The Crisis of Identity in Contemporary Japanese Film: Personal, Cultural, National (Brill's Japanese Studies Library)

The Crisis of Identity in Contemporary Japanese Film

Brill’s Japanese Studies Library Edited by

H. Bolitho K. Radtke

VOLUME 30

The Crisis of Identity in Contemporary Japanese Film Personal, Cultural, National

By

Timothy Iles

LEIDEN • BOSTON 2008

On the cover: A group of young people leaving an impromptu street concert near the Meiji Shrine in Tokyo’s Harajuku ward. June, 2006, inside Harajuku Station. Photo by Timothy Iles. This book is printed on acid-free paper. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Iles, Timothy, 1961– The crisis of identity in contemporary Japanese film : personal, cultural, national / by Timothy Iles. p. cm. — (Brill’s Japanese studies library ; v. 30) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-90-04-17138-1 (hardback : alk. paper) 1. Motion pictures—Japan. I. Title. PN1993.5.J3I47 2008 791.430952—dc22 2008031291

ISSN 0925-6512 ISBN 978 90 04 17138 1 Copyright 2008 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Hotei Publishing, IDC Publishers, Martinus Nijhoff Publishers and VSP. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Brill has made all reasonable efforts to trace all right holders to any copyrighted material used in this work. In cases where these efforts have not been successful the publisher welcomes communications from copyright holders, so that the appropriate acknowledgements can be made in future editions, and to settle other permission matters. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill NV provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, MA 01923, USA. Fees are subject to change. printed in the netherlands

In memory of my father

CONTENTS Foreword, by Dr. A.V. Liman Professor Emeritus, University of Toronto, Otemae University ................................................................................

ix

Acknowledgements .....................................................................

xiii

Introduction ................................................................................

1

Chapter One Contextualising Identity in Contemporary Japanese Film ..........................................................................

29

Chapter Two Problems of Communication, Identity, and Gendered Social Construction in Contemporary Japanese Cinema: the Look and the Voice ...........................................

53

Chapter Three

Families, Crisis, and Film ...............................

79

Chapter Four Horror, Thriller, Suspense: “Who Are You?” ....

105

Chapter Five Travelling Toward the Self in Japanese Film ....

135

Chapter Six The Human/Post-human in Japanese Animation ...............................................................................

159

Chapter Seven Animation and Identity: Drawing a Line Between the Real and the Ideal .............................................

185

Conclusion

Looking for the Face in the Frame ......................

213

Bibliography ................................................................................

217

Index ...........................................................................................

221

FOREWORD There is a growing interest in Japanese film throughout the world. The classical period of Japanese film, namely the 1950s and ’60s of the last century have been studied and described in sufficient detail by scholars and film experts such as Donald Richie, Audie Bock, Keiko McDonald, David Dessser, Noël Burch, Isolde Standish, Abe Mark Nornes, Minaguchi Kiseko, Sato Tadao and others. Western film theoreticians dealing with Japan can now avail themselves of an extensive body of translation and analysis, thereby avoiding some of the more obvious pitfalls which so far awaited the non-specialist observer. However, one still finds serious misinterpretations in the work of otherwise impeccably equipped film critics. Timothy Iles has the great advantage of being an expert Japanologist and at the same time being extremely well versed in comparative and theoretical approaches to film. Furthermore, he sets out to map out and describe a period that has not been studied yet in a systematic way, namely the mid-eighties of the last century up to the present. In order to discuss his chosen range of films in depth, Dr. Iles provides an extremely well informed and incisive analysis of the social background, tracing the impact of Japan’s rapid urbanisation and modernisation on the Japanese psyche and the ensuing drastic readjustment of cultural values. In chapter One the author introduces notions of the Japanese self and shifting identity, supporting his argument with quotes from authorities such as Karatani Kōjin, Tsurumi Kazuko and others. To illustrate the changing concepts of self and identity, he then provides an in-depth analysis of a 1988 film by Matsumoto Toshio, called Dogura Magura. It is not only the psychological make-up of the film, but also its narrative cinematic techniques that are discussed here in illuminating detail. Traditional Japanese concepts of self and identity were always expounded in conjunction with cultural ideals of motherhood and Timothy Iles correctly analyses the mother image in this film in the context of larger shifts of social identity, national vision and historic self-awareness. He points to the interesting conclusion of the film, which suggests that the protagonist’s extreme violence is not

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individually motivated, but is the direct result of a larger social crisis and destabilisation. Chapter Two takes the reader further into a discussion of gender, as related to this social crisis. At the same time, the art form of film itself is questioned as a male-centric art form with useful quotes from Mary Ann Doane (film as fantasy of a male voyeur versus the passively viewed female object). The film Iles chooses here to illustrate his point is Stereo Future by Nakano Hiroyuki, made in 2001. The author proposes a very interesting theory that women in Japan are equated with technology—cyborgs, androids and robots—that serves the male masters, and thus the old ideal of female subservience is continued in a different guise. The revolt of the “female toy” is again extremely violent, as she kills all her suitors. There is a certain repetitive sado-masochistic element in many of these films, a psychological trait that has always been a part and parcel of the Japanese psyche, but in more felicitous times it was kept in balance by healthier trends. In Chapter Three the author logically switches to the theme of disintegration of the Japanese family, discussing four films: Family Game, Black House, Visitor Q, and Nobody Knows. He points to the earlier films by Kurosawa, Mizoguchi and particularly Ozu, in whose Tokyo Story and other films we find a strong, almost prescient awareness of the growing generation gap and the looming family crisis. However, Dr. Iles correctly concludes that in the work of these older directors the view of the family is still basically optimistic, while in the work of these younger directors fathers are absent or irrelevant, mothers deeply, often murderously psychotic. The child ends up being the “nexus of anxiety” in the tragic farce that remains of family. Chapter Four deals with another highly interesting genre of films, namely horror/thriller films. While older tales of the supernatural (both in film and literature) were rather benign, e.g. Mizoguchi’s Tales of Ugetsu, the hidden evil that we watch in a horror film is far greater and of a more sinister kind in the work of these recent directors. Films such as Suicide Circle are not delectable trips into the phantasy world anymore, they are gloomy and grim visions of the hopeless nature of our modern world. Chapter Five presents a thorough look into the shifting attitudes toward travel and the urban space, and how those attitudes differ from the pre-modern period. The relationship between travel, nature, and poetry, while once providing a link between the contemporary world and its traditions, has changed in modern Japan. As Timothy Iles has

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indicated, now, travel maintains an urban aspect which requires the traveller to face his or her alienation. Significantly, though, travel still provides a means whereby the traveller can overcome that alienation. Chapter Six goes into a very important discussion of the traditional notions of the anthropomorhpic representations in Shinto and how these effect the current concepts of human—posthuman. Discussing the animé films of Oshii Mamoru and Miyazaki Hayao, the author makes a very valuable point: the humanising tradition of Shinto, which in contemporary Japan results in anthropomorphising even so called “inanimate” mechanical toys, can greatly contribute to taking a new look at our dualistic Cartesian views of animate/inanimate. Moving through the issue of technology and its increasing effects on our daily lives, Timothy Iles comes logically to a discussion of technology’s antiphony: the natural world and the function of space as a location for identity formation. His discussion in Chapter Seven of space as “ideal” in the works of Japan’s best-known animator, Miyazaki Hayao, is insightful and original, and brings a note of optimism to this work. But this is also one of this work’s strengths, because identity as an issue can so often become mired in pessimism and negativity. By demonstrating that a positive place for an ideal conception of identity is possible within the works of a very popular director, Timothy Iles indicates the enduring need for hope as expressed through Japanese film. All in all, Timothy Iles has written a fascinating book on a hitherto unexplored subject and he has done so in a brilliantly incisive and illuminating way. I am pleased and encouraged that this book has been published. Anthony V. Liman Professor Emeritus, University of Toronto Professor Emeritus, Otemae University

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I am more than grateful for the support, comments, and encouragement I have received from my colleagues in the Department of Pacific and Asian Studies at the University of Victoria, and for the camaraderie which exists among them. I am especially grateful for Dr. A.V. Liman for his guidance over many years, and his inspiration for ways of looking at film. I would like to thank Drs. Vivian Lee and Michael Bodden for the occasions we have had to talk about film and analysis, as well as Drs. Cody Poulton and Hiroko Noro for mentoring me so conscientiously. My gratitude to my wife and to my parents is profound. And finally, I would like to thank the directors of the films I have examined here for having created such fascinating examples of the cinematic art.

INTRODUCTION This is a book about identity, contemporary Japanese film, and the relationship between the two. While this relationship is extremely complex, this book tries not to be: rather, it tries to look in a simple way at a set of aspects about this relationship, a very narrow set, at that, and tries from here to say some simple things about a complicated issue. However, by ‘confessing’ this at the outset I do not mean to imply that the aspects which we will look at are trivial or that I will approach them simplistically. I have tried to approach the essential, social problem of the creation and expression of identity as it is addressed in cinema in such a way that the reader, who may or may not have a background in Japan, film studies, or even with this word ‘identity’ itself, will be able to see why I consider that many contemporary Japanese films deal with the issue of identity as something fundamentally problematic. I hope by the end of this study that this reader will see why I consider many Japanese films to be centrally concerned with what amounts to a crisis in the contemporary Japanese conception of identity, individuality, and the understanding of the self ’s role in society, tradition, and (westernising) modernity. Japan of course is an incredibly ‘studyable’ country, with a long history and intricately-nuanced arts, not the least of which are its visual arts. My interest here is in cinema in general but more precisely in fictional, narrative cinema, both commercial and ‘art house’, rather than documentary, educational, or more ephemeral films such as corporate or political propaganda. Further, here we will limit our discussions to ‘film proper’, that is, works conceived of and executed as organically complete entities—“one-offs,” perhaps, rather than continuing series for either television or the video market. This is purely for utility’s sake in the interest of space. There are certainly examples of continuing television series that are deeply and directly concerned with the issue of identity. Anno Hideaki’s intricate Shin seiki ebangerion (Neon Genesis Evangelion, lit., “New Century Evangelion,” 1995), for example, is an extended and powerful exploration of the individual and society, informed by Existentialism and wrapped in a post-apocalyptic ‘techtopia’. The equally interesting though in some ways less provocative series, Hagane no renkinjutsushi (Full Metal Alchemist, 2003, various directors) written by

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Aikawa Shō, too, offers an example of a popular discourse on identity, structured as an extended quest for redemption and reclamation of family, social stability, and self discovery. However, here our focus will be on cinema not as a valorisation of that medium over others but simply because it in itself offers an almost overwhelming selection from which to draw. I must at the outset say, too, that even in limiting our discussion to contemporary cinema, there are many, many more examples of films which have much to contribute to our understanding of our central issue that for many reasons must be left for another occasion. This is unfortunate but inevitable. Japanese cinema, growing from an amalgamation of imported cinematic techniques, theatre, literature, and the visual arts, itself has a history over 100 years long—and within that history has developed conventions and trends that both mirror and contradict those of other national cinemas. This is partly the result of Japan’s cultural cosmopolitanism, and partly the result of its insistence on its own ‘uniqueness’. It is not my intention here to argue one way or another about Japanese innovation or derivativeness in film—or in any other cultural enterprise!—and neither is it my intention to present a history of Japanese film. For that I highly recommend the work of Donald Richie, Isolde Standish, or Satō Tadao, for general histories; Abé Mark Nornes, for a history of Japanese documentary film; Kurosawa Kiyoshi, for a history of the horror film; or Iwamoto Kenji for a discussion of cinema and nationalism. Neither do I intend to present a study of genre. Although the films which I will use to illustrate the points of my argument all function to tell particular stories, they do so from many different points of view, utilise many different techniques, and come from many different genres, from family dramas, to horror, mystery, comedy, and animated science fiction. The point I hope to make clear by the end of this work is that the theme of ‘crisis’ in contemporary identity, which my selected examples from Japanese cinema reflect, cuts across generic boundaries to influence and inform films from every genre. That is not to say this issue influences every film—nothing does, not even the desire on the part of the filmmakers to make money. However, I do hope to demonstrate here that an awareness of the social issue of identity, of the formation and maintenance of individuated self-identity, is a guiding principle of many of Japan’s best and most acclaimed contemporary filmmakers.

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“Identity” is one of those words that everyone understands, until they have to define it. On the one hand it is as simple as the first person pronoun, “I,” as in “I want to eat, I go to school, I don’t know who you are;” but on the other hand, it is as obscure and complex a concept as a theoretically-informed, historically-limited performativity of gender, ethnic, and class consciousness can ever hope to be. Somewhere in between is the “identity” to be found here in these pages, as this term applies to an issue in contemporary Japanese cinema. This is not a study of the historical evolution of notions of ‘Japaneseness’ (Nihonjinron) or even of Japanese cultural distinctions as they have developed historically away from the models provided by China or the rest of the world. It is not a study of nationalism, and neither is it a study of the concept of ‘the nation’ itself, in the Japanese context or otherwise. Numerous works already exist which address these issues, exploring the political and national definitions of the word ‘identity’. Among these are Iida Yumiko’s wide-sweeping and astute Rethinking Identity in Modern Japan: Nationalism as Aesthetics (Routledge, 2002), and Japanese Identity: Cultural Analysis (Center For Japanese Studies at Teikyo Loretto Heights University, 1997) edited by Peter Nosco. In Japanese, there are literally too many titles to list dealing specifically with the question of Japanese national and cultural identity—this question is very much an industry unto itself, but it has its roots in the kokugaku or “National Learning” propounded by Motoori Norinaga (1730 –1801) in the 1700s. A recent example dedicated to explorations of the Japanese people through popular culture is the multi-authored Nihonjin no kokoro: genfūkei o tazunete (The Heart of the Japanese People: in Search of an Original View, Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1997), for example, edited by Tsurumi Shunsuke. It contains chapters entitled “The Heart of the Japanese People as Seen Though Film,” “The Heart of the Japanese People as Seen Though Manga,” and so on, all aiming to use their respective avenues of approach to ‘explain’ or ‘demonstrate’ an essential aspect (‘the heart’) of the Japanese in broad terms, thus arriving at a portrait of a national character. This approach, while always interesting, is perilous—and is not mine. And, finally, this is not a study of ‘identity’ per se, seeking a strict and universal definition of that slippery term applicable both within and without the context of Japanese cinema. Such a study would fall more comfortably under the oversight of philosophy, psychology, or even religion. We will propose a working definition of this term presently,

