Page 64 - Nightmare Japan Contemporary Japanese Horror Cinema

Cultural Transformation 51

Sato’s cinema simultaneously turns on foregrounded images of
endangered physiognomies and corporeal disintegration. Even throughout
the last ten years, as the circulation of capital, information, and
interpersonal communication has become increasingly invisible and
electronic, Sato’s films have continued to turn and return to the physical
body, in its visible, messy, and all-too-vulnerable splendor, as a site of
perpetual contestation. The body in Naked Blood and Muscle provides a
flexible and ever-encodable space that again recalls Cronenberg’s cinema,
where the body is ‘at once a target for new biological and
communicational technologies, a site of political conflict, and a limit
point at which ideological oppositions collapse’ (Shaviro 1993: 133-4).

The Seen and the Obscene:
Sato Hisayasu’s Naked Blood and the Japanese Body

Naked Blood is perhaps one of Sato Hisayasu’s most complex and
visually arresting films. The plot revolves around a seventeen year old
boy genius named Eiji. Inspired by his dead father’s scientific and
philosophic aspirations, which included a desire to better the world by
helping humanity achieve a form of intensity akin to blinding light, Eiji
creates the ‘ultimate painkiller’ to ‘improve the happiness of mankind.’
The fruit of his labor is a drug called Myson, a substance that causes the
human brain to feel pain as pleasure. Seeking humans upon which to test
his creation, Eiji sneaks his elixir into an intravenous contraceptive that
his mother (an established scientist) unknowingly administers to three
young women. The test subjects include two unnamed women – a vain
woman whose ‘greatest pleasure[s]’ are having an attractive body and
wardrobe, and a food-obsessed woman whose ‘greatest joy’ is eating –
and Mikami, a woman who hasn’t slept since she was in the fifth grade,
when the ‘shock’ of the onset of menses ‘blocked’ her ‘sleep cycle.’ Eiji
chronicles Myson’s impact by videotaping each woman from a distance,
but his anonymity is compromised when Mikami catches him spying on
her and confronts him. In part because Myson allows Mikami to
experience her disdain for Eiji as attraction, they become romantically