Page 71 - Nightmare Japan Contemporary Japanese Horror Cinema

58 Nightmare Japan

camera. As such, the film provides a commentary on bodily experiences,
mediated visions and the eroto-politics of the gaze.

Mothers and Sons: Women and Work

Sato’s depiction of the splattered body recognises social anxieties
accompanying changes and continuities in gender roles and expectations
as they relate to contemporary Japan’s transforming social and economic
landscape. Manipulated by the euphoric effects of Myson, the violence
that the vain woman and the gluttonous woman perform against their own
bodies can even be understood as a proto-feminist critique of the
destructive impact of patriarchal authority and beauty ideals: the women
literally self-destruct in a frenzy of body modification taken to near fatal
extremes. In addition, Naked Blood addresses what Anne Allison
describes as cultural apprehensions over the steadily emerging presence
of women in the workplace and, by extension, the occasional
reconfiguration of domestic space: ‘In Japan in the 1990s…domestic
labor is losing its moorings. Women are working in greater numbers, for
more years, and with less inclination to quit at the point of marriage and
motherhood’ (Allison 2000: 174). This gendered transformation of the
social body finds cinematic articulation in the character of Eiji’s mother.
It is her position as a legitimately employed scientist, coupled with her
son’s familial, social, and professional alienation (Eiji, after all, is still a
teen and, thus, still under intense pressure to succeed in school), which
results in the unauthorised delivery of Myson to the unwitting test
subjects. This bodily chaos, engendered by the mother’s unwitting Myson
tests and mapped across explicitly feminine bodies, seems to suggest that
women’s participation in what was conventionally a masculine sphere can
only result in catastrophe.
This social anxiety over women’s transgressions of traditional
feminine roles plays out in the oedipal politics at work in Eiji’s
dysfunctional family. Eiji’s desire to become a scientist and develop the
aptly named Myson stems from his hope to follow in his deceased (and,
thus, ‘absent’) father’s footsteps. Like his father before him, Eiji longs to