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but beyond that, this study will not be especially concerned with what the word means—only how. This study is an examination of the ways in which Japanese filmmakers have addressed a set of issues related and relevant to individuals trying to create individually meaningful lives in which they remain responsible agents aware of and sustained by, or else alienated from and rebellious against, history and tradition, both national and personal. This is the central issue behind this study: how do contemporary Japanese films and filmmakers conceive of identity and handle it across genres? The question is a broad one; the discussions to follow are also broad, but all revolve around a few central assumptions. The first of those is that—for many filmmakers reflecting a certain social attitude, at least—there is a crisis in conceptions of identity in Japan. However, to this assumption there will always be counterpoints and alternatives, either in the substance of the issue itself (i.e., there is no crisis) or else in its implications (i.e., there may be a crisis but it has readily apparent solutions). Against the filmmakers and their works which we will examine, there stand contrasting examples which present positive views of the process of coming to terms with the self—films such as Shall we ‘Dansu’? (Shall We Dance?, 1996, Suo Masayuki), Wataboizu (Waterboys, 2001, Yaguchi Shinobu), and Shimotsuma monogatari (Kamikaze Girls, 2004, Nakashima Tetsuya) all examine characters coming to accept their own eccentricities and along the way being accepted by their families, friends, and co-workers. These works present problems of identity as ‘quirks’ to be first humoured, then loved, and they do so with great humour, sincerity, and validity. Their success and popularity attest to their quality as films, but also to their functions as reassurances for a movie-going public seeking solace in the face of financially, politically, and of course personally troubled times. At root, however, these works too accept the proposition that ‘identity’ is something to be formed through some process that partakes of (or at least holds the potential for) conflict and struggle. Well, if there is a crisis, then where does it come from? This is an especially complex issue which my work here will not necessarily try to resolve. However, for at least a brief indication of some of the potential causes of this problem, I can accept what the avant-garde novelist Abe Kōbō (1924–1993) identified as a root to many of the social issues he saw Japan as facing, and which he explored at length in his work. Abe was primarily concerned with the effects of a rapid modernisation and

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urbanisation on 20th Century Japan, and saw these transformations as fundamentally alienating. As he has it, “most aspects of culture have been accumulated on top of the human relations established in rural villages. There is a discernible trend to formulate analogies of the conditions of modern existence in the structure of these rural villages, but from within this tendency, the stress or the sufferings of people living in the cities is born” (Abe, 1980: 198). As a result, “the relationship between the Other and the self has changed into something unstable and difficult to grasp” (Abe, 1980: 195). Whereas now we operate under new social relationships, our inner selves still cling to the older values. Thus there is a conflict between the self who seeks a new social relationship and the self who tries to maintain the older form. Regardless of what one wants, one still must face the new relationship, although the older self rejects it. I suppose that this has been a common literary theme forever. Whether man will survive or not is also an eternal subject, though more pronounced in our time. I think that a characteristic of modern literature is this uneasiness regarding human existence which has been superimposed on a desire for new human relationships. That is to say, there is an uneasiness as to whether the quest for new relationships is meaningful or whether human relationships are worth seeking at all. They might simply disappear altogether. That is what I am facing now. . . . Thus we communicate the theme that we are unable to communicate with each other. We terminate our communication. And that’s self-contradictory (Abe, 1974: 454–5).

This ‘terminated communication’ effectively cuts off society’s members from not only their neighbours but from a pragmatic relationship with their cultural pasts, as well, in effect alienating them from history and their fellows. From this profoundly isolated condition, it is difficult to develop a whole, encompassing, and stable sense of self-identity. The next of the assumptions under which this book will operate is that there is a set of criteria by which we may define “identity” and allow that definition to hold across the various films and genres we will encounter in this study. Identity in and of itself has many dimensions, but as I will use the term here, it will refer to an existentially psychological condition of being a unique, that is, essentially individual person separate from the other individuals who make up the society in which one lives yet connected by a shared awareness of history, tradition, value system, and cultural experience. Of course it is true that despite the similarities of daily experiences which may unite these individuals along economic, linguistic, or ethnic

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lines, each individual will encounter those experiences in slightly—even vastly—different ways. It is with these differences that our use of the word identity begins, for it is from these differences that the individuals who will make up the subjects of our attention here will emerge as distinct characters, distinct ‘beings’—of light and shadow, perhaps, but beings nonetheless in their actions and words—who comment on the world around them. The third assumption is that identity is a product of several factors extending beyond the psychological ‘reality’ of the individual—that is, identity has both a personal and an environmental, familial, social source, and these sources are shared across cultural boundaries. This does not imply that these sources all function in the same way in different cultures, or are all understood in the same ways, but that they all exist in different social/national settings. In other words, the sources of identity are recognisable and comprehensible to people from different cultural groups. As such I have looked at some of these sources: the family, gender issues, spatial location, and so on. The issues I have chosen represent the ‘starting point’ perhaps for a consideration of the ways and places in which an individual will grow and conceive of himor herself precisely as an individual, but obviously there are important aspects which I will not discuss here. These include such explicit issues of power as political affiliation, class membership, and economic status; race and ethnicity; and education. This book does not aim for an exhaustive understanding of the ways in which cinema becomes an arena for the contestation of identity issues, nor does it aim for a critique of Japanese social structures in general or particular. As such, by necessity its scope is limited, and in setting the parameters for those limitations I have chosen some of the fundamental influences on an individual’s sense of identity at the expense of others. Perhaps it is obvious by now, but one of the guiding principles by which I have selected the areas for discussion is an understanding of identity informed by a respect for humanism—however out of fashion this -ism may be. While it may be controversial to suggest that an individual still has responsibility for his/her individuality, it is precisely this attitude which creates the tension around identity as a problem in the films which I will discuss—despite the current theoretical climate which suggests that market and political forces dictate the choices available to an individual (through advertising or globalisation as an erasure of the local, of the particular) while still maintaining the illusion of ‘individual choice,’ the works which I will discuss present

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characters who struggle to define themselves through that very act of making an individual choice. Thus the assumption that identity is in fact possible is the fourth informing principle of this book. Moreover, despite the doubts that many of them harbour that it may not be obtainable, the films I will discuss accept that identity is in fact desirable. If they did not, there would be no ‘crisis’ to present, no problem on which to focus. Identity operates as a goal here, and a worthwhile one at that. Through their work, the filmmakers whom we will encounter suggest a simple proposition: human beings are unique, and deserve to be so. This uniqueness motivates them to create their own identities, for which they are responsible, and to which they are entitled. From Kurosawa Kiyoshi to Miyazaki Hayao, the directors here accept as valid the desire for an individuated selfhood which aims for freedom—of choice, of thought, of action, of community, of spirituality. But this selfhood is not always the same thing, and it is not always militant. It stands in different relationships to technology, to history and tradition, and to the urban space of contemporary Japan. Nonetheless, it is always recognisable as individual. How contemporary cinema presents this selfhood and in which venues it appears will be the subject of the chapters of this book, through a set of criteria moving from the personal, to the familial and social, to the spiritual. Understanding both film and ‘identity’ to be the subjects of this book, how, then, do they come together—film and a reflection of pertinent social conditions—and how will I pursue the demonstration of their relationship? In answering these questions I must state at the outset that this work is first and foremost a study of film and its thematic content, and the ways (technical, narratological, industrial) in which directors produce that content. I am not especially concerned with the reception or commercial success of any given film. The reader interested in this aspect of the Japanese film industry would do well to consult the work of Alastair Phillips and Julian Stringer, or Keiko McDonald. Also, I do not conceive of film as necessarily an accurate ‘model’ of contemporary Japan, but do I believe it to be both a comment on and a reflection of current conditions which form the basis for the ‘lived experience’ of the average Japanese person. However diligently it strives for it, film can never achieve total accuracy, can never serve as a model for a historical moment because, manifestly, it is a product of the human imagination—it is a fiction, albeit often a very persuasive, effective, and moving one. There is in film, as Graeme Turner puts it,

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a “dreamlike separation from the everyday world” (Turner, 1988: 2) which is equally part of film’s fascination and also its disqualification as a source of accurate ‘history’. Film is the result of cooperative effort, which makes it a collaborative ‘product’ in a way that literature is not but drama is. As a product, it responds to and reflects conditions around it—these may be historical, philosophical, social, political, or economic. The nature of that response, that reflection, itself can be quite mixed, but even when film aims for an absolutely realistic presentation, it always exists as a manipulated object. It is with that manipulation that this work is most concerned, for through that manipulation the director of a film is able to bring his or her attitudes, either conscious or not, to the material his or her film presents. Thus it is within both cinematic narration and historicity that the ‘meaning’ of the work lies, but first and foremost that meaning is accessible through analysis of the components from which the film and its narrative are constructed. From analysis come the materials for interpretation, which include an awareness of history and situation; from interpretation the critic ‘inflicts’ meaning on the work, but this need not necessarily be an act of violence. In my case, I have tried to avoid as much as possible ‘abusing’ the texts through interpretation, while remaining sensitive to the range of possible meanings they contain within the conditions which have made their creation possible or even necessary. In this I see every work as in some way allegorical—as telling a story about the world from which it has grown, but not telling ‘the world’ as it is. Nonetheless, this is not a study of Japanese social issues read through film. Such a study would fall under the purview of the social sciences, or history, or political science, for example, and would entail a very different set of objectives, methods, and assumptions than the ones which concern me here. Rather than using film as a means of illustrating or ‘proving’ a point in contemporary Japanese society, my aim here is to analyse film to discover within a wide range of samples certain underlying similarities. From the relationships which will emerge between those various similarities, I will demonstrate the conclusions to which I have come, primarily that the issue of identity exists as a conundrum, as a source of problematic trauma, for many contemporary directors, who weave together with their stories thematic treatments of this particular issue. Certainly it is true that society influences film and that the concerns of the times become the concerns of the artists living therein, but it

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is important to remember that artists, in whichever medium they create, do so not exclusively in response to the issues around them or to serve the needs of social scientists or historians by providing ‘data’ or records as accurately as possible. Artists create art, and do so for the fulfillment of their own artistic aspirations. This is true in all the arts, and in film, too, however ‘industrial’ or ‘popular’ an art form it may be. In fact in many ways it is precisely the industrial quality of cinema which makes it inappropriate as a subject of social scientific analysis—it is not ‘real’, in the sense that narrative cinema aims to tell a mediated, manipulative, ‘artificial’ story. Our concern here is with the process of those stories which contemporary Japanese filmmakers tell through their chosen artistic, ‘industrial’ medium, and the thematic content with which they choose to load them. This content and these stories are not amenable to experimentation, as a proper scientific subject must be, but they are accessible to analysis, from which we may arrive at interpretation. This is an approach based on textual analysis informed by narratological concern for structure, relationship, and combination of narrative elements. Thus rather than interrogating film for its reflection of social reality in order to support the construction of a social portrait, this study will utilise historical conditions to facilitate an understanding of why certain films operate as they do. It will concentrate its attention on the structural features of the films under consideration in order to analyse the ways in which they construct their narratives, the better to conceive of the interpretive possibilities of those narratives themselves. And although I speak here of ‘structural’ elements within film, this is not a structuralist approach to the texts under investigation. In fact in many ways I approach the subject matter here from an auteurist point of view, in that I privilege the position of the director as the arbiter or ultimate ‘creator’ of a film as a collaborative work of art, even though I remain fully aware of and respect the roles of producers, scriptwriters, cinematographers, actors, and the many other people whose effort is vital to the realisation of the completed work. However, my appeal to the ‘director’ as the creator of a film often stands as a type of hermeneutic shorthand to facilitate our discussion of what may serve as a ‘motivating force’ or ‘guiding principle’ for why a film takes the particular shape it does. Rather than with any given director, my interest is always with that particular shape. And so from close, textual readings of the ‘shapes’ of the films will grow interpretations not ‘predicted’ by any particular theoretical stance,

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but supported by sensitivity to the polysemic structures of the works themselves. While I do make use of ‘theory’ throughout to inform my interpretations, that use is something which the films themselves dictate. My fundamental approach is deductive. That is to say, I have not started from a particular stance, and then gathered together a collection of films, reading them strictly and exclusively through the terminologies and expectations of that stance. Rather, I have started—appropriately, I believe—with the films themselves. This study has grown from what I have noticed in my analysis of the structural and thematic components of recent Japanese cinema, and from there, into an argument which proposes that, for many directors currently active in Japan, the issue of identity is of extreme importance—as a conundrum, a challenge, a crisis, or an opportunity. As I have said, my primary concern here is with film rather than with theory; as Johannes Ehrat rightly points out, the central concern of film theory is theory, not film (Ehrat, 2005: 1). Theory does find a place here, but as a tool in interpretation, not a dictator of analytical method. This is a point I wish to make clear—my reading of film is based on the close reading of the parts of film, to discover the internal relations of those parts and the range of meanings which those relations activate or privilege. From here, theory can be of utility in creating links between the work and the world—in the interpretation of the meanings of the film. Meaning is personal, not frivolous or free, but something which is dependent upon the critic’s ability to articulate what s/he perceives within the work. It is here that the opinions, attitudes, knowledge, and experiences of the critic become important—and it is here that theory can find application, after an examination of the text’s own logic. By way of example and in order to demonstrate how I conceive of interpretation growing forth from analysis, here I will introduce two films from nearly forty years apart which each deal with an aspect of identity. These films are indicative of many things—their producers’ concerns with the function of the individual in society, the role of science and technology in the lives of consumers, intrafamily relationships as sources of personal stress, and so on—but they also represent differing approaches to the ‘problem’ of identity and its conception. These two films are Tanin no kao (The Face of Another, Teshigahara Hiroshi, 1966), and Dopperugangaa (Döppelganger, Kurosawa Kiyoshi, 2002). I bring these two films together because they are both ‘about’ identity in ways which grow from their times, but also in ways which speak to

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each other and demonstrate a changing attitude toward the themes of the works, both explicit and implicit. Structurally they are both chronologically linear narratives which follow a single protagonist through a period of personal crisis and see him (for both protagonists are male) emerge from the process of the plots with an altered self-perception. It is this ‘new’, altered self-perception which is the ‘goal’ of the works, and which allows the films to comment on their contemporaneous periods in critical ways. That the self-perceptions of the protagonists which emerge from the films are in many ways diametrically opposite is another fundamental reason for considering these films together, to prepare us for our investigations to come. As David Desser has noted, Teshigahara Hiroshi (1927–2001) approached “the question of identity . . . somewhat obsessively and unilaterally” (Desser, 1988: 77). He shared concerns with the novelist Abe Kōbō who was influenced by Existentialist individualism, and deeply suspicious of an enforced ‘community’. In partnership the two produced four cinematic adaptations of Abe’s novels, two of which in particular were highly successful. The earlier of these is Suna no onna (The Woman in the Dunes, 1964) which presents a focussed rejection of the domination of the group and its traditions over the individual and his ‘differences’. The latter, Tanin no kao (The Face of Another, 1966), as we will see, questions the process of self-identity formation as something given to or inflicted upon an individual by external forces beyond his/her control. Both of these films utilise experimental cinematic techniques and feature avant-garde scores by Takemitsu Toru (1930–1996) to create highly critical presentations of a modern Japan trapped between a still-forming contemporary reality and a traditional sense of community rapidly becoming obsolete. Straddling these two competing poles stands the modern individual as a pawn unable, despite his concerted efforts to do so, to assert his validity as a self-actualising existence—he remains a tragic figure unable to overcome the insistent claims of a ‘traditional’ value system which sees him as its property to utilise as it sees fit. Teshigahara’s films, however, do not present a solution to this individual’s dilemma; rather, they remain content to insist that the struggle for a durable self-identity is both meaningful and, essentially, possible. That is to say, at root, together with earlier Modernist works that see the individual pitted against a centralising mechanism of industrial/national control, these films accept the premise that there is an identity which a person can create for him/herself as a distinguishing, individuating project, but they maintain their focus on that process of

