Page 159 - Nightmare Japan Contemporary Japanese Horror Cinema

146 Nightmare Japan

‘Kiyoko, your dad’s tired. Kiyoko, it’s not my fault, you know…’ In
disgust, The Bat slides her bedroom door closed and turns her attention
once again to the computer monitor’s glow. Convinced that she can
ascertain the mystery behind the mass deaths through a relentless
scouring of cyberspace’s remotest reaches, ‘The Bat’ so immerses herself
within the internet’s ‘online communities’ that her captivation with the
‘world wide web’ finally results in her all-too-real and all-too-perilous
physical captivity, a trauma that could have been avoided were she to
engage with the physical world from which she withdraws rather than
cyberspace’s ecstatic disembodiment.
In The Image Factory: Fads & Fashions in Japan, Donald
Richie explores the paradox inherent in a culture driven by continual
innovations in communications technology. Describing the allure of new
products and images in Japan, Richie states that such commodities
(shinhatsubai) allow for ‘a social distraction at the same time that [they]
promote a kind of social cohesion’ (Richie 2003: 11). Likewise, while
acknowledging that such practices are by no means exclusive to Japan,
Richie expands his exploration of the embrace of style over, or in place
of, substance by revealing the contradiction at the heart of such
simultaneously individuating and collective behaviours:

[I]n a place so status conscious as Japan, self image is important and new
image indicators are in demand. All indicate, to be sure, merely how different
in a manner everyone else will shortly be. Nvertheless, or consequently, a
demand for the new indicator grows and an industry accommodates mass
production. This is everywhere true, but Japanese society includes conformism
as a major ingredient and everyone wanting to do everything at the same time
creates a need which the fad and fashion factories fill. (7)

In Suicide Circle, Sono, like Richie, recognises this consumerist cycle by
which people define themselves as at once apart from the masses, and as
a part of a larger, virtual, collective identity without which one’s personal
‘style’ would have no meaning. In fact, it is this communal drive to
produce an ever-transforming identity through conspicuous consumption
that Sono locates as evidence that ‘[n]owadays…Japan does not have any
culture’ (Crawford 2003: 309) beyond the ahistorical ephemerality of a
mass-marketed popular culture capable of reducing individuals to