Page 70 - Nightmare Japan Contemporary Japanese Horror Cinema

Cultural Transformation 57

its tines. It is only at this point, when lips meet lips that the audience fully
realizes the extent of her orgasmic, self-destructive action. Her self-
consumption continues with a nipple and an eye, too, but it is the
woman’s consumption of her own labial lips that most viewers will
remember long after the film is over.
This scene offers what is perhaps Sato’s most explicit example of
how the violent dismantling of the human body provides a metaphor for
the ways that disciplinary power in Japanese culture both grants and
restricts personal expression, maintaining a notion of a cohesive national
and cultural identity. By blatantly displaying that which cannot be shown
(human genitalia) through a removal of the ‘obscene’ object from its
traditional context, Sato simultaneously shocks his audience and reveals
some of the logics at work in contemporary Japanese culture. By
revealing, through an ingenious process of decontextualisation, the very
corporeal features rendered invisible by national censors, Sato forces his
audience to confront the nationalist logics behind contemporary
representations of the human body within Japanese visual culture, an
image system designed to maintain a specifically ‘Japanese’ physical and
social body free (at least theoretically) from Western, Orientalist notions
of embodiment. The politics of censorship and (controlled) nudity in
Japanese cinema is laid bare, exposed in a frenzy of the visible that
ultimately discloses how the concerns over maintaining a consolidated
social body are at once partially informed by, and yet ideally resistant to,
Western and other non-traditional concepts of social and cultural identity
that inform how the human body is visually portrayed and ideologically
invested. The quivering flesh at the end of the fork both is and is not
genitalia; Sato is both reveling in the dangers of the ‘obscene’ body and
playing by the (or maybe creating new) rules. Naked Blood, then, pushes
and deconstructs the boundaries of what can be seen, both making the
logics of cultural negotiation visible as well as contesting them. Naked
Blood skillfully directs the viewer’s gaze, guiding his/her experience of
this film about detached characters caught up in extreme events that,
within the diegesis, unfold almost completely before the lenses of
photograph and video equipment, including the meta-lens of Sato’s own