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struggle rather than offering a vision of the ‘complete’ individual—for this vision would in its own right be an ‘imposition’ or ‘infliction’, rather than an invitation to self-discovery. Many of the films which I will discuss in this study contest that premise, and present identity as something unobtainable in the face of a globalising ‘metaculture’ of homogenising, hegemonic corporate ideology. Tanin no kao tells the story of a man, Okuyama (Nakadai Tatsuya), whose face has been damaged during a laboratory accident. Through a psychiatrist’s (Hira Mikijirō) assistance, he has a mask constructed, an artificial though very realistic face, and learns to wear it as a new way of re-inserting himself into the society around him. He comes to develop a ‘second’ life in the mask, even attempting as this ‘new’ man to seduce his wife (Kyō Machiko). The relationship he develops with the psychiatrist is intense, allowing the film at several points to emphasise that through the ‘new’ face, the psychiatrist and society are together ‘imposing’ a new identity on the man, against which he cannot resist. The man becomes increasingly bold behind this mask of a ‘new’ personality, until, driven by desire, he attacks a young woman. The psychiatrist comes to the police office at which the man has been arrested to vouch for him; having won his temporary release from jail, the two walk away from the office. On the street, they become entangled in a crowd walking toward them—eerily, every face is hidden behind the same bland, featureless, and mouthless mask. As the crowd passes by, Okuyama comes near to the psychiatrist, and with no change in the expression on his face, pushes a knife deep into his back. The psychiatrist falls dead, while the man in apparent surprise feels his face—the mask has now become his ‘true’ face. This film is visually complex, and uses that complexity as a direct reinforcement of the plot’s philosophical premises. The film begins with close-up shots of artificial human body parts—ears, parts of faces, a forearm—floating in water, while in voice-over the psychiatrist asks whether we know what these parts are. He tells us that they are not just body parts, but an “inferiority complex in the shape of a finger,” ear, and so on. The psychiatrist tells us that these body parts are not the focus of the treatment he provides; rather, he uses them to “fill the gap in the mind.” In this way one of the key themes of the film emerges: the relationship between the body, visible and apparent to others, as a source of personal confidence or security, and society. It is not the body per se that provides these things, but its appearance to the surrounding society. ‘Errors’ or deficiencies in the body create corresponding

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problems in one’s own self-perception—the sense of selfhood depends on the position and appearance of the individual in society. This idea is reinforced in the images which play out while the film credits roll: following the title, we see a line-drawing of a schematised face, which fades into two drawings of faces side by side, which give way to two passport-type photographs of a man and woman, which give way to exponentially increasing numbers of passport-type photos, the first two becoming lost in an ever-increasing number of tiny photos. This montage gives way to a crowd scene of numberless people seeming to sway in time to the waltz score which plays over the titles. From here, we cut to a side-view of a person talking—but this view is given as an x-ray, the bones of the jaw and skull perfectly visible as they move. This person is the protagonist, explaining to the psychiatrist how his face has been damaged in a chemical explosion. The montage procession of photographs is also important in setting the theme of the film, for here we see the potential of the ‘crowd’ to absorb and ‘erase’ the individual. The diminishment in size of the individual photographs corresponds to a diminishment in the importance of each particular one in creating the overall mosaic of ‘society’, here given as the complete set of individually unrecognisable faces. The transition from still photos to moving images of a real crowd emphasises that the film is ‘about’ real issues in the social setting around it, but the appearance of the artificial body parts and the x-ray of the protagonist as he speaks equally emphasises the aesthetic manipulation and consciousness of the director of his subject matter as a comment on, not an accurate record of, ‘real’ conditions. This is borne out by the resistance of the film to show us the ‘real’ face of the protagonist—we never see his wounds, never see his face without either bandages or mask. As the protagonist tells his wife, he had once thought of the face as nothing more than a thin layer of skin, but having lost his through the accident, he comes to realise it is the “window to the mind; without it there is no communication.” This character is typical of those in Abe Kōbō’s fiction, which focuses on an individual forced by circumstance either to confront or defend his individuality. Here, we have a protagonist who, through an accident of his own causing, has come to realise the importance of social recognisability in defining one’s own position. Throughout the film, this character subjects himself through the will of the psychiatrist to a reconstruction of his identity—but this identity, as the psychiatrist tells him, comes from the mask, the ‘social face’ which the world around him compels him to wear. Technology plays a part in

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this, of course, in that it is technology which permits the creation of a thoroughly life-like, latex mask for the wounded protagonist. Nonetheless technology here is a danger, for it serves to submerge the man’s ‘true’ face behind the artificial and imposed identity which only the film’s final act of violence permits him to ‘make his own’. In contrast to this, technology plays an equally important though far more ambiguous role in Kurosawa’s Dopperugangaa. The story here is very simple, and the script far less self-consciously philosophical than was Abe’s for Tanin no kao. We meet a small handful of characters in two separate stories which merge early on. The first of these is Nagai Yuka (Nagasaku Hiromi) who, while shopping (at the slyly named “Unidy” home centre), is surprised to meet her brother, Takashi. She offers to drive him home, but he waves her off, wordlessly. By the time she arrives at their apartment, he seems already to have returned. However, on the television that he is watching as she walks through the door, she hears a news report of police on the scene investigating a suicide near where she had been shopping. The telephone rings, and a voice asks her to identify a body which the police believe to be that of her brother. She insists a mistake has been made, that her brother is home; but when she calls for him, there is no reply. Afterwards, she sees him again, repeatedly—he is now busily at work on the novel he had always planned on writing, and seems to be happily living with her. The second story introduces a group of researchers in a high-tech firm. The team is led by Hayasaki Michio (Yakusho Kōji), a brilliant scientist whose previous inventions provide the bulk of the company’s income. Their latest project is the development of a mechanised chair (which they refer to as a jinkōjintai, an ‘artificial body’) capable of performing nearly every action which its rider imagines—a thoughtcontrolled wheelchair equipped with mechanical arms capable of translating thought into movement through sophisticated computer software. However, this project has hit an impasse—either the software or the hardware does not perform as it should, and the team faces the pressure of a rapidly-approaching deadline to correct its flaws. The amount of pressure is obvious in the behaviour of Hayasaki, who becomes irritable, aggressive, and even abusive toward his colleagues—who seem particularly forgiving and honoured to work with him. From this pressure, however, something happens—somehow, Hayasaki ‘splits’. He discovers that a second ‘Hayasaki’ has come into existence—looking, dressing, speaking, and thinking exactly as he does.

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However, this second Hayasaki does not behave as he does; instead, he is calmer, more confident, and has a better sense of humour toward his life, his work, and the impasse which his project has hit. Here the two stories meet, as Hayasaki seeks out Yuka, about whom he has heard from his assistant, Takano (Satō Hitomi). The two discuss her brother, who, she tells Hayasaki, acts quite differently than he did before—he is withdrawn, uncommunicative, and devotes his time to writing. As Hayasaki and Yuka develop the beginnings of a friendship, she confides in him that she preferred her brother as he had been. Hayasaki promises to look into the matter, but unbeknownst to both, the ‘second’ Hayasaki takes matters into his own hands, casually murdering the brother and burying his body at the seaside. This begins a spree of killings by the second Hayasaki who uses the money he takes from his victims to fund the ‘first’ Hayasaki’s research. The ‘first’ Hayasaki insists on his resentment of the ‘second’, yet secretly accepts the money, data, and even food which the ‘split’ brings for him. He even comes to envy the second Hayasaki’s easy ability to seduce women: the awkward love affair always on the verge of developing between him and Yuka bears testament to his inability to ‘open up’ to other people, in that the ‘second’ Hayasaki has no difficulty at all in creating a physical relationship with her. It is with this relationship in fact that the film ends—after a series of confrontations in which initially it appears that the ‘first’ Hayasaki has won, the ‘second’ returns both to claim and then destroy the artificial body on which the two had for so long laboured. Having destroyed the project, the second Hayasaki and Yuka walk off together through the Niigata countryside—the first Hayasaki now dead, his ideals perhaps living on inside the second. This is very much a film concerned with personality, and with the suppression of desires which serve as subconscious motivations for conscious actions. It is in ways an opposite of Tanin no kao, in that rather than focussing on the social pressure of identity, it instead concentrates on personal ambition and individual drive. Here, too, however, we have violence as a means of ‘accepting’ a type of identity, and yet this violence is directed towards the split self as a means of doing away with that division, rather than reconciling the two opposed sets of personality traits: the responsible, industrious, and inhibited; or the confident—even arrogant—self-centred, and insouciant. Violence emerges as a solution; this is something to which we will return in Chapter Four, in which we will discuss the function of violence as something lurking beneath

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the everyday normalcy of urban Japan in films of horror, thriller, and suspense. Here, violence is not a way of unifying the self, but rather of vanquishing duality and establishing the appearance of stability. The visual presentation of the film—not its cinematography as such, but frames and borders added in post-production—reinforces the idea of a ‘split’ in the characters. The first such reinforcement comes at the very beginning, as the credits and title appear on screen. The credits seem to ‘float’ across the screen, white characters on a black ground, but each name is doubled, and each moves in different directions. Next we see a single, passport-styled photograph of Hayasaki in the middle of the screen, also on a black background, but on either side of the photo are two slightly smaller, grey-filled ‘frames’ into which the central photo divides. The two divided photos tremble and shake while the central photo fades out (all this while a musical score worthy of Hitchcock plays). As the shaking stops, the expressions on the faces in the two photos become clear—one, a grinning, devilish face, the other, a serious, disturbed one. Between the two comes the film’s title. Thus the theme of a divided self is obvious from the outset. Throughout, however, this use of ‘frames’ or separated portions of the screen recurs to emphasise the gap or ‘divide’ between these two split halves of Hayasaki—very often when the two are on screen together (driving, for example, or talking in a cafe), thick, black bars serve to keep the two characters ‘apart’, visually and thematically. These bars appear in one other of Kurosawa’s films, Akarui mirai (Bright Future, 2003), and serve the same purpose there: to reinforce the sense of separation between two principal characters. Here, the emphasis is on the division of the self into two contradictory halves, one oppressed and frustrated, the other far more confident and self-assured. Of course the behaviour of the two characters amply demonstrates their dissimilarity of personality. This ‘frame’, however, forms an immediate, visual reinforcement of their total inability to reintegrate themselves into a single unity, and highlights the pessimism in the film’s attitude toward the issue of identity as a problem. This is nowhere more apparent than towards the end when the two Hayasakis argue (in split screens) about why they had dreamed of creating the artificial body—the ‘first’ Hayasaki insisting he had done it for himself, purely for the thrill of accomplishment, the second instead hoping for “money, fame, power, and women.” In a film ‘about’ technology, as well, this use of the frame acts as a ‘low-tech’ solution to the problem of having the same actor portray two characters and having both of them appear on screen at

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once. Dopperugangaa also makes use of a more challenging ‘high-tech’ solution, that of digitally compositing Yakusho into scenes where the two Hayasakis appear, and does it remarkably well—but these scenes lack the commentary inherent in the absolute visual separation of the two characters by the frames. In this film, technology, although it holds out the promise of ‘improving’ the quality of human life by ameliorating the conditions of those afflicted by disabilities, for example, emerges instead as a source of frustration and hindrance to the formation of a comfortable community. Hayasaki’s inability to complete the design of his project creates alienating fury within him, and through this fury comes the formation of his ‘split’, his other self able to do the things which he cannot. This other self has a far greater ‘control’ of life than does Hayasaki—he is able to interact with his colleagues more confidently, to laugh at himself and his troubles more assuredly, to fulfill his desires more quickly, and to achieve his goals more completely. He is also far less inhibited by concerns for social morality, committing acts of seduction and murder with apparently equal ease. This other self, born from the frustrations of work, is able to overcome them through his ability to ridicule them, and to stand ‘on his own feet’. He has confidence in himself, a confidence which grows with every successful occasion for him to reveal to his ‘earlier’ self the depth of his abilities to fulfill the hidden dreams which that earlier self had suppressed. Thus technology both holds these two films, Dopperugangaa and Tanin no kao, together, and yet demonstrates the divide which exists between them, becoming an entrance into their critical analysis. Technology as a tool of social oppression has given way to technology as work—it becomes a promise for the improvement of individual lives, and thereby social conditions themselves, the fulfillment of which individual inabilities in turn frustrate and prevent. Both of these views of technology are valid and the fears behind both of them are legitimate—and yet neither, of course, is the final or ‘complete’ word on the issue. In Chapter Six we will explore the issue of technology in much greater detail to see how in the Japanese context attitudes toward it grow from traditional spirituality, to propose that technology offers one avenue for the expansion of the notion of community to include the human, non-human, and ‘posthuman’ alike. For now, we will leave this problem aside and say only that in these two films, technology serves as an example of the ways in which conceptions of society, identity, and self-fulfillment/self-creation have shifted in the forty years which separates their productions.

