Page 59 - Nightmare Japan Contemporary Japanese Horror Cinema

46 Nightmare Japan

disarticulation advance a radical politics of identity through visual
displays of corporeal extremity and disintegration?
As a means of addressing these questions, consider a string of
events that take place late in the film. Unable to die no matter how
violently he attacks himself, Hideshi phones his colleague, Nakamura. In
the course of their conversation, Hideshi convinces Nakamura to pay him
a late night visit, interrupting, in the process, the handsome Nakamura’s
exchange of post-coital tendernesses with the equally comely Kyoko.
Nakamura, the antithesis of the socially stagnant and withdrawn Hideshi,
arrives at his co-worker’s tiny apartment only to discover a pale, gore-
soaked Hideshi who, pretending to be a zombie, states: ‘I am not the
Hideshi of before. No longer the old Hideshi who is always apologizing.
No, I am sorry. Not really, but…meet the new Hideshi who will not die.’
It is at this point that Hideshi disembowels himself and, laughing
hysterically, pelts a screaming, frightened Nakamura with an assortment
of tangled, blood-drenched internal organs.
This sequence is vital to Kuzumi’s film, for it transforms the
reactive, put-upon Hideshi into an active agent, a Deleuzian ‘Body
without Organs’ that exceeds binary constructs like ‘life’ and ‘death’;
‘internal’ and ‘external’; ‘clean’ and ‘dirty’, or ‘sterile’ and
‘contaminating’. What makes Hideshi unique in a culture of conformity
also makes him monstrous, but ecstatically so. As his body resists the
physical logics that should logically culminate in his death, Hideshi
transforms into an object of ‘pure immanence’; he becomes an infinite
becoming, ‘a singular life’ that ‘can be mistaken for no other’ (Deleuze,
2001: 29). In contrast, Nakamura and Kyoko scramble about Hideshi’s
tiny abode on their hands and knees, sopping up gallons of blood and
complaining about the ‘dirt’ and ‘contaminating’ filth. Through these
actions, which Hideshi’s laughing head watches with a combination of
amazement and ridicule, Nakamura and Kyoko firmly position
themselves within an ideological framework preoccupied with discipline
and order. Additionally, their impulse to clean Hideshi’s apartment reifies
the notion that the excretions (including the blood) of others violates long
established conceptualisations of ‘internal’ and ‘external’, ultimately
realising what Emiko Ohnoki-Tierney describes as ‘people dirt’, an