Page 58 - Nightmare Japan Contemporary Japanese Horror Cinema

Guinea Pigs and Entrails 45

desire for continued advancement within late industrial capitalist culture
threatens to transform the average Japanese ‘salaryman’ into an
individual all but incapable of detaching himself from his socially
proscribed role of hard-labouring employee within a carefully established
and strictly maintained system of rank and order.
Unlike his more self-assured and sexually dynamic colleague,
Nakamura, Hideshi lacks the necessary confidence to initiate romances,
or even to establish significant friendships. Rather than exuding charisma,
Hideshi walks with his head lowered, mumbling, often incomprehensibly,
to himself. The most explicit metaphor for Hideshi’s social alienation and
interpersonal impotence, however, emerges through Hideshi’s inability to
take his own life. No matter what he does, he cannot die. Even when he
plunges a knife into his midsection, pulls it across his belly, and then
finally severs his head in an action immediately reminiscent of the form
of Japanese ritual suicide, hari kari, Hideshi still cannot die. As the film
comes to a close, he is no more than a talking head on his living room
table, laughing maniacally as his suave co-worker Nakamura, and
Nakamura’s love interest, Kyoko, chastise him for making such a mess of
his apartment.
Given the scenario described in the paragraphs above, it would
be easy to categorise He Never Dies as an uneven exercise in dark
comedy, or as a special effects extravaganza that focuses primarily on a
socially maladapted failure that can’t even successfully take his own life.
The film indeed conforms to these assessments; however such a narrow
analysis merely scratches the surface of this unusual text. We can
certainly read the film as a satire (which it is), but what, then, are we to
make of the film’s ending, in which Nakamura and Kyoko berate Hideshi
for his slovenly, blood-splattered abode? Does this sequence merely
stress, yet again, Hideshi’s struggle against a corporate mindset that
continually renders him useless, impotent, invisible, and obsolete? Is
Kuzumi’s film simply a critique of masculinity in a transforming
Japanese culture, or are there larger stakes in this motion picture’s
engagement with conceptions of an identity undergoing traumatic
reorganisation? Might Hideshi’s gradual biological and psychological