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Having now set the stage for the analytical procedures to follow, I must say a few things about the timeframe for this study, and about the process through which Japan has gone in the last one hundred and forty years to become a ‘modernised’, westernised nation. I have used the word ‘contemporary’ many times already in this Introduction, and with good reason: I have set a limit on the timeframe with which this book will deal, from roughly the mid-1980s to the present. This has not been arbitrary. These past twenty years correspond with the most recent period of ‘turmoil’ through which Japan has passed. In the last 150 years, Japan has seen several periods of sometimes devastating change, starting with the rather sudden end to the Tokugawa Era (1603–1868) precipitated by the arrival of Commodore Matthew Perry of the American Navy in 1854. This arrival ushered in an era of remarkably rapid and thorough transition, which saw Japan go from an isolated, feudal, agrarian collection of loosely-bound provinces, to a centrally-controlled, militarised, industrialised, and to a significant extent urbanised—not to mention westernised—colonial power. Within 75 years of the start of the so-called ‘modern period’ (beginning in 1868 with the Meiji Restoration), Japan controlled most of Asia and was embroiled in a bitter, bloody, and ultimately doomed World War with Britain, China, the United States, and the USSR. The period between 1868 and 1912—the Meiji Era—was the first period of turmoil for modern Japan, during which its institutions, social structure, urban centres, and mode of economic production all underwent almost unprecedented transformation. The scope of this transformation was vast but more importantly it was always a project aware of its relationship with history. As Isolde Standish puts it, “ ‘modernism’ became linked to a qualitative transformation, in that claims of progress offered the prospect of improvement on the past” (Standish, 2005: 30). Improvement here had several aspects, not the least of which were industrial. These in turn were closely connected to considerations of capital. They were also closely connected with renewed conceptions of the individual, upon whom arguably for the first time rested the responsibility for social success. “Progress, in the social context, was defined in terms of the projection of western societies’ present onto Japan’s potential future, and in terms of the individual, onto concepts such as the ‘cult of success’ ” (Standish, 2005: 30). But as I will argue, it is precisely from this ‘new’ concept of the individual and his ‘success’ that tensions in the understanding of identity first emerge. “In Tokugawa Neo-Confucianist terms, this

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conception of social progress through individual success was antithetical to the established world order” (Standish, 2005: 30). The internal contradictions of the newly-minted definition of ‘individual responsibility’ which stand in contrast to the pre-existing conceptions of those words, give rise, in literature and intellectual discourse, to great debate as to the direction Japanese ‘progress’ should take—debate which in many respects can never cease, as Japan continues to face the task of adapting to a ceaselessly changing global context. Nonetheless debate during the Meiji Era encompassed such fundamentals as the family, government’s role in guiding the citizenry, and even the relationship between the spoken and written languages, hitherto divided by archaic grammatical and orthographic rules. This particular portion of the debate of Japanese modernity is known as genbun’itchi, the ‘unification of speaking and writing’. It had tremendous implications for Japanese literature, and coupled with influence from western models in terms of subject matter, types of heroes and situations, and methods of expression, ‘re-wrote’ the literary aesthetic in powerful ways. This ‘rewriting’ still has implications for Japanese literature, which in turn influences and inspires Japanese cinema. The Meiji Era, this period of incredible reformation, has its exemplars, its intellectuals who capture its spirit; one of the greatest of these is Natsume Sōseki (1867–1916) in whose fiction we find many instances of characters struggling to situate themselves in their rapidly changing times, usually without success. Sōseki is a writer of isolation, of alienation, of the ‘modern’ individual seeking to define himself against a backdrop of traditions still evident though no longer au courant, no longer up to date. Even physically Sōseki came to embody the transitions Japan as a whole was undergoing—he lived for several years in England before returning to Japan to write and to teach at the Tokyo Imperial University, but more tellingly, he dressed himself fashionably in western suits, and wore a moustache, manifestly displaying himself as did most intellectuals of his generation as a modern man. Yet despite this external display Sōseki and his characters carried within them the tempest of change that was sweeping over their country during the Meiji Era, Japan’s first period of tumult after the Tokugawa Era’s more than 250 years of relatively peaceful seclusion. The Meiji Era gave way to the Taishō Era (1912–1926), a time of relative peace, stability, and an entrenchment of the processes of urbanisation and westernisation which saw Japan emerge as an economic force as well as a colonial power. Domestically, Japan flirted with notions of

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democracy, but also with censorship; with a growing feminist movement but also with an environmentally irresponsible industrialisation. This period too presented Japanese intellectuals with problems of self- and national conception—the very idea of the ‘self ’ as something standing in relation to the ‘nation’ was new and crucial to understanding the world which had so recently and suddenly opened up beyond Japan’s borders. This was a period of Modernism replete with all the angst that term implies—a time of centralisation, consolidation, incorporation, in which the individual, newly-made and made anew after Japan’s transition from feudal pre-modernity to the westernised modernity of the Meiji Era, found himself subjugated to the needs of an also newlymade and increasingly powerful state that clothed itself in the guise of an imperial and traditional continuity. Kinugasa Teinosuke’s film, Kurutta ippeiji (A Page of Madness, also known as A Page out of Order, 1926), deals precisely with this in its depiction of Japan as an asylum for the insane, presided over by white-coated doctors of psychiatry very much in the western vein. The most poignant scene of the film—among many, many others—comes when the protagonist, an aged custodian, calms visibly aggravated inmates by placing the masks of the Noh theatre on their angry, disturbed faces, instantly transforming them into apparently peaceful, cheerful companions. Allegorically, the scene mimics the imposition of a traditional and stable identity onto a disturbed and aggressive modernity presented as madness, in order to offer, as William Gardner writes, “a warning about the dangers of hyperstimulation and consumer spectacle while simultaneously exploiting an aesthetic of modernist speed and visual sensuousness” (Gardner, 2004: 60). This film highlights the awareness of Japan’s changing understanding of the self and the individual in relationship to the community and the nation to suggest that the inevitable result of this changing relationship is madness—“an extreme form of the interiority and alienation characteristic of modern subjectivity” (Gardner, 2004: 68)—unless the modern individual accepts the ‘mask’ of a traditional identity as an ostensible but artificial reality nonetheless capable of soothing the ‘hyperstimulated’, modern mind. This contestation and problematisation of modernity as a threat to identity fell, however, to the rising tides of censorship and militarisation of the Shōwa Era (1926–1989), a period which saw intellectuals in general either accept the national project of imperialism or else suffer an imposed silence. With the increasing intensity and hardship of the war years culminating in defeat in 1945 and the period of Japan’s occupation by US

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and allied forces came its second great period of national turmoil. The political and racial ideologies that had sustained Japan through the colonial period and the war years came to an abrupt end with defeat and with the Emperor’s declaration that he was not a living god but a simple human being—a declaration which was devastating to many who had believed in the Emperor’s divinity as a justification and compensation for their own sacrifices. The consequent period of tremendous hardship saw the reconstruction of Japan’s shattered urban and industrial infrastructure, and the renovation of her political, legal, and social institutions under often heavy-handed American guidance. Even though the American Occupation ended with the signing of the San Francisco Treaty in 1952, American influence continued till much later. This influence is apparent as a questioning of Japan’s political and social institutions in the films of such classic and masterful directors as Kurosawa Akira (1910–1998), Ozu Yasjirō (1903–1963), and Mizoguchi Kenji (1898–1956), some of whose work we will consider in Chapter Three. This period, which in many ways came to an end in 1964 with the staging of the Tokyo Olympics, led to an era of phenomenal economic growth and the return of true prosperity to Japan, to the extent that the majority of her population began to think of themselves as successfully middleclass. The shared values of hard work, personal sacrifice for the good of the company and the nation, and education for personal, familial, and national benefit, all worked in concert to create a society of peaceful, dedicated, and industrious citizens able to reflect pride in their cooperative achievements—however overly-simplified and artificially-rosy this picture may be, it is essentially an accurate one of Japan’s period of rebuilding following the years of hardship during the Pacific War and the twenty years which followed it. And nonetheless this period of prosperity was not without its critics and its rebels who challenged the supremacy of the middle class mentality of consumerist conformity and who questioned the legitimacy of the Japanese state as a fit ‘leader’ for the Japanese people. Foremost of these is Oshima Nagisa, whose work in the 1960s stands at the vanguard of an aggressively critical, socially engaged nuberu baagu or ‘new wave’ which brings the question of identity into direct contact with the political (Desser, 1988: 89). Oshima’s work is highly allegorical and unashamedly political, presenting, in Taiyō no hakaba (The Sun’s Burial, 1960), for example, a bitter denunciation of Japanese militaristic imperialism told through a group of Osaka slum dwellers and illegal blood merchants. In Koshikei (Death by Hanging, 1968), Oshima

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directly addresses the responsibility of the state in forcing a race-based identity onto its citizens, in order to expose governmental and institutional culpability for the plight of Korean nationals living in Japan. Oshima’s work, never popular domestically though always controversial and critically important, represents a high point of Japanese political filmmaking, and serves as a sterling reminder that even in times of relative national prosperity, resistance is still possible and still capable of producing enduring masterpieces of the filmmaker’s art. Japan’s third period of turmoil came hard on the heels of its newfound economic prosperity and strength. During the late 1970s and early 1980s, Japan’s economy, fuelled by an almost bottomless international demand for its consumer goods, electronics, and automobiles, became the second most powerful in the world. Money seemed to flow into Japan in ever-greater torrents, not all of which reached the pockets of the average Japanese, but sufficient to give a sense of security to many. This sense of security gave a new generation of Japanese consumers greater freedom—but also greater appetites—than their parents or grandparents had ever dared to imagine. The so-called Bubble Years, as this period has come to be known to economists and historians, were built on the dizzying though unstable foundations of a highly favourable trade surplus, land speculation and unsecured bank loans; and, quite naturally—as the economies of Europe and the United States began to experience recessionary constraint, and the economies of Taiwan and South Korea began to offer more competitive sources of manufactured goods—they came to an end, as all bubbles do, in a sudden and shocking burst. The end of the bubble years brought scandal to Japanese politicians and corporate leaders, disaster to banks and businesses, and the crushing reality of mountainous debt, unemployment and homelessness to countless thousands of Japanese on a scale unseen since the end of the war. This third period also brought an unparalleled questioning in Japanese film of the substance of existence, beginning with that fundamental aspect, identity. Even though the ‘rebellious’ years of the 1960s had seen filmmakers bold enough to question the status quo with often scathing insight and sarcasm, such as Oshima Nagisa, Terayama Shuji (1935–1983), Imamura Shōhei (1926–2006), and Teshigahara Hiroshi, the simple scale and quantity of productions since the mid-1980s that have critically resisted an easy acceptance of middleclass comfort and a conception of ‘identity’ based on consumer-centric ‘patterns of consumption’ suggests the increasing awareness of ‘identity’ as a social, moral, and personal problem among many more filmmakers now than then.

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An example of the type of filmmaker who was able to produce a focussed, effective, and yet also highly entertaining critique of Japan’s mid-1980s’ consumer-culture is Itami Jūzō (1933–1997). His first film and one of his best-known, Osōshiki (The Funeral, 1984), which I will discuss at length in Chapter One, centres on the loss of Japanese traditions in the face of westernisation and the role of the media in alternately speeding and resisting that loss. His second film, Tampopo (Tampopo, 1985), reads as an almost textbook example of postmodernist filmmaking, having a structure which repeatedly and gleefully frustrates the development of the ‘main’ narrative by branching off into wildly parodic, and only minimally connected, sub-stories and episodes, blending many different genres and narrative styles. This film in particular focusses its energies on satirising Japanese consumerism, but still presents characters—even those drawn only schematically—as psychologically intricate. As such, Itami’s work highlights identity as an issue without problematising it, and, as in Osōshiki, presents the possibility of reformulating familial/social traditions valid for the present day while maintaining a direct link with history. It is with the Post-Bubble period, this third time of transition, that this book will deal—it is from this time, whose processes of reconstruction have not yet accomplished their goals, that the future Japanese conceptions of society, self, and identity, will come. In practical terms, there are two ‘types’ of Japanese film, especially as they are seen outside of Japan: live action, and animation (or anime, as it is known popularly, even though this term can be problematic for the many different styles and production criteria it masks). The chapters to follow deal principally with live action examples, and yet it is in animation that an insistent optimism is most apparent. This study, while not strictly speaking divided into two sections, will move loosely through its discussion of live action film to end off with a consideration of two very different, though very important and influential, directors of animated films. These are Oshii Mamoru and Miyazaki Hayao, well known in both Japan and the non-Japanese world, and both very concerned with issues central to my work here. The starting point for my work, in Chapter One, is a clear expression of the crisis of identity seen as madness. The discussion here centres around Matsumoto Toshio’s film from 1988, Dogura magura (Dogra Magra), which I read against Itami’s Osōshiki in order to facilitate a situation of the problem of identity in the context of late-Bubble Economy Japan—set during the late Taishō period, the film itself is aware of its historicity, and uses its setting as an allegorical location from which

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to comment upon its contemporary era. Here we will consider different ways of conceptualising self-identity, and consider the function of inevitable generational/social transitions in spurring the necessity for an individually-constructed sense of selfhood. The problem of tradition is of prime importance in both of these films, although they present a valid and informative contrast in their resolution of this issue. Dogura magura itself is explicitly ‘about’ the search for identity and the lengths to which one generation is willing to go to prevent the next from fulfilling that search. As such, the film functions as a rich allegory for the problems of imposition and control implicit in any social situation—its setting in an insane asylum makes that allegory so much the richer. But this is first and foremost a ‘personal’ film which suggests that the search for identity is indeed the existential condition of every youth coming to terms with his/her place in the world, the family, and history. Thus as a starting point this film permits a necessary conceptualisation of identity as the meaning of that term came to change during Japan’s periods of transition; indeed, its prescience in foreseeing the arrival of the most recent period of transition is quite impressive. From this starting point I will move to another of the fundamental issues affecting the ways in which one may conceive of his or her identity—and that is gender itself. The films I will address in my second chapter share several key features, as interesting as they are disturbing. These features focus on a resistance to female access to power in contemporary Japan—that is, the films I will discuss demonstrate in different ways a resistance to feminism that emerges as an almost subversive undercutting of an ostensibly supportive presentation of capable, progressive women. Despite the sincere sympathy with which some of the films create their female protagonists, almost invariably these creations are undermined by narrative/plot elements that effectively deny women legitimate and equal access to the economic, judicial, even moral mechanisms of power. This act of undercutting is insidious for the naturalness with which the films I will discuss accomplish it—and while some of the films, notably Nakano Hiroyuki’s Stereo fyūcha (Stereo Future, 2001), consciously deconstruct images of masculine privilege and power, nonetheless the underlying resistance to an acceptance of female power is a frustrating reminder of the limits gender can place on an individual’s ability to think him- or herself into roles different from what society traditionally may have reserved for men or women. Directly related to the issue of gender is the function of the family in inculcating within its members an awareness of their potential social

