Page 156 - Nightmare Japan Contemporary Japanese Horror Cinema

Spiraling into Apocalypse 143

dressed in high school uniforms clasp hands at the edge of a subway
platform at Shinjuku Station and leap to their deaths beneath the wheels
of a Tokyo-bound express train, Sono immerses his audience in a
desperate search to discover the motivating force behind an epidemic of
mass suicide that threatens to spread beyond one’s wildest speculations,
consuming an ever increasing number of Japan’s youth (including its
emerging working and urban-professional classes) in an orgiastic feast of

Image 15: Promotion photo from Tsukamoto Shinya’s Tetsuo: The Iron Man
(© Tartan USA)

wilful self-obliteration. Over the subsequent ninety min-utes, the
audience follows the exploits of four central protagonists: Kuroda, a
seasoned detective and patriarch of a quietly dysfunctional family;
Shibusawa, Kuroda’s young assistant; ‘The Bat’, a young female otaku
who ‘resides’ both ‘virtually’ on the internet and ‘physically’ within the