Page 49 - Nightmare Japan Contemporary Japanese Horror Cinema

36 Nightmare Japan

Juliet (USA, Lloyd Kaufman, 1996). This combination of the horrific and
the satirical proves an effective mechanism for interrogating conceptions
of national trauma haunting Japan throughout the twentieth century, from
the brutal legacy of Japanese imperialist aggressions in the South Pacific
during World War II, to shifting notions of sex and gender roles during
the ‘bubble economy’s’ waning years. Understood as a barometer for the
multiple social and economic fluctuations endemic to late industrial
culture in Japan, Devil Woman Doctor and He Never Dies reveal a social
and national body in mortal conflict with itself.
Tabe Hajime’s Devil Woman Doctor consists of a series of
gruesome set pieces and comical experiments narrated by the eponymous
‘physician’, a drag queen named ‘Peter’. From the film’s opening
moments, in which a scalpel-sliced doll expels an impossible geyser of
blood, to a scene of a reporter hovering curiously above a buffet of
cannibal delicacies (including eyeballs, testicles, and vulvas), to a
sequence during which four of the ‘Devil Woman Doctor’’s patients
compare their increasingly bizarre ailments, Tabe’s film, with its tacky
special effects and ridiculous over-acting, defines itself as an explicitly
self-conscious text that is not meant to be taken seriously. Though
certainly aiming to ‘gross out’ viewers with its copious depictions of the
human body bleeding, exploding, mutating and decomposing, the
dialogue accompanying the images renders the events at once comical
and critical. Most importantly, Devil Woman Doctor’s narration deploys
blunt observations and barbed insights to dissect both Japanese history
and contemporary Japanese culture. Thus, like a sadistic physician
carving her way into a fresh corpse, Tabe’s text probes both old and new
‘wounds’, peeling back layers of flesh to expose the allegorical
connections festering like cancers just beneath the surface of the Japanese
social body.
By way of illustration, consider the sequence in which a reporter,
Kageyama Tamio, attends the inaugural ‘tasting party of human flesh’, a
catered buffet of dishes featuring assorted body parts variously prepared
for human consumption. Among the dishes on display are human brains
‘pickled in soy sauce and vinegar’, jellied eyeballs garnished with
cockroaches and flies, severed hands and heads in bowls of crisp iceberg