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positions. My third chapter therefore deals with issues of the family, examining shifts from the immediate postwar period to the beginning and end of the tumultuous time after the collapse of the Bubble years. The primary focus of this chapter is what some contemporary filmmakers see as a breakdown in the structure of the family caused not by children losing respect for their parents, as was the opinion of immediate postwar filmmakers, but by parents abdicating their responsibilities in the home in favour of their duties at work or outside of the home. The principle films I will use in this chapter are highly critical of the parents and their overt neglect of their families, specifically, of their children, and use biting satire to highlight the almost absurd irresponsibility of these figures who should, the films themselves strongly suggest, stand as the guiding lights in a young person’s development. Once that young person has developed, however, is s/he to be on his or her own? And if so, how can an individual cope with what could be the terrifying prospect of carving out a meaningful sense of his/her own self ? These are the questions I take up in Chapter Four, reading through contemporary Japanese thriller films for an answer and focussing especially on works of horror. In that many of the sources of terror in recent works of so-called “J-Horror” stem from purely mundane aspects of Japanese daily life, there must be a common conception running through the creative imaginations of the writers and directors working in this genre which understands “daily Japanese life” as terrifying. I suggest here that it is precisely the pressures of consumerist conformity, on the one hand, and an internationalising sense of cosmopolitanism, on the other, that create a crisis in personal and national perceptions of the Japanese ‘self ’ and society—such a crisis resulting in the very ‘reality’ of Japan itself spawning images of horror, profound social mistrust, and a dread of the everyday as a potential source of violence. In this way the tragedies of the Aum Shinrikyō sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway system in March, 1995, and the Shōnen A incident from Kōbe in 1997 work in tandem to reinforce deeply-felt fears that Japan has lost its ‘innocence’, its aura (typically more imagined than real, nonetheless) of being a ‘safe country’ immune to the sorts of inexplicable violent outbursts that periodically punctuate American news media, for example. In many ways this chapter is the central one for my argument because it is in the genre of horror and the examples which I will discuss that we may find the clearest problematisation of the issue of identity as terrifying—again, I by no means intend to imply

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that every horror film from Japan in the past twenty years questions the safety of having neighbours whose names one may not know, but indeed this emerges as a source of stress and its concomitant feelings of unrest in many works of horror. The fear of the unknown—the sine qua non of any work of horror—has been displaced in contemporary J-horror by an unknown which is very, very well known: the usual, the ‘normal’, the everyday. This, to me, is disturbing, but to many of Japan’s filmmakers, it becomes an inspiration. Related to this issue of the ambiguities of everyday identity as a source of horror is a very common practice: that of trying to escape from the everyday through travel. Here, we will look at the usual trope of travel conceived of as a process of self discovery to measure the ways in which this device functions to situate the modern Japanese character on the one hand in relation to the literary traditions of that country, and on the other with the realities of urban space, isolation, and alienation. It is this awareness of Japan’s urban spaces as the site of travel that marks an innovation in the treatment of this trope at the hands of contemporary filmmakers and permits them to postulate ways in which the urban space can sustain the (post)modern individual—allowing him or her to reintegrate into the surrounding world and recuperate his/her sense of psychological, historical, and social stability. The works we will look at will range from the romantic to the comedic, but will all permit for an optimistic sense of self-integration, even self-integrity, and a reformation in the relationship between modernity and tradition enacted within the cosmopolitan, urban spaces of a transforming Japan. My sixth chapter will deal with the very nature of the everyday itself as an increasingly hybrid thing, split between the organic/biological and the mechanical/technological. As we interact more with technology to accomplish the simple tasks of daily life and to negotiate the pathways of communication, information, and entertainment, the dividing line between the biological and the mechanical becomes blurred. Japanese filmmakers working with animation and in the science fiction genre have explored ways in which this blurring boundary line comes to signify a future form of existence for the human species, and have utilised this opportunity to question the relationship between the body, the self, the tool, and the person. This chapter will explore these points of intersection as they inform Japanese animated science fiction, specifically in the work of Oshii Mamoru, to interrogate the function of the ‘posthuman’ in the conceptions of a technological ‘future form’ for humanity.

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This chapter will also explore the role played by a traditional Japanese acceptance of community as something capable of transcending the mere human component of that term, to include the natural and spiritual worlds as well, to provide an understanding of the reasons behind the popularity of animation in general in Japanese film. This split focus holds itself together through an adoption of the word ‘community’—a powerful word in the Japanese context which serves as one of the foundational principles of the Japanese social order as well as worldview. Here, it allows for a merger of the human with the nonhuman in a condition of mutual respect. This informing, foundational principle—that the human and non-human worlds are able to interpenetrate each other—resonates with the theoretical developments of posthumanism and artificial intelligence in western science, but supplies something posthumanism lacks: an awareness of non-western philosophical tradition which perceives of the human as already dependent upon a wider ‘support network’ of different modes of existence and forms of consciousness. This question of ‘forms of consciousness’ leads me to my final, seventh chapter, which will consider the ways in which animated film can present an imagination of space and consciousness conceived of as ideal. Within this ideal space the animated films of Studio Ghibli create ideal characters—characters able to demonstrate self-determination, confidence, growth, intelligence, and sincere compassion for their fellows (human and otherwise). I will end this work by considering the processes of creation which first bring about an ideal conception of the self and then place that self within an equally ideal—though manifestly artificial, obviously unreal—world. This chapter may seem naïve in comparison with some of its precursors, but that naïveté reflects the true innocence of Studio Ghibli’s ideal world, an innocence which is as profound and profoundly inspirational as the ‘everyday horror’ which motivates the creators of J-horror to present the world as incurably terrifying. But I will suggest here that a positive conception of identity is more than simply a hope in the context of Japanese cinema. It exists as a model capable of transcending the national and cultural boundaries which come to mean less and less in the increasingly interdependent, globalised world of the developed nations. The films which I have used to illustrate my argument are not the only ones in which supporting ‘evidence’ forms a substantial layer to their plots and narratives, and indeed I have used only a very small number of films from which to draw my conclusions. I have chosen films that

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for the most part are readily accessible outside of Japan—accessible both simply materially but also culturally. The directors presented here are well known internationally, even if they are not yet especially well studied academically. Despite the depth and range of scholarship on Japanese cinema, there still remains incredibly much to do. It is my hope that this work will make at least a small contribution to considering the ways in which cinema and identity influence and stand in relation to one another.

CHAPTER ONE

CONTEXTUALISING IDENTITY IN CONTEMPORARY JAPANESE FILM As Karatani Kōjin writes in his Nihon kindai bungaku no kigen (1980, tr. Origins of Modern Japanese Literature, 1993), by the beginning of the 20th century in Japan, “the illusion that there is something like a ‘true self ’ has taken root. It is an illusion that is established when writing has come to be seen as derivative and that voice which is most immediate to the self, and which constitutes self-consciousness, is privileged. The psychological person, who begins and ends in interiority, has come into existence” (Karatani, 1993: 69). This newly-born, ‘psychological person’ represents one of the formative issues of modernity in the Japanese context: the shift in patterns of ‘selfhood’ held during the premodern, Tokugawa era (1603–1868), to those of the suddenly and feverishly ‘modern’ Meiji era (1868–1912). Karatani characterises this shift as allowing “the ordinary face . . . to take on meaning” (Karatani, 1993: 57), as allowing the individual to have a sense of selfhood not dependent upon a socially-endowed position or relationship to history. But herein lies the dilemma of contemporary Japan, for that sense of selfhood, created and maintained on the one hand through individual self-identity and psychological differentiation from its neighbours, is still pulled by a ‘traditional’ value system which places it in a subordinate position to the family, the company, the society, the nation. That this should be the case is hardly surprising given Japan’s contradictory stance of embracing the modern, western world while still maintaining an image of itself as insular and enjoying an unbroken traditional heritage stretching back over more than two thousand years. It is this duality of national vision, I will argue here, that places on Japanese intellectuals a burden of conceiving of themselves in two essentially oppositional ways. On the one hand, there continues a tremendous awareness of social role and responsibility; while on the other, and especially since the American Occupation of 1945–1952, there exists increasing pressure for individuals to think of themselves as precisely that: individual.

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As I mentioned in the Introduction, Kinugasa Teinosuke’s film Kurutta ippeiji (A Page of Madness, also A Page Out of Order, 1926) takes up the theme of this contradictory split in its explicit depiction of young, angry patients in a mental hospital—a fitting metaphor for Karatani’s “psychological person” and the interiority with which s/he is formed. That film had proposed through its allegorical use of Noh masks at a pivotal moment that the imposition of a traditional ‘face’ to the problem of modernity was nothing more than a literal ‘masking over’ of the burden of maintaining a dualised self-identity. Through this film, it becomes clear that this burden is something we can characterise as neurotic. It requires the self to do two things: first, to be itself, and second, to stand outside of itself and watch its own performance, in this instance masked by a veneer of pleasant sociability. The issue here is one of an imposition, and it is this imposition of a possibly outmoded, ‘traditional’ face or surface onto a changed reality that brings with it a neurotic reaction. As this chapter will argue, the sense of imposed identity with which Japan had been trying to contend since the Meiji Era acquired added urgency with, first, the economic strengths of the latter half of the 20th century, and then the economic hardships of the late 1980s and 1990s. As Tsurumi Kazuko writes, in many societies the basic value orientation of the society as a whole does not change, or changes only slightly, within the lifespan of an individual. There are some societies, however, in which this fundamental value orientation of the overall group undergoes a drastic change within an individual’s lifetime. . . . In the latter type of society . . . the individual is obliged to abandon his basic set of values after childhood in favour of a new value orientation. . . . Japan after the Meiji Restoration . . . and after World War II happens to fall into [this] second category (Tsurumi, 1970: 4).

It is this drastic readjustment of values that brings to Japan the crisis in identity which operates on the social, macro level, but more importantly, on the individual, micro level. This process of readjustment which “provided divergent principles of adult socialisation” (Tsurumi, 1970: 4), has happened in at least two major periods, but I will argue throughout this book that Japan is still going through such a period. The growing commercialism and consumerism of post-1960s Japan coupled with an increasing sense of Japan’s global position and susceptibility to global influence brings to Japanese public discourse a set of contradictory pulls: to embrace ‘internationalisation’ (kokusaika) on the one hand, but also to retain Japanese traditions and awareness of Japanese uniqueness—this

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latter characterised by the waves of titles published under the banner of Nihonjinron or ‘theories of Japaneseness’. My focus throughout this work will be these contradictory pulls and how they can help us to understand the ways in which Japanese filmmakers have conceived of their own contributions to cinema. In this opening chapter, I will introduce two films from the 1980s, and read them through/as compelling allegories for the situation of Japan, caught between modernisation (pursued as westernisation), and a lingering pull to maintain an awareness of and respect for tradition. These two films deal precisely with the clash of modernity and tradition, but are themselves contradictory in their resolutions and propositions of this clash. I will show that, on the one hand, tradition is critiqued as inevitable violence and madness, while on the other, it is presented as the foundation for the modern family. These films, through their engagement with tradition, serve to focus our attention on the transitional processes of contemporary Japan which have led to contradictory values of selfhood as independent or integrated into a social context. It is this contradiction, I will argue here and throughout this study, which leads to the ‘crisis’ in identity I hope this work will illustrate as informing much of contemporary Japanese film. The two films are, first, Matsumoto Toshio’s playful though disturbing psychological mystery, Dogura magura (Dogra Magra, 1988), based on the novel by Yumeno Kyūsaku, and Itami Jūzō’s Osōshiki (The Funeral) from 1984. Reading through primarily Dogura magura and using Osōshiki as a ‘foil’ or contrast to the former’s comments on tradition and modernisation, I will contextualise the problem of identity and introduce ways in which that concept has undergone the sort of drastic readjustment which leads to both social and individual crisis. Given the historical situation of transition in which he lived and wrote, it is not surprising that Yumeno Kyūsaku set his novel Dogura magura (1935, tr. Dogra Magra, 2003) in a mental institution, as Kawabata Yasunari did with his script for Kinugasa’s film Kurutta ippeiji. Matsumoto Toshio maintained this setting in his cinematic adaptation of the work, which presents the struggle for identity as precisely the struggle of a madman to regain his memories of who he is. As Kawana Sari points out in her discussion of changing attitudes toward science in detective fiction in early-Shōwa Japan, film, specifically the German Expressionist masterpiece Das Kabinett des Doktor Caligari (The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, 1920) by Robert Wiene, played an important role in contributing to Yumeno’s construction of the novel (Kawana, 2005: 106–108). The

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novel both draws upon and differs from that German work, however, just as it draws upon and differs from other Japanese novels centred on ‘mad scientists’ and their patients (Kawana, 2005: 103). Matsumoto’s cinematic adaptation in turn draws upon and differs from the novel, as it alters quite a few textual components the better to suit the filmmaker’s conception of his work. Nonetheless, it maintains Yumeno’s fascination with ‘science’ as a potential source of harm, actualised in both novel and film as a destructive force warping and inhibiting the protagonist’s sense of selfhood. In this, science—rational, Western science—operates as a betrayal of social and cultural advancement. Kawana discusses this change in attitude toward science between Taishō and Shōwa Japan as an “inversion” in which “scientists come to embody a new menace to the human pursuit of happiness” (Kawana, 2005: 89). “Such an inversion not only points to the creativity of detective writers in questioning and overturning conventional perceptions of scientists and their pursuits, but also underscores the fundamental ethical ambiguity of scientific endeavour in the 1920s and1930s” (Kawano, 2005: 90). This ethical ambiguity is central both to Yumeno Kyūsaku’s novel and to Matsumoto’s adaptation, which highlights the obvious, painful, and ultimately disastrous split between the self as formed by knowledge of the (personal, cultural) past, the self as formed by modern scientific intervention. The story of the film is simple despite having a plot distinguished by several twists and turns. A young man, Kure Ichirō (Matsuda Yōji) awakens one day in a psychiatric hospital, completely unable to recall anything about himself or why he is there. The voice of a young woman, Moyoko (Misawa Eri), from the next locked room calls to him and begs him to help her, but he has no idea of how to do that, or whether the voice is even really speaking to him. The two competing and themselves only questionably sane psychiatrists, Drs. Wakabayashi (Murota Hideo) and Masaki (Katsura Shikaku), who try to help the young man regain his memory, seem only to be conducting an experiment on him—but the youth may in fact be a murderer driven to his crimes by his obsession with an ancient scroll depicting the stages of decomposition of a human corpse. While in the hospital, Kure comes across a long manuscript entitled Dogura magura, which he learns has been written by a mental patient (possibly himself ) as a record of his own growing insanity; the title comes from the chants of an obscure Christian cult, he learns, long outlawed in Japan. Anyone reading this manuscript, Kure is told, will also be driven mad. In the end, the youth

