Page 157 - Nightmare Japan Contemporary Japanese Horror Cinema

144 Nightmare Japan

confines of her dark, cluttered bedroom; and Mitsuko, a young woman
whose boyfriend leaps to his death from a window near the top of a tall
building. As the film progresses, various clues lead to assorted dead ends,
both literally and figuratively. At one point a gang of glam rockers calling
themselves the ‘Suicide Club’ and led by an androgynous figure named
Genesis kidnap ‘The Bat’ and hold her captive in an abandoned bowling
alley. Meanwhile, Detective Kuroda, having failed to protect his wife and
children from the deadly ‘fad’ sweeping the nation, responds to his own
family’s suicide by blowing his brains out. This tragic event strengthens
Shibusawa’s resolve to discover the truth behind the mass deaths and, in
the process, protect Mitsuko, whose own investigation leads her to
uncover a collective of prepubescent boys and girls seeking to transform
Japan. The collective’s unlikely but highly effective plan involves using
the all-girl pop band Desert (alternatively – and, as we shall soon
discover, importantly – spelled as ‘Dessert’ and ‘Dessret’) to incite
Desert’s many fans to either take their own lives or, if possible, reject an
ultimately destructive self-absorption by realising and nurturing their
individual ‘connection’ with other people.
The film’s shocking opening sequence in Shinjuku Station not
only introduces viewers to Sono’s ‘audacious’ and ‘richly rewarding’
(Crawford 2003: 306) filmmaking style, but also initiates a series of
events intended to recall one of the more tragic episodes in recent
Japanese history. Though the over-the-top images of bloody geysers
dousing horrified bystanders and thick rivers of gore flooding over the
subway station’s white tile floor alert viewers early on that the events to
follow will most certainly contain graphic material decidedly not for the
squeamish, the combination of mass death and mass transportation seem
designed to evoke inevitable comparisons with the deadly sarin nerve gas
attacks carried out in the Tokyo subway system on 20 March 1995 by
members of the Aum Shinrikyo cult. In Suicide Circle, despite the
rejection of initial speculations that the deaths may be in some way
connected via a larger organized faction (‘A suicide cult?’ the detective in
charge of the investigation asks with a dismissive laugh. ‘Ridiculous!’),
the multiple quests to discover the force behind the rapidly escalating
body count propel the plot forward. Additionally, the desire to