Page 99 - Nightmare Japan Contemporary Japanese Horror Cinema

86 Nightmare Japan

telephone her father and attempt to obtain his unwitting assistance in
freeing her son from the otherwise sure death awaiting him.
Similarly, Dark Water’s Yoshimi, in her scramble to find
housing, employment, and sympathetic legal council, leaves her daughter,
Ikuko, vulnerable to the sporadic, yet increasingly threatening
machinations of Mitsuko’s troubled spirit. Equally distressing for
Yoshimi is the fear that Ikuko may experience a sense of isolation and
abandonment akin to the emotional pain she suffered as the child of
divorced parents struggling against economic pressures in a culture
clinging to communal ideologies privileging ‘conventional’ pre- and
immediate post-war family structures. Yoshimi’s anxiety heightens when
Ikuko’s school principal remarks upon Ikuko’s strange behavior, a
condition that isolates her from her fellow classmates and that, in the
principal’s opinion, stems from domestic instability: ‘I…hear you are
divorced. That must be affecting her. We see this a lot with children of
divorced parents.’ What’s more, when Yoshimi inquires as to the purpose
behind a wall of children’s drawings depicting a little girl in a yellow
raincoat and holding a red bag reminiscent of the scarlet backpack that
frequently accompanies the increasingly uncanny encounters with
Mitsuko’s ghost, the school’s principal explicitly links Ikuko’s troubles
with Mitsuko’s disappearance:

As a matter of fact, she [Mitsuko] used to behave oddly, too. However, in
Mitsuko’s case her mother abandoned her. Just got up and left one day. You
never heard of her? The girl who disappeared two years ago: Mitsuko Kawai?
She was one of our kids here.

The principal’s allegation that Mitsuko’s mother abandoned her young
daughter resonates deeply with Yoshimi, who, as we learn from Dark
Water’s opening sequence, habours heartrending memories of waiting
alone at her own kindergarten for her divorced mother’s belated arrival.
Such moments position Nakata’s film not only as a text concerned with
the myriad economic and social dilemmas accompanying transform-
ations in the Japanese family, but also as a work that addresses how such
alterations may engender traumatic cycles of abandonment and neglect
that could have catastrophic consequences for successive generations.