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escapes the psychiatric hospital only to confront a hallucinatory vision of himself, standing blood-soaked beneath a blood-red sky on a beach strewn with corpses, before awakening once more in the asylum cell. The setting of the film within a psychiatric hospital is important of course for it foregrounds the quest for identity as a way both into and out of madness, but more significant is the director’s use of time. The narrative is not linear—it jumps repeatedly to past events through flashbacks often made confusing by the film’s lack of consistent cinematic technique to indicate this temporal shift. Despite not using this consistently, the film does allow certain scenes to make very effective use of a visual nostalgia—tinting the image sepia for example to highlight the ‘look’ of the Taishō period. Typically however these scenes are the ‘real time’ of the film’s narration, while often the flashback sequences are presented with more natural or realistic colours. This temporal playfulness calls attention to the film’s conscious intention to highlight history, for the specific purpose of dissecting its historical period itself. The film is set at the very end of the Taishō era—specifically, in the last half of 1926, and therefore at a turning point in Japanese history. In fact the film is set at several turning points—the continuing transition from pre-modern to modern Japan, the end of the Taishō Era and the soon-to-arrive transition to the Shōwa Era. This particular transition would have been unknown to the characters of the film, but it would certainly have been known to the audience, thus adding an ironic aspect to the film itself and creating a reflexivity in those watching it. The specificity of the temporal setting calls attention to itself repeatedly in the film as the plot engages in a play of the dates September 9, 1926, and October 9, 1926, motivated by the characters Wakabayashi and Masaki both trying to outwit the other in their experimental treatment of Kure, using the dates as ways to confuse the boy’s understanding of his place in time but diegetically making it clear to the viewer that the setting is within months of the transition from the Taishō to the Shōwa eras. History is thus important to the film to allow the viewer to connect the period of the film’s setting with that of its production—itself a transitional period, coming on the cusp of the shift from the Shōwa era to Heisei (1989–present). But history is also important for highlighting the process of generational change and what can be passed on from one generation to the next. The film makes explicit reference to inheritance through the experiment which Wakabayashi and Masaki seem to be conducting on Kure. Masaki and Wakabayashi have a theory which they term shinri-iden,

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or “Inherited Psychological Condition,” which they hypothesise creates a ‘genetic memory’ within every person—this genetic memory is more than biological, it is also social and cultural, creating an awareness of race but also forming the very foundation of each individual’s identity. The experiment which both Wakabayashi and Masaki are attempting to conduct on Kure makes explicit reference to inherited traditions—they have proven through historical research the direct descent of Kure Ichirō and his promised bride, Moyoko, from a legendary artist in ancient China, Wu Ching-hsiu, who in order to save his Emperor from undue influence at the hands of Yang Kwei-fei (China’s equally legendary femme fatale), convinced his wife to allow him to kill her and paint her corpse in the various stages of its decomposition. Wu’s idea had been to awaken the Emperor to the inevitable transience of life and the folly of being passionately obsessed with ‘the ways of the flesh’, but the act of painting the rotting corpse caused the painter himself to become obsessed with murder and death—not only does he kill his young bride, but also her sister. Because Kure Ichirō has forgotten his ‘inherited identity’ as the descendant of the murderous painter, Wu, he is trapped within an insanity of amnesia but nonetheless compelled by his ‘genetically inevitable’ reality to commit atrocious acts of violence. Masaki and Wakabayashi each want to re-awaken Kure’s memory by tempting him with the scroll. This painted scroll becomes the object of Kure’s obsession and the thing which inspires him to acts of murderous violence against his mother and bride-to-be, but it also functions as one of the allegorical elements of the plot, allowing the director, Matsumoto, to foreground the explicit play of tradition and modernity here. Kure’s psychological problems, his loss of self-identity within his modern reality, are shown to be the direct result of his ignorance of and his isolation from his past—personal and familial, but also cultural and national. That the ‘traditions’ to which the film refers are in fact imported ones—coming after all from Chinese legends of a Chinese painter, Emperor, and beauty—creates the possibility to read this film as a direct comment on Japan’s relationship to its own history. Japan, like Kure, had received tremendous historical influence from China. In many ways it is indeed appropriate to speak of Japan itself have a shinri-iden, or “Inherited Psychological Condition” coming directly from China through “cultural DNA,” and as I have argued, it is Japan’s transition away from that ‘inherited’ past to a newly-formed though also imported

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cultural model which both Yumeno’s novel and Matsumoto’s film present as damaging, as a ‘betrayal’ by modern science through its willful and perverse experimentation on the new generation of Japan. This issue of generational transition and responsibility is clear when we recall that Kure’s problems are also an attribute of his upbringing—raised by his mother alone without a father’s presence or guidance. The plot tells us, however, after tantalising us with the possibility that both ‘mad scientists’ may be his father, that Masaki is in fact Kure’s biological parent. Each doctor is presented as a morally ambiguous figure concerned not with Kure as a son, but as a subject, as a patient; this is in keeping with Kawana’s identification of the ‘mad scientist’ as an emerging trope in early Shōwa fiction (Kawana, 2005: 89). Masaki exposes Wakabayashi as virtually a ghoul obsessed with death, while in turn being exposed as a psychiatrist fixated on fame and willing to use his own son to achieve it. The critique of the figure of the father is obvious and as we will see in Chapter Three, looking specifically at fathers in the Japanese family, the implication is clear that the father has abdicated his responsibility as a moral example for his children. Of course Dogura magura does not present the image of the mother as completely free from ambiguity, as well. While for the most part the film presents positive images of the mother (Kobayashi Kaori)—typically in black and white stills highlighting a nostalgia for the “good wife and wise mother” idealisation of early-modern Japanese womanhood—an extended dream sequence presents an incestuous attraction between son and mother. In the dream, Kure plays while his mother sews. Through the open neck of her loose kimono he is able to catch a glimpse of her exposed breast—at this moment, she pricks her finger, causing herself obvious pain, a drop of blood forming at the wound. Kure comes to her to suck the blood, then cradles his head in her lap, a contented look on his face as her hand plays with his hair. This is a corruption of the way in which a child receives a ‘healthy’ sense of security from his mother. As Okonogi Keigo writes, When a baby suckles at his mother’s breast, he looks into her eyes. He sees there himself, reflected in those eyes. He sees that his mother is watching over him with profound affection—that is to say, at this moment, the baby realises himself to be the object of his mother’s affection. In other words, through his mother’s glance, comes the foundation of the baby’s healthy self-love (Okonogi, 1992: 260).

But between Kure and his mother pass both sexual ambiguity and an intimation of violence through the drop of blood. After licking

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the drop and cradling his head, Kure looks up at his mother’s face, only to find himself staring at a rotting corpse. It is this association of violence, corruption, maternity, and sexuality which lingers over Kure in his obsession with the scroll painting of his distant relative, but it is also through this association that Dogura magura critiques the role of the contemporary mother as a figure of indulgence in the development of Japanese youth. However Dogura magura’s central focus is not on the role of the parents in creating the crisis of identity of Japanese youth; rather it is on that crisis itself and its wider social and historical sources. The issue of instability which Yumeno and Matsumoto in turn problematise in Dogura magura stems from the explicit issue of transition—of time, social structure, national vision, and the role of the individual. This is a specifically historical issue, as becomes clear from a brief description of Japan’s premodern past. Japan, for most of its history, was a feudal country in which networks of clans formed alliances extending from the local to the provincial and to the ‘national’ level—I use national here with reservation, for, until very late in the 1800s, Japan had no true conception of itself as a ‘nation’ as that term is typically understood. Rather, the principal islands making up the Japanese archipelago were populated by people who felt allegiance or kinship with the other inhabitants of their particular region, and while there may have been considerable overlap in many of the cultural, spiritual, military, and linguistic practices of those regions, there was no conception of a unifying homogeneity extending from those regions to the national scale. Linguistically, considerable variation existed even between fairly close geographical areas—this regional dialectical variation in the Japanese language still exists, to the extant that someone from Osaka, speaking the Kansai dialect, will have considerable difficulty communicating with someone from the Tohoku (Northeastern) area, speaking the Tsugaru dialect. Each region had its own festivals, laws, shrine system, and, typically, its own ruling clan, which stood in some type of power relationship with other clans from both within and outside of the region. This power relationship determined the local and crossregional alliances which in turn determined the relationship between the local, more or less powerful clans, with the lines of nobility and with the emperor’s family. So fluid were these relationships that in the early 700s, one of the first texts written in Japan, the Kojiki, or Record of Ancient Matters, sought to schematise the system of nobility by creating a mythical line of descent for all the various aristocratic families, from

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various offspring of the two principal founding deities of the Japanese islands, Izanami and Izanagi, through their daughter, Amaterasu, the Sun Goddess (whose lineage descended to the Imperial family). One of the effects of this schematised lineage system is to highlight a defining feature of Japan’s premodern, feudal social order: it existed as what scholars term a ‘dividual’ society, in which each member of society receives his or her sense of identity precisely from his or her role and function within that society. In other words, the individual is predicated upon the very existence of the society—an individual in isolation is not only cut off from his or her society, but from the very source of his or her own self-conception. This is one reason why banishment of (certain types of ) criminals or high-ranking courtiers too powerful to execute was such an effective method of punishment in premodern Japan. Genji, the principal character and eponymous ‘star’ of Murasaki Shikibu’s (c. 973–c. 1014) Genji monogatari (Tale of Genji, c. 1000), for example, suffered banishment when rival factions at court gain the ascendancy with the appointment of a new emperor, and languished at the fishing village of Suma till being pardoned and permitted to return to court. This episode in Genji portrays Genji as living in complete isolation from the world—but in fact he received messengers regularly and lived only a few dozens of kilometres from the capital! Nonetheless, banishment, removal from a sustaining and defining social order, cast the offending individual into a nebulous purgatory of undefined selfhood, characterised by a loss of self-value as a corollary to a loss of social value. In many ways this is one of the conditions of modern Japan itself—banished from its past and traditional self-conception, and it is certainly the situation of Kure Ichirō in Dogura magura, as an allegorical representative of Japanese youth. I’ll return to this point throughout this chapter and the ones that follow, but for now it’s important to bear in mind the radically different methods of self-conception between premodern, feudal Japan, and the modern, heavily western-influenced nation that stands in its place as a substitute that has never quite completely effaced its former model. As the chief of the psychiatric hospital, Dr Wakabayashi tells Kure in response to being asked to tell the amnesiac who he is, unless he recalls that for himself, any identity given to him will be meaningless. Identity is thus something that must have a personal reality—and this becomes the guiding principal for not only the film but for my discussions that will follow. Identity here is the existential, psychological sense

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of who one is—it is the indivuated expression of desire operating as a motivating factor for the person who sustains through that expression a relationship between desire for the future and situation in the past. Dogura magura explicitly refers to precisely this view of identity in its use of the past as something from which Kure Ichirō is isolated; cut off from his personal past by his amnesia, he is unable to define himself in his present. Matsumoto overlays this personal past with a national one, though, by repeatedly emphasising the cultural roots of Kure’s shinri-iden and their allegorical implications for contemporary Japan. The director plays with issues of transition from that past cultural model to an emerging one based on scientific rationalism—but the film’s plot shows that very science to be harmful to and heedless of the well-being of its subjects. They are not the beneficiaries of its progress but rather the material for its experiments. Kure’s crisis has two sources: his isolation from self-knowledge, but also the deceitful manipulation of his self-conception by forces of science powerful beyond his own abilities. In the face of this ‘double-pronged’ attack, Kure as an individual is incapable of resisting the onslaught of transitions both temporal and ‘cultural’, as the stages of his ‘self formation’ surely are. His acceptance of his identity as Kure Ichirō, the murderous amnesiac who has inherited a genetically-inevitable predilection for violence, comes as a breakdown, the very moment at which he knows himself to be insane. In this, Dogura magura’s conclusion to the dilemma of identity is purely pessimistic—and that is why the film ends as it began, with Kure awakening in a madman’s cell. Kure remains the trapped, manipulated product of an inherited cultural ‘identity’ and a rational ‘science’ which sees him only as an experiment. ‘Identity’ as such is impossible; it is a failure, a catastrophe standing as an unguided transition from one set of definitions to another. The pessimism of this view comes from the impossibility of the individual to take creative responsibility for his or her own existence, as Kure himself could take responsibility only at the height of madness. The individual, Yumeno and Matsumoto tell us through this work, is always the product of factors external to him- or herself. Classically, Descartes expressed the opposite to this in his dictum, je pense, donc, je suis, “I think, therefore I am,” which insists that the cognition of cognition is itself a prerequisite for a cognition of one’s own identity. This becomes a tautology, but a meaningful one, especially in Japan, where such simple issues as pronoun choice become complicated by considerations of social relations between speaker and hearer—by

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a cognition of one’s social existence. Using the same dictum from Descartes, Sato Kumiko argues with considerable panache that such a simple equation does not operate in the Japanese language, because: “I think, therefore I am” supports the Christian fantasy of the equation between the subject of enunciation (I, the enunciator himself, which can never be enunciated—your eye can’t see itself !) and the subject of the enunciated (the agency of act, of thinking). The Japanese subject model . . ., on the other hand, does not enunciate “I” because Japanese language usually does not take the subject, “I” or other pronouns to form a sentence. This requires the enunciator to suppose the listener of enunciation (“you”) to suppose and know that the un-enunciated word (“I”) is “your you” in the mutual dual supposition, that is inferably “I.” The “you of you,” a surplus that cannot be reduced to the fantasy of the simple “I” or the self, requires the imaginary locus that ultimately undertakes everyone’s “you.” . . . [T]he ultimate undertaker (“depositeé”) is the Emperor, not a person or a function but a purely empty locus that does nothing and thus embodies everyone’s subjectivity by becoming present absence. Compared to the Western subject who becomes a subject by [opposing himself to a concrete Other], the Japanese subject is imagined as a purely relational reference of you to you, which requires the absence per se at the top of the depositing pyramid structure (Sato, 2004: 351–2).

One approach to self-identity in Japan, sensitive to the still-present memory of Japan’s feudal social past, thus emphasises “the importance of being responsive to the voiced and unvoiced feelings of others” (Tobin, 238), that is, makes the “self ” highly relativised and something which is to be voluntarily suppressed in specific situations. Addressing this notion as ‘traditional’ and ‘Japanese’ is problematic, however, in that it is not exclusive to Japan, and neither is it exclusive to the premodern period, something said to have ended in Japan in 1868 with the restoration of the Emperor Meiji to political power, and the subsequent quest for modernisation (which meant Westernisation in many ways) upon which the country embarked. This period, too, was marked by a crisis in the definition of ‘the individual’ and the individual’s place in society—it is not surprising therefore that the Meiji Restoration and the following Taishō period saw not only tremendous intellectual activity around these questions, but also a tremendous resurgence in the popularity of the ghost story and other literary works of horror, by such writers as Akutagawa Ryūnosuke and Edogawa Rampo, for example, as a way of conceptualising the trauma of social change on an individual level.

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Another vision of Japanese self-identity emphasises its fluidity and interdependence: The Japanese notion of humans is most succinctly expressed in the two Japanese characters for humans, which combine to form the term ningen: the character for nin means humans and that for gen means among. [This] vision of society does not consist of atomised individuals. Instead, ningen is dialectically defined by both humans and society. . . . Such a society consists of interdependent individuals (Ohnuki-Tierny, 1990: 207).

