Page 190 - Nightmare Japan Contemporary Japanese Horror Cinema

New Terrors, Emerging Trends 177

new patient eventually decomposes into a noxious green gas that, once
sucked into the hospital’s ventilation system, quickly infects all who
come into contact with it. At once claustrophobic in its settings and
apocalyptic in its scope, Infection is an extensively allegorical text
intended to instigate both dis-ease and discussion.
As the preceding plot summary suggests, the material
consequences of prolonged economic recession, coupled with extreme
fiscal practices like compulsory downsising and the exploitative over-
extension of current labour resources, underscores much of Ochiai’s film.
Likewise, as the film’s title suggests, many of Infection’s more horrific
sequences extend the inside-outside, uchi-soto binary discussed at length
in Chapter Four. This dread of contagion, which informs popular
imaginings of the Japanese corporeal and social body, arises most
viscerally and memorably in Infection’s numerous graphic representations
of corporeal putrefaction. Of course, Japan is far from the only culture
embedded with discourses of (im)purity and pollution. As Jonathan
Dollimore notes, ‘there is no greater human aversion…than that felt
towards “those unstable, fetid and lukewarm substances where life
ferments ignobly…where the eggs, germs, and maggots swarm”’ (2001:
253). The dread of decaying bodies in Infection arises from a reaction
against, or a wilful disregard of, notions of biological and social
permeability. In other words, Ochiai’s embattled protagonists – a motley
crew made up of doctors, nurses, and patients – reject ‘life in its primal
reality’, disavowing comprehensions of the human form as ‘a state of
differentiation so excessive that it includes within itself the
indifferentiation of death’…the ‘stuff of life’ that is also ‘death gorging
life with decomposed substance’ (Bataille 1957: 95).
The hospital staff’s desire simply to ignore the unwanted
patient’s putrefying physiology, a rejection of individual and collective
responsibility that results in their ultimate inability to contain the
infection that spreads from body to body, also positions Infection as a text
concerned with the return of a ghastly repressed past suddenly bursting
forth within the Japanese popular imaginary. As such, Infection explores
the politics of contagion on both an interpersonal and socio-historical
scale. In particular, Infection’s negligent staff and morally ambiguous