Page 192 - Nightmare Japan Contemporary Japanese Horror Cinema

New Terrors, Emerging Trends 179

Satomi Hideki, his wife, Ayaka, and their five year old daughter, Nana,
are travelling home by car from a visit with Ayaka’s parents. A university
professor obsessed with his research and preoccupied with the fear of
failing to secure tenure, Hideki begs his wife to drive back to a pay phone
they passed several miles earlier so that he can email his research to his
colleagues. As he sits in the cramped confines of the phone booth waiting
for his data to upload, he finds a weathered scrap of newspaper with a
photograph of his daughter accompanied by a story describing her death
in an automobile accident. Confused and understandably sceptical at first,
Hideki turns towards the street only to see his wife making her way
towards the booth to check on his progress. Behind her, we see the car
with his daughter strapped in the back seat. Seconds later, a speeding
truck collides head-on with his parked car. Hideki’s vehical bursts into
flames that quickly consume his daughter’s tiny body. As police and
rescue crews arrive, Hideki frantically searches for the scrap of
newspaper containing the premonition, but it is nowhere to be found.
The narrative then leaps forward three years. Hideki and Ayaka
have separated. Unable to reconcile intense feelings of guilt regarding his
delayed reaction to the mysterious clipping’s otherworldly ‘warning’,
Hideki has suffered greatly. His once promising career as a university
professor has crumbled, and he now teaches a class of rowdy,
disinterested high school students. Ayaka, meanwhile, has immersed
herself in her career, working as a university faculty member studying
psychic phenomena and urban legends. Hideki begins to experience
premonitions in the form of mysterious news clippings prophesying
destruction, and his quest to discover their origin reunites him with his
estranged wife. Together, they learn the fate of a young man driven mad
by his inability to stem the influx of similar premonitions. As video
footage of the young man and, eventually, Hideki’s own first-hand
experiences reveal, altering the future is possible. However, these
attempts culminate in mixed results. For example, Hideki is able to save
his wife from a railway disaster, but he cannot prevent the stabbing death
of one of his students. Furthermore, attempts at altering possible futures
result in radical corporeal transformations, most noticeably the
appearance of grey blotches that eventually spread across the individual’s