This fluidity and interdependence permit a ‘traditional’ Japanese conception of selfhood wherein “a good person is one who knows how to modify his or her self-expression and behaviour according to varying contexts” (Tobin, 1995: 246), and wherein the notion of identity is political according to a relational arrangement of social hierarchy inherently different from one that develops in a non-feudal social structure. The contradiction between the globally “sold” version of individuality—complete with its own internal contradictions—and the relational Japanese attitude toward individuality, provided the seed during the Meiji era from which grew the dilemma of modernising, urbanising Japanese society, pulled as it was in opposite though equally powerful directions. From this dilemma sprang revolutions in literary expression, but also such early cinematic works as Kinugasa’s Kurutta ippeiji, for example, which dealt, as I have mentioned, with the split between the perception and reality of the self, allegorically through the inmates of an insane asylum. It is from this same seed which springs Dogura magura’s narrative of a loss of history as a loss of identity, and its setting also within an insane asylum. Japan’s relational attitude toward identity is antithetical in varying degrees and in varying circumstances to the Western valuation of an “atomised” individuality, but importantly, it has implications for the consumer age, in which the very conception of relation must contend with questions of authenticity, of the brand, of fashion. Contemporary notions of self-expression, and hence of self-identity which accompany them, amount to a “hallmarkisation of feeling” (Tobin, 1995: 249), in which personal feelings are expressable through such banal consumerobjects as pre-wrapped gifts from department stores. This indicates the arrival of “an era of postindividualism” (Tobin, 1995: 249), in which individuals are encouraged to “define and express [themselves] through the accumulation and display of items of cultural capital” (Tobin, 1995: 253), in which the commodification of feelings “is used

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to control and diminish the intensity of . . . emotions” (Tobin, 1995: 253), and in which the resulting excessive, consumerist mediation of self-expression becomes “a symptom of the malady of postmodern emptiness” (Tobin, 1995: 233). It is with this emptiness that Dogura magura plays, presenting its protagonist, Kure Ichirō, as empty of his past and present, but compelled by the social forces around him (for which Drs. Wakabayashi and Masaki stand as a direct representation) to seek to fill in that emptiness. This “emptiness” is presented as a lack, a loss of the foundation upon which the self can be constructed and supported in a meaningful, social context and therefore something to be resisted, but here that resistance is seen as a symptom of psychiatric malaise. The emptiness and its understanding as disease result in a shifting focus, a referential approach to identity which creates at the same time a freedom to explore new types of identity or modes of being—and yet a tremendous sense of instability, a profound pressure to ‘rediscover’ the reality of the individual as connected to his past. It is not surprising that this issue should arise in Japanese film in the late 1980s, the close of the Bubble Years but also the period of postmodernity, the rise of plurality and the celebration of the fragment. Dogura magura presents its characters as destabilised, as cut off from the linearity of their pasts and even, through its ‘play’ with narrative chronology, as cut off from the flow of contemporaneous time of the film’s setting. This destabilisation is purposeful to enable the film to maintain several interpretive levels, commenting on Japan’s past periods of transition while equally commenting on its present, but also allowing it to problematise identity in a politically astute way. Destabilisation of the self is one characteristic of postmodernity. Mediated communication enables us to encounter many diverse people representing different social enclaves and ethnic or religious backgrounds. In this way, it challenges the validity of singular perspectives and calls into question the hegemony of rational choice and the belief in one truth or univocal judgment. . . . Self becomes multivocal as we carry a number of voices with us. Individuals, then, may find that they no longer have a central core with which to evaluate and act, but instead find themselves ‘decentred’. Decentredness is also linked to a sense of dislocation, not only in the sense of being strictly tied to physical space because of mediated opportunities but also in the way self may be mobilised and dispersed (Grodin and Lindlof, 1996: 4).

In the Japanese context, the sense of unease stemming from the destabilisation of the self is not necessarily ‘new’, in that the self has

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traditionally been a flexible entity able to shift its relational definition to adapt to changed situations. However, for a community which has traditionally seen itself as ‘homogeneous’, ‘closed’, or in some way univocal, the “destabilisation” and “dislocation” of the postmodern condition can be seen as directly challenging to the notions of Japanese homogeneity, univocality, and identity—rooted in place—which collectively make up the discourse of Nihonbunkaron, or Nihonjinron. These terms designate discussions and analyses of the “set of characteristics that supposedly separate the Japanese from other national or ethnic groups” (Befu, 2001: 5), claiming the “central premise that the Japanese are a homogeneous people . . . which constitute a racially unified nation . . .” (Burgess, 2004: no page). The theories of the uniqueness of Japanese culture (Nihonbunkaron) or the Japanese people (Nihonjinron) require a shared value system, way of life, and sociocultural identity, one that is traditionally stable, enduring, and located within the Japanese archipelago (often within specific regions of that island group, the various areas of which themselves demonstrate a ‘hierarchy’ of authenticity, from a peak in the Kansai, centred around Kyoto, to a trough in Hokkaido or Okinawa), and so provide a framework wherein the individual may receive sociocultural support for his or her own search for a personal identity capable of deriving its own stability from that of the ‘national character’. While Japan has for the past 20 years espoused an ‘internationalist’ (kokusaika) perspective, and has a marketplace to a great degree open to international goods, the effect of ‘internationalising’ Japan has been to bring Japan out into the world, and to “ ‘include’ foreigners by locking them into a particular category of difference” (Burgess, 2004: no page). As national culture increasingly becomes ‘world culture’—that is to say, a homogenised, exported ‘Western’ or ‘American’ culture—the challenge of maintaining a distinct, local identity becomes so much the more problematic, and for Japan, enamoured as it has been with a mythic ideal of itself as in some ways closed off, isolated, or unique from ‘world culture’, this issue is especially troublesome. It is with precisely this issue of maintaining a sense of cultural continuity in the face of generational, technological, and social change that Itami Jūzō’s Osōshiki (The Funeral, 1984) deals. This film tells a simple story: the father-in-law (Otaki Hideji) of the protagonist (Yamazaki Tsutomu) passes away suddenly, and his wife (Sugai Kin) and daughter (Miyamoto Nobuko, wife and favourite leading-lady of the film’s direc-

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tor) plan his funeral. Along the way, the family members reaffirm their love and commitment to each other; the husband has and ends a messy affair; and the widow begins to face the task of living alone. This simple story holds many opportunities for exploring the subject of change, and it makes good use of them to highlight ways in which Japan is moving both away from and yet also towards a value system the film presents as ‘traditional’. The first occasion for this critical comment comes at the very outset, when we meet Inoue Wabisuke and Amamiya Chizuko, husband and wife protagonists, respectively. They are actors filming a television commercial for a brand of sake, but this commercial itself both parodies and highlights the presence of ‘traditional’ Japan in the film. The commercial set is that of a pre-modern, wooden ryōkan, in which Wabisuke is seated, clothed in traditional hakama. Chizuko enters, clothed in a dark kimono. She pours a flask of sake for Wabisuke, who is startled and disturbed by her appearance—through a gimmick, an optical trick, the commercial presents Chizuko as enormously enlarged, several times larger than life, while Wabisuke in contrast appears miniscule in comparison. Of course the television commercial is using both its set and this gimmick as its visual ‘hook’, its device to attract the attention of the viewer. Semiotically, however, the set and the visual distortion play an important interpretive role in the context of the film. The set, immediately identifiable as pre-modern Japan, signals the contrast between the chronological period of the commercial and that of the diegetic time of the film. This contrast foreshadows events later in the film and introduces one of the themes to come: that of the function of the past within the present, and ways by which that function can be fulfilled. The set also highlights the people who occupy it—this is where the visual distortion of their relative sizes operates as a parodic foreshadowing of the roles of the men and women throughout the film itself. As the film progresses and plans for the funeral come to pass, it is the female characters who emerge as capable, responsible, emotionally resilient, and strong, validating the way in which Wabisuke and Chizuko’s relative sizes appear in the commercial and opening the possibility of situating this work as feminist. Ultimately, however, Itami’s handling of the film forgives the men for their various foibles—Wabisuke comes to regret the affair he’s had (though perhaps equally out of repentance and embarrassment over the behaviour of his lover), and Kikue, the widow, comes to realise how very much she’ll miss her late husband

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despite the life of bickering they’d fallen into before his death. The film is ‘humanist’ rather than ‘feminist’, but it bases its view of modernity firmly on the ground of visuality and transition. By this, I mean that Itami has used visuality—the visual medium of cinema—to present an image of modern Japan growing out of and learning from Japanese traditions passed on through that self-same medium of the moving image. Zvika Serper has demonstrated how important “principles of traditional Japanese aesthetics” are to Itami in his project of using juxtaposition to create eroticism in his two best known films, Osōshiki and Tampopo (Dandelion, 1988) (Serper, 2003: 70). The aesthetics on which Itami draws are the “use of dialectically opposing characters and actions originat[ing] in the Japanese traditional theatre” (Serper, 2003: 73). He employs them in Osōshiki to juxtapose the cinematic image of ‘the present’ against the nested cinematic image of ‘the present as past, as record’ in order to highlight continuity, both temporal and cultural, between what Japan was, is, and will be. This is apparent in the ways in which ‘film’ resolutely shows itself throughout this work. I’ve mentioned the television commercial which begins the film as an example of Itami’s highlighting of a pre-modern time juxtaposed against a ‘present’ capable of using the past as a ‘gimmick’ or device, and thus proposing itself as humorously ‘fond’ of that past. ‘Past’ here is the subject of parody, nothing more than a means to an end—that of selling a product—but as Osōshiki develops, the relationship between past and the visual medium of film begins to change. As Wabisuke and Chizuko prepare for the funeral, they realise they do not know how to behave at the ceremony—they do not know how to greet the mourners, how to express gratitude at their presence, how to show their grief, how to conduct themselves. This is hardly surprising—few people make a habit of attending funerals or of studying etiquette, after all. Instead, however, of turning to colleagues for advice, or of seeking information through print, the couple purchase a video instruction manual for proper funeral decorum. Of course as actors they may feel an affinity for video rather than for other means of acquiring knowledge; nonetheless watching them watch the video impresses us with their process of ‘rehearsal’, very much as if they were learning lines for their next project. It is not my intention here to suggest that they are somehow cold or heartless—their sorrow at the father’s loss is genuine. Turning to the medium of film as a repository of ‘correct’ patterns of behaviour, as they do, begins to change the function of both the past and of film in the context of maintaining a connection

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with the traditional in a technologising, modernising Japan. Film holds the past—the past holds meaning, both emotional and practical, for the present—and together they hold a key to an indigenous, cultural identity which otherwise may be lost. That the past and its traditions are indeed in danger of being lost is apparent through Wabisuke and Chizuko’s consternation at realising they do not know how to behave at the funeral—though not especially young, they are definitely children of post-war Japan, and so are representative of what can be called Japan’s first truly ‘modern’ generation, the first generation to be born into a Japan occupied, dictated to, and restructured in its own image by a foreign power. Hardly surprising at all then that this couple has lost a direct, tangible link with the traditions of their country, but so much the more important for that link to be preserved through the medium of film. It is through this medium, too, that Wabisuke and Chizuko preserve the record of their father’s funeral. As the family comes together to arrange for and to hold the funeral ceremony, coworkers of Wabisuke film them in 16mm black and white. Itami incorporates this footage directly into Osōshiki, as both a touching glimpse into the process of recording family history, and a cinema verité-styled comment on the role of film in history in a broader sense. This footage, with its grainy, archaic ‘look’, is reminiscent of early news reels capturing for posterity the events of Japan’s transition to westernised modernity. It serves the same purpose for the family—that of capturing this event for their own posterity, and of creating a link between the (future) lives of the family’s children with their own past. This film-within-a-film is important for this ‘personal’ reason, but more so for what it allows Itami to suggest—that through preservation, the present and the future both can maintain an awareness of the foundations upon which they stand, and that those foundations, those traditions, are and will remain necessary for a solid, well-functioning individual able to fulfill his or her social and familial roles. That ‘the family’ has been the foundation for the individual and for Japan’s conception of itself is an historical reality which I will address in Chapter Three. Here, it is sufficient to borrow a few words from Takakusu Junjirō who, in a 1906 article in the International Journal of Ethics, wrote that In Japan, the family system leads to mutual succour and mutual cooperation on the part of all who are connected. Parents help children and children parents. Elder brothers help the younger and the younger help the elder. The honour and glory of the house are the first concern of

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chapter one all. If there is want in one section it is made up by another. And these families gathered together into groups, make a village, and groups of villages infinitely multiplied make a corporate nation. To be sure, this principle tends to foster a spirit of borrowing and dependence, but it also makes possible some of the finest fruits of national patriotism and family devotion, so that we Japanese look back for 120 generations to the founder of our empire, Jimmu Tenno, and feel that ever since we have all been one people (Takakusu, 1906: 102–103).

