Page 56 - Nightmare Japan Contemporary Japanese Horror Cinema

Guinea Pigs and Entrails 43

Filmed four years earlier than Tabe Hajime’s Devil Woman
Doctor, Kuzumi Masayuki’s He Never Dies anticipates Tabe’s
application of verist aesthetics, as well as Tabe’s dark humour and
socially critical agenda. Kuzumi frames his film with narration delivered
by a US scientist who, seated beside a huge globe, adopts a
stereotypically academic posture and repeatedly stresses that what we are
watching is undeniably ‘real’. The text he introduces is the story of a
young ‘salaryman’, Hideshi, and his multiple, inevitably vain attempts at
ending his unfulfilling life of deadening routine and virtual invisibility.
Retreating from human interactions and vocational responsibilities,
Hideshi leads an otaku-like existence, surrounding himself with manga
and anime. Importantly, like many of the Devil Woman Doctor’s
miserable patients, Hideshi wages a gruesome war against his own
rebellious physiology; he has become a man who literally cannot die.
Progressing from conventional suicidal behaviours, like slashing his
wrists and throat, Hideshi soon hacks off his own limbs with a large
knife, disembowels himself so that he can pelt a visiting co-worker with
internal organs, and, finally, decapitates himself with a pair of giant
gardening sheers. Building upon its outlandish premise, the film’s
combination of exaggerated performances, complex editing, and non-
diegetic sound ensures that, by its final sequence during which Kuzumi
cross cuts between the closing credits and reverse-motion ‘highlights’ of
the most intense instances of self-inflicted violence, no spectator can
possibly confuse what they see with ‘what real things are like’ (Stremmel
and Grosenick 2004: 42).
At the same time, careful viewers can discern an underlying
examination of contemporary Japanese culture, or, in Brechtian terms,
‘what things are really like’ (42), from certain perspectives. To immerse
viewers within the waking nightmare that is Hideshi’s life, Kuzumi shifts
between extreme high-angle black and white shots suggestive of
surveillance footage and a myriad of more overtly filmic strategies
ranging from non-diegetic sound effects and music to extreme close ups,
from slow motion photography to creative editing techniques.
Consequently, Kuzumi readily abandons any pretenses towards
‘documentary authenticity’ in favor of presenting a cinematic spectacle so