kurosawa Kiyoshi’s Pulse (Kaïro, 1997) engage a complex
history of annihilation and reconstruction. At the same time, these
ominous yet captivating cinematic visions contribute, both nationally and
internationally, to a recurrent correlation of the Japanese social body
with, in Joshua La Bare’s words, ‘not only apocalypse, but the fact of its
transcendence: the finite and, through it, the infinite’ (La Bare 2000: 43).
Consequently, the events that bring about the ‘end of the world as we
know it’ can be secular (ushered in largely through biological or
technological means), or religious (informed by any, or a combination, of

1 Although also released in the US and UK under the title, Suicide Club, I elect to use the initial
foreign release title, Suicide Circle, because it foregrounds the film’s theme of recursion.