Page 158 - Nightmare Japan Contemporary Japanese Horror Cinema

Spiraling into Apocalypse 145

subordinate one’s individual will to a larger, apparently inclusive social
or cultural phenomenon – a behaviour evidenced by not only cult
members, but by otaku, hikikomori (defined below), and avid fans of pop
bands – quickly becomes a target for Sono’s increasingly expansive
social analysis.
In Suicide Circle, the character calling herself ‘The Bat’ most
explicitly conforms to popular culture stereotypes surrounding
hikikomori, an increasingly prevalent social configuration in
contemporary Japan. ‘Translated literally’, Mitsuko Kakiuchi tells us, ‘as
“those who retreat,” hikikomori are the frighteningly logical extension of
“otaku,” the buzzword for Japanese teens from last decade…
hikikomori…retreat from society into complete nothingness, holing
themselves up in their bedrooms at their parents’ homes and doing
anything to fill the hours’ (Kakiuchi 2005: para 2). Sono’s depiction of
The Bat adheres quite closely to Kakiuchi’s description; before her
abduction by the sadistic self-promoter, Genesis, and his glam rock
minions, we see The Bat sequestered in her bedroom, a cramped, refuse-
cluttered space lit only by the muted glows emanating from a computer
monitor and a murky fish tank. Preferring the fluid anonymity of the
internet to interpersonal contact within the solid confines of the physical
world, The Bat conducts her own on-line quest for the source of the mass
suicides not so much out of an altruistic desire to assist the authorities as
out of a yearning to entertain herself by demonstrating, if only to the
handful of people with whom she barely communicates, the extent of her
computer-assisted research skills.
Indeed, hikikomori’s translation as ‘those who retreat’ is
particularly applicable to Sono’s representation of The Bat and her
primary companion, a fellow hikikomori who sits silently by The Bat’s
side. Additionally, in a brief but important sequence revealing the extent
of The Bat’s withdrawal from the world, Sono presents his audience with
a heart-breaking full shot of the young woman’s dishevelled father
dressed in a badly wrinkled business suit and seated behind a broken
table. A brief but powerful moment suggestive of the economic
recession’s devastating impact upon the Japanese family, the father
pleads before his technophile offspring, calling her by her given name: