Page 163 - Nightmare Japan Contemporary Japanese Horror Cinema
P. 163
150 Nightmare Japan
To posit Desert/Dessert/Dessret as an exclusively destructive or
isolating force, however, ignores their function as the ambassadors of the
prepubescent collective behind the suicides, a group whose ‘hatred
towards Japan’ Sono imagines as ‘an angelic beauty’ (Crawford 2003:
309). Although many of the lyrics to their ostensibly syrupy ditties can be
read as thinly veiled invitations to ‘find a match that lasts forever’, even if
such a quest results in saying ‘so long’ to life in late-industrial Japan,
certain lines advocate a rejection of the isolation that so-called
‘communication technologies’ can foster in favour of tangible,
emotionally-engaged interpersonal relationships. We can find such an
ideology championed in the following lyrics from the music
video/performance over which the closing credits roll:
Little did we know
How little do we really know
Everyday we’re pressing the key
That executes a million commands
If only you could say exactly what is on your mind
And tell me how you really feel
Maybe I can lend a helping hand
Scary it’s true, but loads of fun, too
In short, Desert/Dessert/Dessret’s pop lyrics provide vital clues about the
motivations of the ‘angelic’ children behind the mass suicides, especially
their powerful desire to promote external, ‘real world’ human
attachments, exchanges through which people can ‘feel the pain of others
as [they] would [their] own’. It is this message of ‘connection’ that
characters like Detective Karuda (with his emotional distance from his
family and his recurrent obsession with his appearance in mirrors)
tragically fail to understand until it is too late. Similarly, it is this contact
that the film’s suicidal characters only achieve in the most abstracted and
ironic of ways: as anonymous, uniform rectangles of freshly-skinned
flesh mechanically sewn into gruesome spiralling chains that are
eventually wrapped in plastic, packed in nondescript white sports bags,
and mysteriously left at the site of numerous suicides.
In contrast, the desire for interpersonal communion informs
many of the actions of Karuda’s young assistant, Detective Shibusawa,