Page 17 - Nightmare Japan Contemporary Japanese Horror Cinema

4 Nightmare Japan

(Schneider and Williams, 2005). To date, however, only one volume of
criticism dedicated exclusively to the current deluge of horror films from
Japan has been published: Japanese Horror Cinema (McRoy, 2005).
Comprised of individual essays investigating the genre’s dominant
aesthetic, cultural, political, and technological underpinnings, Japanese
Horror Cinema addresses, among other key topics, the debt Japanese
horror films owe to various Japanese theatrical and literary traditions,
recent permutations of the "avenging spirit" motif, the impact of atomic
warfare upon the popular imaginary, the influence of recent shifts in
audience demographics upon horror movie fandom, and the developing
relations and contestations between Japanese and Western (Anglo-
American and European) horror film tropes and traditions.
Given the absence of a sustained single-authored academic
engagement with the latest offerings of filmic horror from Japan,
Nightmare Japan: Contemporary Japanese Horror Cinema offers a
much-needed aesthetic and critical introduction to some of the genre’s
most significant works. As a substantial component of Japanese popular
culture, horror films allow artists an avenue through which they may
apply visual and narrative metaphors in order to engage aesthetically with
a rapidly transforming social and cultural landscape. Furthermore, given
Japan’s complex and often contradictory responses to the impact of
Western – as well as neighboring Asian – cultures, the liminal
physiognomies that frequently populate Japanese horror films (be these
corporeal formations traditionally monstrous, phantasmagoric, or
representations of the human form dismantled) offer useful models for
interrogating what H.D. Harootunian describes as Japan’s ‘cultural
particularity’, its malleable ‘relationalism (aidagamshugi)’ that ‘reflects
the diversity of Japanese society at a given moment’, as well as its ability
to ‘accommodate change throughout time’ (73). Thus, Nightmare Japan
advances current studies in Japanese horror film through close readings of
politically-charged motion pictures emerging within an historical moment
when the artificiality of social, national, and physiological boundaries has
never been more apparent, and during which the desire to re-inscribe
these borders has never been, in the eyes of some cultural theorists, more
pressing. This book, in other words, positions Japanese horror cinema’s