Page 149 - Nightmare Japan Contemporary Japanese Horror Cinema

136 Nightmare Japan

the multiple faiths practiced in Japan), or both. Following a brief survey
of the representation of catastrophic imagery in post-war Japanese horror
film, this chapter examines the genre’s continued application of
apocalyptic conceits as a variable response to a transforming Japanese
political and cultural landscape at the dawn of a new millennium.
In Suicide Circle, for example, Sono Shion offers viewers a
grisly and, at times, darkly humorous depiction of a contemporary Japan
plagued by a series of spectacular yet baffling mass suicides. Punctuated
by clips of music videos by a pre-pubescent pop group called Desert, an
all-girl bubblegum ‘band’ partially responsible for the epidemic of self-
slaughter, Suicide Circle presents a biting critique of a culture informed
by rampant consumerism, social alienation ironically enhanced by the
ubiquity of communications technologies, and gender politics
complicated by the simultaneously pervasive and perpetually transitory
culture of ‘cuteness’, or kawaisa. 2 Thus, like the film’s schizophrenic
collision of cinematic tropes and popular culture iconography, Suicide
Circle’s underlying social commentary far exceeds the parameters of a
reductionist logic founded upon simplistic notions of one-to-one
causality. Rather, Sono understands Japanese social and national identity
as imperilled by a plethora of cultural logics that, ‘like leaves which
soon…grow into a thick forest of darkness’ (Crawford 2003: 307),
saturate the country’s mass culture (minshu bunka). As Sono suggests in a
recent interview, an ultimately isolating and fundamentally ahistorical
conceptualisation of one’s national culture is, in itself, a ‘suicidal’ posture
(309).
Higuchinsky’s Uzumaki shares Sono Shion’s enthusiasm for
pursuing more experimental approaches to storytelling. However, the
social critique informing the apocalyptic events in Uzumaki’s elliptical
narrative has a profoundly different ideological ‘spin’. Based on Ito
Junji’s highly successful manga series about an isolated town ‘infected’
by recurring spiral patterns of a supernatural origin, Uzumaki borrows
from a plurality of secular and religious sources. Higuchinsky eschews

2 See Richie, D. (2003) The Image Factory: Fads and Fashions in Japan. London: Reaction
Books.