Page 181 - Nightmare Japan Contemporary Japanese Horror Cinema

168 Nightmare Japan

While many viewers may find Pulse ‘despairing’, Kurosawa
maintains that his apocalyptic vision is also – perhaps necessarily –
optimistic in that it proposes ‘the possibility of starting again with
nothing…the beginning of hope’ (2002: 36). A treatise on transience and
cycles of change, Kurosawa’s film extols the quasi-existentialist benefits
of perpetually re-examining one’s ideologies and the network of social,
cultural, and ontological contingencies one must continually negotiate,
even before one interacts with the world in which one exists. As
Kurosawa remarks in an interview with Japanese scholar Tom Mes:

I’m not so interested in the group that surrounds the individual. I’m interested
in the values that the individual has come to embrace. For the individual to re-
assess those values and understand the way in which those values that he has
come to embrace are in fact the forces that have come to oppress him, not
something from the outside. (2003: para 31)

Such introspection is never easy. Indeed, as Pulse illustrates, it is
fraught with its own battery of perils, from abject nihilism to emotionally
paralysing despondency, the latter of which ultimately leads to
Kawashima’s demise. Moving forward while accepting the present and
learning from the past, however, is all one can do. Thus, the film’s
concluding bird’s-eye view shot of a lone vessel drifting slowly over an
apparently endless expanse of ocean becomes a metaphor for the human
condition, a circumstance that exceeds national particularities. Similarly,
when Michi’s closing voiceover narration informs us that ‘[n]ow, alone
with my last friend in the world, I have found happiness,’ we believe her.
Like the ship on which she rides, Michi is moving forward with only the
vaguest notion as to her final destination and with no assurances as to
what, if anything, she might find. Michi is adrift, moving, in transition,
becoming; the journey itself becomes the point.