Page 63 - Nightmare Japan Contemporary Japanese Horror Cinema

50 Nightmare Japan

of dissolution. This chapter examines Sato Hisayasu’s Naked Blood and
Muscle as texts that imagine the human body as an unstable nexus of
often contradictory social codes informed by the cultural logics of
contemporary Japan. Set within late-industrial landscapes where the flesh
is at once agonisingly immediate and increasingly anachronistic, Naked
Blood and Muscle engage both the extreme dread and the ‘extreme
seductiveness’ that, as Georges Bataille reminds us, may constitute ‘the
boundary of horror’ (Bataille 1994: 17). Indeed, it is my ultimate
contention that while Sato’s Naked Blood and Muscle engage a
multiplicity of territorialising cultural forces, they also revel in intensity
until what emerges is a narrative of social and physical corporeality that
allows viewers to conceive of an alternative existence that ‘no longer
resembles a neatly defined itinerary from one practical sign to another,
but a sickly incandescence, a durable orgasm’ (82).
Locating the films of Sato Hisayasu within a particular cinematic
genre is an especially frustrating endeavor. Indeed, even his most
commercially accessible works, if in fact such texts can be said to exist,
are largely exercises in generic and cultural cross-fertilisation. Though
influenced by Western literary and cinematic traditions, Sato’s films
reveal a myriad of social and political anxieties over the ‘appearance’ of
the Japanese physical and social body. Emerging at the intersection of
horror, science fiction, and Japanese soft-core pornography, Sato’s films
are a veritable mélange of splatterpunk, cyberpunk, and erotic cinema
motifs that locate the body as a liminal construction. As a result, it is
perhaps most accurate to examine Sato Hisayasu as one of cinema’s most
famous (infamous?) practitioners of ‘body horror’ – a hybrid, and thus
somewhat more inclusive, category that, according to Kelly Hurley,
‘recombines’ multiple ‘narrative and cinematic conventions of the science
fiction, horror, and suspense film in order to stage a spectacle of the
human body defamiliarized’ (Hurley 1995: 203). A comprehensive term
like ‘body horror’ is intensely appropriate in discussions of Sato’s films,
where the metaphoric implications of the splattered or transfigured body
are central to his aesthetic and political agenda. Though frequently
exploring non-human topos of technology’s complex role in the social
imaginary of Japan’s late capitalist political and ideological terrain,