Page 60 - Nightmare Japan Contemporary Japanese Horror Cinema

Guinea Pigs and Entrails 47

‘outside’ impurity that, in turn, threatens the sanctity of the ‘inside’ in all
of its multiple forms – i.e., the body, the house, the nation. Freed from
such concerns, Hideshi, the ‘He’ of He Never Dies, is finally the
character that is the most ‘alive’. Through ‘pollution’ and ‘self-
mutilation’, Hideshi embraces ‘an affirmative relation to death in its
material existence: corpse and decay’ (Menninghaus, 2003: 347). A
manifestation of pure immanence in his reconfigured relationship to gore,
death, and decay (those most abject of abjections), Hideshi frees himself
from the soul-crushing cycles of the Japanese corporate, capitalist
machine and its supporting binaries. Consequently, Kuzumi Masayuki’s
He Never Dies advocates the potentialities of an opposition to ‘the
cosmetic struggle against death’s traces’, a perspective that offers the
possibility – to paraphrase Georges Bataille – of playing in ones own
‘decomposition’ (347).

Image 4: The body at war with itself in He Never Dies (© Ecclectic DVD Distributors)