Page 175 - Nightmare Japan Contemporary Japanese Horror Cinema

162 Nightmare Japan

captured in the still photo. From this moment forward, Michi and her
fellow employees experience increasingly bizarre supernatural events,
including encounters with ghost-like entities that lead them to become
ever-more convinced that ‘[s]omething strange’ is transpiring.
The film’s second major character, Kawashima, is a shy
economics student whose initial foray into the world’s on-line community
results in an encounter with a strange web site displaying dimly lit images
of shadowy, isolated figures followed by an unsettling invitation: ‘Would
you like to meet a ghost?’ Annoyed, he shuts down his computer and falls
asleep, only to awaken when his computer inexplicably boots up and
displays the same unsettling images. Kawashima is unnerved by this
unwelcome technological intervention, and he soon visits one of his
university’s computer labs in the hope of learning why his PC has
suddenly taken on a disturbing life of its own. It is in the lab that he meets
Harue, a female graduate student in computer science with whom he
begins an awkwardly tender, yet ultimately ill-fated friendship. During
one of his subsequent visits to the university, Kawashima meets another
computer science graduate student named Yoshizaki, who has created a
computer program in which dots of light drift about on the computer’s
screen until, when they get ‘too far apart’, they are slowly drawn together
and ‘die’. Harue explains that the program mimics human interactions in
the real world, an assessment that takes on troubling connotations when
thicker, ghostly dots invade the program. In addition, like the employees
of the botanical nursery, Yoshizaki and Harue begin to encounter strange
otherworldly phantoms. In one crucial scene, Yoshizaki engages
Kawashima in a discussion, during which Yoshizaki advances his theory
that the world of the dead has reached its maximum capacity and,
consequently, these lonely spirits have ‘oozed’ into the electronic and
physical realms of the living in an attempt to find new places to inhabit.
As the film moves towards its climax, encounters with ‘ghosts’
become more prevalent and the world becomes progressively less
populated as people drift into deep, often suicidal despair before
transforming into ashy, vaguely human-shaped smudges. These human
stains disintegrate into tiny black flakes that whirl skyward, ultimately
fusing with the perpetual blanket of low grey clouds. Eventually, Harue