Page 24 - Nightmare Japan Contemporary Japanese Horror Cinema

Introduction 11

imagining new economies of identity, Sato explores the abject dread and
infinite promise of the human body in a state of perpetual becoming.
Fusing splatterpunk, cyberpunk, and erotic cinema (or pinku eiga) motifs,
Naked Blood and Muscle locate the human body as a liminal construction,
a flexible and ever-encodable space that is ‘at once a target for new
biological and communicational technologies, a site of political conflict,
and a limit point at which ideological oppositions collapse’ (Shaviro
1993: 133-4).
Chapter Three focuses upon one of the most popular motifs in
Japanese literary, dramatic, and visual arts: the kaidan, or ‘ghost story’.
An exceedingly flexible and persistently revisited trope in contemporary
Japanese horror cinema, particularly those dependent upon
representations of the onryou, or ‘avenging spirit’ motif, these uncanny
narratives draw upon a plurality of religious traditions, including
Shintoism and Christianity, as well as plot devices from Noh and Kabuki
theatre, to relate tales of incursion upon the natural world by spectral
entities eager to exact revenge on, or in some way intervene with, the
living. Specifically, this chapter analyses three acclaimed works by two
of Japanese horror cinema’s best known directors: Nakata Hideo (Ringu
[1998] and Dark Water [Honogurai mizu no soko kara, 2002]) and
Shimizu Takashi (Ju-on: The Grudge [2002]). Inspired by films like
Shindô Kaneto’s Onibaba (1964) and Kobayashi Masaki’s Kwaidan
(1965), Nakata and Shimizu re-envision the ‘avenging spirit’ motif in
these tales of ‘wronged’, primarily female entities who return to curse the
living. Careful considerations of the focus of, and motivations behind,
these spirits’ wrath offer valuable insights into the historical, political,
and economic logics informing contemporary social and cultural tensions
between nostalgic imaginings of a ‘traditional Japanese’ past and the
steady emergence of women as both single parents and active members of
Japan’s work force.
Chapter Four investigates the bleak, nihilistic, and criminally
under-explored motif of ‘dove style violence’, a term that finds its genesis
in Thomas Weisser’s and Yuko Mihara Weisser’s description of the
detached cruelty exemplified by ‘certain species of bird’ that, when it
discovers that ‘a flock member is different or weaker’, will peck