Page 160 - Nightmare Japan Contemporary Japanese Horror Cinema

Spiraling into Apocalypse 147

nameless, faceless cogs in a global capitalist machine, or – as is the case
with those characters who take their lives in Suicide Circle’s frenzy of
mass emulation – to a series of computer-generated red and white dots
immediately reminiscent of the colours of the Japanese flag.
Furthermore, the suicides’ almost viral proliferation throughout the
film reveals the expansive yet, for Sono, ultimately destructive impact of
a Japanese popular culture defined by fads and fashions. Teenagers, eager
for a way to assert themselves in a society driven by both the allure of the
new and the compulsion to ‘fit in’, form impromptu ‘suicide clubs’ to
which death is the price of admission. Other young people, like those that
comprise the murderous glam rock band ‘Suicide Club’, blindly follow
monomaniacal wannabe cult-leaders like Genesis (the self-proclaimed
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‘Charles Manson of the information age’) in an attempt to discover their
niche through lyrics that romanticise death (‘I want to die as beautifully
as Joan of Arc inside a Bresson film…because the Dead shine all night
long!’) and through the construction of a quasi-Sadean ‘pleasure room’.
However, it is not merely ‘impressionable’ teens that fall prey to the
suicide fad; several adults are also depicted taking their own lives
throughout the film. As Alan Wolfe writes in his essay, ‘Suicide and the
Japanese Postmodern: A Postnarrative Paradigm’, individual self-
annihilation provides the ideal model for resistance in a late-capitalist
culture defined by ‘the endless circulation of increasingly unnecessary
consumer goods and images’ (1988: 231). Sono explores a very similar
notion in Suicide Circle: In one scene, for example, Detective Karuda
responds to the notion that the suicides are just a ‘fad’ by warning his
fellow officers, ‘[n]ot a word about a suicide club or kids will be dying all
over Japan.’ Thus, for Wolfe and Sono, suicide is the ultimate fad in that,
like all crazes that soon give way to the next big thing, it ‘represents the
capacity for the subject to resist without resisting’ (229). This is
particularly the case in contemporary Japanese culture, where an
increasing majority of the population knows only a Japan linked

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Actually, given the media circus surrounding the 1969 Tate and LaBianca murders, as well as
the subsequent protracted Las Angeles trial of Charles Manson and several members of his
notorious ‘Family’, one could argue that Genesis’s claim to this title is suspect at best,
especially since Charles Manson himself is very much the ‘Charles Manson of the information
age’.