Page 98 - Nightmare Japan Contemporary Japanese Horror Cinema

Ghosts of the Present 85

discover that not only did she drown in the water tank atop the apartment
complex in which Yoshimi and Ikuko live, but that the spirit will not find
peace until the cycle of abandonment and loneliness completes its round.
In a harrowing climax, the apartment building weeps cataclysmic tears
from every crevice, corner, and ceiling as Yoshimi symbolically adopts
Mitsuko’s ghost by clutching the phantom of the long lost girl to her
chest, much to her biological daughter, Ikuko’s, heartbroken dismay.
Nakata’s film, however, does not end here. In a remarkably restrained and
poignant epilogue, Ikuko, now ten years older and possessing only
fragmentary recollections of her tempestuous childhood, returns to the
apartment she shared with her mother in the dilapidated housing block. In
their former apartment, Ikuko and Yoshimi share a few tender moments,
but when Ikuko inquires as to whether she may once again live with her
mother, Yoshimi falls silent and Ikuko realises that Mitsuko’s spirit still
resides within the building. Yoshimi apologises for the fact that they
cannot be together, and when Ikuko turns her head quickly in hopes of
catching a glimpse of Mitsuko’s spirit, her mother disappears. Saddened,
Ikuko walks home alone beneath a clear blue sky.
Perhaps one of the most immediate comparison viewers may
draw between Nakata’s Ringu and Dark Water concerns the central
protagonists’ marital and, by extension, socio-cultural statuses. In each
case, the heroine struggling against supernatural forces is the single
mother of a young child; Ringu’s Reiko is divorced, and Dark Water’s
Yoshimi is in the midst of a divorce. These respective situations inform
not only the mothers’ relationships with their offspring, but also the
extent to which the restless spirits succeed in insinuating themselves into
their lives. In Ringu, for example, Reiko and her ex-husband’s frantic
quest to determine the origin of the haunted videotape renders their son,
Yoichi, vulnerable to Sadako’s viral-like curse. Although early in the film
Yoichi expresses curiosity about the existence of a cursed videocassette,
Reiko – who is clearly coded as Yoichi’s primary caretaker – is
ultimately unable to police her son’s every waking moment. As a result,
she cannot prevent Yoichi from viewing the sinister images on her copy
of the cursed tape and, as the film closes with a high angle extreme long
shot of her car on a lonely stretch of highway, Reiko finds she must