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New Terrors, Emerging Trends 193

corporeality. Similarly, in its depiction of Takagi Hiroshi’s search for the
traumatic ‘truth’ of his past, Vital functions as one of Tsukamoto’s most
‘human’ films. In the wake of a devastating automobile accident, Takagi
Hiroshi discovers that he has lost both his memory and, though he does
not recall her, his lover, Ooyama Ryôko. This violent collision of the
corporeal and technological, an event immediately evocative of his earlier
cyberpunk masterpieces, Tetsuo: The Iron Man and Tetsuo 2: Body
Hammer, seemingly reawakens Takagi Hiroshi’s slowly waning interest
in human physiology, and he soon embarks upon his first semester of
medical school. While dissecting a cadaver for a course on human
anatomy, Hiroshi, in response to a strangely familiar tattoo he finds on
the cadaver’s arm, begins to recover what he believes to be memories of
his forgotten past. As these snippets of salvaged time increasingly
destabilise his perception of what constitutes reality and fantasy, Hiroshi
becomes more and more engrossed in questions of identity, both in
relation to the woman on the dissection table in the school’s pathology
lab, and in terms of ‘who he really is’. Discovering the cadaver to be the
body of his deceased girlfriend, Ryôko, Hiroshi’s approach to the cadaver
also transforms from a dispassionate clinical detachment to a maniacal
preoccupation with discovering possible alternative causes of the
cadaver’s death, an obsession that alienates most of his classmates. One
important exception, however, is Kiki, who seems drawn to Hiroshi
despite finding his erratic behaviour unsettling. Throughout the film, Kiki
finds her erotic desire for Hiroshi variously compromised by Hiroshi’s
obsession with the dead Ryôko. Nevertheless, Kiki alone dares to
accompany Hiroshi on his anatomical, sexual, and emotional journeys of
(self-) discovery.
Vital’s complex engagement with notions of posthuman identity
and the all-too-human will to romanticise our base corporeality extends
themes with which Tsukamoto’s films have engaged since 1988’s Tetsuo:
The Iron Man and, before that, Adventures of Electric Rod Boy (Denchu
Kozo no boken, 1987). Specifically, Vital underscores Tsukamoto’s
paradoxical fascination with and fear of increasingly technologised
environments. A pathologisation of, and critical foray into, the corporeal
as a mythical repository for an imagined spiritual configuration, or ‘soul’,