Page 47 - Nightmare Japan Contemporary Japanese Horror Cinema

34 Nightmare Japan

As if in recognition of the imagined ‘dangers’ that may
accompany this potential reversal of social power, the killer in Flowers of
Flesh and Blood wears samurai armor, a black leather butcher’s apron,
and latex gloves throughout the lengthy dismemberment sequences; in a
similar fusion of the traditional and the modern, he wields a battle axe, an
assortment of rusty tools, and a variety of contemporary surgical utensils
against his victim’s prone and securely tied body. While clearly
reminiscent of the previously discussed inclination within Japanese
popular culture to envision a homogenous past, a ‘relentlessly obsessive
“return” to “origins”’ (Harootunian 1989: 66), Flowers of Flesh and
Blood’s conflation of historical (and cinematic) signifiers likewise calls to
mind what Christopher Sharrett calls postmodernism’s ‘catastrophe’, a
condition defined as ‘the simultaneous affirmation and denial of historical
views of reality, the nostalgia for the past simultaneous with its derision,
and the constant attempt to prop up mythic readings of history even as
they are seen as risible’ (1999: 421).
This catastrophic ‘will-to-myth’ about which Sharrett writes –
the impulse to ‘legitimate false consciousness and to reassert primitive
views of human interchange’ (422), including torture and murder –
underlies Hino’s vision of corporeal apocalypse in which the bound
physiognomy of the female victim is methodically annihilated. In its
depiction of historically-coded Japanese iconography (the figure of the
samurai), as well as in its visual, verbal, and poetic allusions to traditional
Japanese ritual (hara kiri is, as Hunter notes, the most obvious), the film
evokes nostalgia for an idealised, if illusory, past at once longed for and
yet impossible to recover. While attired in samurai armor made
ridiculously anachronistic given the dilapidated urban environment in
which he ‘operates’, the killer seems to be literally rotting away from the
inside-out, especially in close ups that reveal stained and broken teeth, as
well as blood-spattered skin flaking beneath a thin layer of powder.
Though suggestive of ritualistic suicide ‘marked by religious ecstasy’, the
captive woman’s bloody ‘flowers’ (her glistening internal organs) are
harvested non-consensually through violence rather than ‘offer[ed] up’
(Hunter 1998: 160) voluntarily. The euphoric expression on her face is