Page 53 - Nightmare Japan Contemporary Japanese Horror Cinema

40 Nightmare Japan

a species. As such, Tabe seemingly rejects easy stereotypes of the
Japanese as a populace culturally predisposed to extreme civility and
extreme rage.
At the same time, however, Tabe represents this ‘Jekyll and
Hyde disease’ through numerous darkly-humorous depictions of the
Japanese social and corporeal body in conflict with itself. The ‘Devil
Woman’ Doctor, for example, introduces viewers to a dysfunctional
contemporary family unit suffering from a disorder that causes their
heads and/or hearts to explode when confronted with even the slightest
social pressures. In a similarly amusing scene, a yakuza boss develops a
‘human face shaped malignant tumor’ with its own distinct personality.
Such contradictory physiologies in Devil Woman Doctor parody
transformations in Japanese culture struggling with conflicting notions of
Japanese-ness. In other words, through representations of the human form
in conflict with, or in some fashion escaping the domineering control of,
the ‘self’, Tabe’s film exposes Japanese identity – in all of its biological,
psychological and national manifestations – as far less cohesive and/or
coherent than previously imagined. Verbal assaults challenging the
dysfunctional Japanese family’s inability to conform to conventional
societal and gender roles precede their exploding heads and hearts,
positioning their gory fates as allegorical explosions or, in some cases,
implosions. Furthermore, by revealing that the yakuza boss has found a
new profession as a street performer singing macabre duets with the face-
shaped malignant tumor on his belly, Tabe foregrounds the performativity
of identity, begging spectators to consider what their own individual
‘performances’ convey to those around them.
If, as Tanaka Yuki suggests, ‘[w]hat seems to be lacking in
Japanese history writing is the kind of work that can bring home to
readers how much continuity there is between life during wartime and
everyday life here and now’ (1996: 214), then Devil Woman Doctor, with
its references to cannibalism during World War II, its bizarre illustrations
of the ‘Jekyll and Hyde’ paradigm, and its depiction of the Japanese body
in conflict with itself, performs a vital function. Likewise, the Devil
Woman Doctor, the unlicensed medical practitioner after whom the film
is named, may, ironically, be the ideal entity for bringing about such