It is not film, of course, which has sustained this self-conception of the Japanese as ‘being all one people’ for so long, but Itami in Osōshiki uses film as the medium which will carry forward that feeling of connection to a traditional past within that basic social unit, the family, which he valorises in his work. Dogura magura also addresses the problem of tradition and its role in sustaining or creating an individual’s self-perception, in two ways. The first is through its relationship to history as I have shown, and its presentation of a loss of history as a loss of self-identity. The second is through its use of costuming and the relationship between clothing, gender, tradition, and modernity. There are an equal number of principal male and female characters in the film: Drs. Wakabayshi and Masaki, and Kure, are matched by Kure’s mother, Aunt Yayako (Enami Kyōko), and Moyoko, but the costuming of each set is quite different. The male characters typically appear in yōfuku, western-styled clothing, while the women are consistently in wafuku, Japanese clothing, either kimono or yukata. Visually, this rigid restriction of the clothing of the male and female characters sets up a division of tradition and modernity along gender lines. Of course this partakes of the historicity of the work and reflects the reality of the period—Japan’s transition to a ‘western’ nation was led by men who typically wore western suits in public, while women were effectively excluded from most of the discourse of modernisation. Significantly, the film’s violence is directed primarily against its female characters, and this too is a comment on historicity, presenting women as specific victims of the consequences of Japan’s transitions. Here, however, costuming also addresses the problem of global homogenisation of culture by highlighting the violence towards characters presented in obvious ‘traditional’ clothing at the hands of characters in obvious ‘western’ garb: global homogenisation is literally ‘killing’ the indigenous, the local, and the traditional. Tangential to this exposition however is the film’s comment on the validity of a unique local culture

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as a basis for self-identification—of all the characters who express any sort of individuated self-hood in the film, those who are most assured of their identities are Kure’s mother and aunt, visually rooted in the costumes of their culture (and in the case of the mother, rooted too in the actual locale of her home—the film presents her only in her home), and Dr. Masaki, the principal proponent of the theory of shinri iden, or inherited psychology—and so the doctor most able to appreciate the power, importance, and influence of history and tradition on the formation of a person’s own sense of identity. This comment of the film’s on the function of clothing in identity speaks to the function of fashion on an international scale in the process of globalisation, and criticises the willingness of some to accept the trends of fashion at the expense of a legitimate self-expression. In an age defined by hyperconsumerism and an exponential growth in the types and significance of the simulacra which feed that consumerism, and increasingly internationally homogenised trends in popular culture and brand-name fashion, “brand names, whose very dynamic conveys both instant obsolescence and the global provenance and neoexoticism of the world market” ( Jameson, 2003: 108), the concept of individuality as defined through either a conflict or a relation with the Other must undergo a fundamental revisioning. This becomes an issue of identitification of the self with something larger than the self, and for many in consumer-oriented societies, that “something larger” is no longer a tradition grounded in history, but fashion. Fashion calls “upon young people to use differentiation as a means of achieving conformity and vice versa, [thus setting] up a contradiction which presents itself as being reconcilable only through continued consumption” (Cameron, 2000: 187). Identity becomes more an awareness of a pattern of consumption than a consciously determined way of differentiating oneself through rationality, sentimentality, or even through nationality. Through fashion and its accomplice, consumerism, “young people are . . . actors in a real-life urban drama in which the prioritisation of the aesthetic leads to a subtle balancing act between conformity and differentiation” (Cameron, 2000: 179). Personal choice in consumer goods, retail outlet, or brand becomes an emblem of personal worth, wealth, belonging, and a proof of personal existence—consumerism and fashion “allow the wearer to display his or her own authenticity” (Cameron, 2000: 180) which ironically derives from a purchasable commodity.

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This domination of the transience of the marketplace over the voluptuousness of the carnival, to paraphrase Bakhtin, extends into the cultural arena, as well, where the consumption of art, literature, or music replaces critical appreciation or creation—and where the success of any given film, for example, is measured more by the retail popularity of its tie-in merchandise than its artistic merits. Cinema, and its sibling television, are at once indicators of the pervasiveness of a globalised, homogenised culture based on consumerism—“eBay is certainly the right word for our current collective unconscious” ( Jameson, 2003: 108)—and a powerful venue for a critique of that culture. But cinema, by virtue of its very popularity and the perception of accessibility which is the corollary to this quality, is particularly well suited to serving as a vehicle for social criticism. It is through this medium that Dogura magura is able to create its compelling allegory of contemporary Japan as still undergoing the process of transition from a traditional and historically-aware culture to a globalised, westernised one which leaves its young trapped in a dilemma of self-incomprehensibility and self/historical-ignorance. Dogura magura, unlike Osōshiki, is far from optimistic at its close that this dilemma can find any sort of easy solution. In fact, the plot is quite the opposite, presenting as it does Kure’s final flight from the asylum— abandoned and in a state of extreme though sudden decay—towards his own hallucination of himself as a mattock-wielding killer. Here the film presents all youth as inevitably having to destroy in order to discover their identities, to come face to face with their ‘true selves’ in ways which may shock them as much as the social order around them. Dogura magura presents Kure as someone whom Masaki and Wakabayashi seek to guide but only for their own purposes. In order for Kure to free himself from the self-serving influences of these older generations, he must reject them, something he does in the most unambiguous way: through violence. As I will show, however, the cinematography of the film prevents the audience from fully accepting this character’s choice as its own, even while it demonstrates the inevitability of Kure’s actions given the contradictory and manipulated pulls on him from his situation. While narrative film has fewer techniques for establishing a sympathetic relationship between itself and its audience than does fiction (without resorting to such devices as the voice-over, for example), the techniques it does have are effective and recognisable. The first of these is the relationship between the camera and the subject of

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its gaze—‘sympathy’ is typically something that comes from a close proximity between camera and character. This is something which Dogura magura’s camera resists, presenting Kure from usually nothing closer than the middle-distance, and typically from a slightly elevated position, frustrating the possibility of approaching this character as an ‘equal’ or surrogate for the audience within the frame. Instead, Dogura magura forces the audience’s gaze into that of a dispassionate observer, mimicking the gaze of a psychiatrist toward his patient. This is not to say that the film validates the position of the psychiatrists Masaki or Wakabayashi—indeed these two characters themselves are only rarely presented in anything closer than middle-distance. However the camera’s stance here actively works to prevent an easy familiarity between the audience and the protagonist, Kure, as it also works to frustrate the acceptance by the audience of the psychiatrists’ view as its own. This issue of character’s point of view is another of the techniques by which film is able to create a relationship between audience and character, but here, too, Dogura magura firmly resists allowing a relationship to develop. There are very, very few character point of view shots in this film, which far more frequently limits itself to presenting views including the character, views of the character, rather than the character’s view. Even when the film presents a glimpse into one of Kure’s extended periods of delusion (while he imagines himself delivering a lecture to a classroom of entirely-oddly clothed students despite in reality being locked alone in his room), the camera shows us Kure within the frame, within the room as a participant, instead of showing us what Kure may be seeing from his own point of view. That is, the camera remains distant from Kure and allows the audience to understand the extent of his hallucinations without sympathetically ‘excusing’ or participating in them. A very rare exception to this typical patterning of point-of-view shots, however, comes at the very beginning of the film, before we first meet Kure upon his awakening in the psychiatric hospital. After the title and credits we see a point-of-view shot of a woman being strangled—hands extend from the bottom of the frame up to the woman’s throat centred on screen as she writhes in apparent agony. The hands appear to belong to the person watching the strangulation, whose view is presented by the camera as its own. The scene fades out in a blur as the next shot begins, also appearing at first as a blur, coming in to focus to reveal a ceiling lamp shown to us from Kure Ichirō’s point of view as he awakens. This rare use of character point of view given to the audience

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as its own serves to heighten the question of identity here not by emphasising the relationship between the audience and the characters but on the contrary by problematising it—the film begins precisely with two questions, “Who?” and “Why?”, questions which are only partially answered at its close. By the end of the film the audience may have an understanding of who Kure Ichirō is—but not a definite conclusion—and yet the question why he is remains a puzzle—why have the doctors treated him as only a subject of experimentation, why has his isolation from his past been necessary, why has it resulted in the violence which the film presents as inevitable? Explicitly, the film refrains from answering these questions, leaving their solution to the level of allegory and interpretation, and yet the viewer is left with the clear understanding that it is precisely this isolation from history caused by a westernisation of daily life that is responsible for creating the tensions in Japanese youth (as represented by Kure) which compel them to violence and the madness of self-ignorance. Produced in 1988, Dogura magura stands at the edge of Japan’s phenomenal economic prosperity of the Bubble Years, and therefore at the beginning of the time frame I will explore in more detail in the chapters which follow. As a film which criticises Japan’s contemporary period through an allegory of its past, it is a very successful indictment of the problems caused by contradictory national images and social value systems motivating contradictory individual patterns of behaviour, here shown to result in madness and ultimately violence as a way of escaping from the contradictions of coping with an unknown identity formed without solid historical foundation. This film is pessimistic but within the context of its understanding of contemporary identity formation in Japan, rightly so—its premise that without a profound sense of historical/social continuity, identity is impossible, is persuasive. The individual, Matsumoto’s Dogura magura suggests, must not stand in isolation from his past and his society, for when he does, he is lost—Dr Wakabayashi’s insistence that Kure must remember himself for his identity to be meaningful means that he must remember not an imposed identity but an organic one, one that grows within a specific context which itself is necessary for the fullest understanding of the identity of the individual. In some ways this premise is rooted within a cultural determinism which is problematic for its air of essentialism, yet at base it retains more than a small measure of legitimacy. Itami’s Osōshiki too accepts this premise and affirms its legitimacy, and more-

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over, brings to this conclusion a tremendous optimism and security. The self does not arise in a vacuum, and despite the responsibility the individual retains for his decisions and his actions, the formation of that individuality occurs within a precise situation which has implications beyond the level of the personal. Thus Kure Ichirō remains responsible for his violence and for his crimes of murder, but the blame for those crimes, the film insists, lies in a project of modernity which has abandoned Kure and all like him to a life devoid of historical context. It is from this abandonment, this project and its consequences, that Japan’s crisis of identity comes, and it is to manifestations of this crisis in other works from Japan’s contemporary cinema that I will now turn.

CHAPTER TWO

PROBLEMS OF COMMUNICATION, IDENTITY, AND GENDERED SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION IN CONTEMPORARY JAPANESE CINEMA: THE LOOK AND THE VOICE In this chapter, I will discuss the issue of gender as a factor in identity formation, and suggest that in the context of Japanese cinema, ‘gender’ is often understood as a device to maintain the privilege of masculinist hegemony. Of course, it is a platitude to say that often film serves as a reinforcement of attitudes towards power which ascribe to men the responsibility for public leadership and control. Cinema, although capable of critiquing this attitude toward gender and power, typically and historically in Japan and elsewhere reinforces it. In so doing, cinema also reinforces gender as a determinant of the range and types of choices available to an individual in the process of identity formation, by prescribing a set of choices as ‘appropriate’ or not based on sex. Thus cinema becomes complicit in the ‘crisis’ I am arguing exists in Japan by reinforcing a paradigmatic definition of ‘identity’ related intimately with gender, and resistant to the possibility of change. Doing away with gender as a determinant of the things an individual ‘can’ or ‘cannot’ do in a social context is a goal, I believe, of humanism in general and feminism in particular. Without imposing this as a goal to which Japan itself must strive, I will argue here that it is a goal to which some Japanese filmmakers do aspire. Their relative ability or lack thereof to imagine this goal in the context of their works becomes a mechanism for reading film and gender as interconnected in the process of identity. Those filmmakers who resist the status quo and offer an alternative vision—often literally created through the visuality of their films—stand as a contrast which illustrates the general condition of the Japanese film industry, and highlights its possible responsibility for potentially maintaining restrictive imaginations of gender roles in the wider social setting. This chapter is not about gender in Japan, per se, but rather about the presentation of gender and its relationship to identity—possible or impossible—based on cinema’s reflection or critique of social norms.

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In order to demonstrate my point that Japanese filmmakers are often complicit in an implicit denial of female freedom in identity formation, I will structure this chapter around an example from a female director whose work stands in thematic and visual opposition to many ‘mainstream’ films. This director is Kawase Naomi. I will focus here on her film, Sharasojyu (Shara, 2003), which uses a distinct visual style and presents both male and female characters themselves distinct from many visions of masculinity and femininity in other films which I will discuss. Here, I will focus on Kawase’s thematic presentation of gender as a real but ultimately unimportant aspect of identity through the visuality of her work. Growing out from my discussion of this film, I will discuss several contrasting examples which resist female empowerment or autonomy, in order to demonstrate the part film plays in perpetuating a social attitude itself culpable in limiting individual growth and emancipation—in short, in limiting the process of an individual’s creation of his or her identity. Although this chapter will focus on gender in cinema, I will not specifically address definitions of masculinity or the issue of masculine privilege. This issue is certainly vital, but in many ways the history of Japanese film is itself the history of “masculinist cinema.” As such, I prefer here to concentrate on Kawase as an example of a filmmaker able to offer a viable visuality opposed to a dominant or ‘mainstream’ one, and through her work approach other films which deal problematically with gender. For the reader interested by the discourse, works such as Kam Louie and Morris Low’s Asian Masculinities: the Meaning and Practice of Manhood in China and Japan (London: Routledge, 2003) represent an excellent starting point for a discussion of some recent problematisations of ‘masculinity’ in Asia in general. Through the work of Kawase Naomi, however, this chapter will address the issue of a ‘masculine visuality’ as the historically dominant mode of visual representation to argue both with and against Mary Ann Doane and other feminist critics who see “the simple act of directing a camera toward a woman . . . [as] a terrorist act” (Doane, 1981: 22). I will propose here that while indeed Japanese film has accepted the dominance of the ‘male gaze’ and as a result has capitulated to a denial of female involvement in social power and identity, nonetheless cinema is capable of formulating a different ‘visual poetics’ based on equality and inclusion in the processes of power. Further, Sharasojyu as a film presents a very interesting use of ‘voice’— that is, while one of the principle issues which I will explore in this

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chapter is the limitation of women’s ability to speak, to formulate a ‘message’ independently, the female characters in this film are able to articulate themselves often more eloquently, consistently, and completely than are the male ones. In this way, Kawase Naomi, as a female filmmaker, has reversed one of the ‘polarities’ of contemporary ‘masculinist’ cinema to demonstrate the potential of women to be self-aware, compassionate, and committed members of a vibrant, inclusive society. In contrast to the example Kawase gives here, many of the films I will discuss in this chapter maintain a discursive ‘silence’ which they impose on their female characters, both reflecting and influencing the viability of a female voice in the broader social context from which they grow. Thus, in contrast to these mainstream works, Kawase’s feminist example stands as a brave model for a reconfigured film structure capable of countering gendered limitations on self-conception. In general I hesitate to bring Western critical theory to the study of Japan for the danger of essentialising an object of inquiry and valorising ‘outsider’ knowledge over ‘insider’. As Judith Butler expresses one manifestation of this danger, “the urgency of feminism to establish a universal status for patriarchy in order to strengthen the appearance of feminism’s own claims to be representative has occasionally motivated the shortcut to a categorial or fictive universality of the structure of domination, held to produce women’s common subjugated experience” (Butler, 1999: 5). Nonetheless the study of film in so far as it is itself an imported art form with a set of technical, historical, and aesthetic conventions which Japanese filmmakers adopted almost entirely and with only little indigenous innovation (at least on the level of lens choice, framing, and other mechanical considerations, and such innovation as has occurred coming relatively recently) requires sensitivity to theories developed in European and North American academic settings. In this chapter, dealing as I will with issues of gender inequality inscribed in the visuality of the films I will discuss, I will make use of early feminist film theory to illustrate my argument that cinema has been complicit in the resistance to conceptions of female equality. I will draw primarily on the work of Laura Mulvey and Mary Ann Doane, two seminal scholars whose ideas still offer validity in the context of Japanese film studies. Although many more recent scholars have brought insights to film in general, the state of Japanese feminist film studies is still relatively young. For example, Japanese film still awaits the type of feminist analyses which Indian film receives in Jasbir Jain and Sudha Rai’s Films and Feminism: Essays in Indian Cinema (Delhi: Rawat

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Publications, 2002), or which Rey Chow brings to Hong Kong and Chinese film in Primitive Passions: Visuality, Sexuality, Ethnography, and Contemporary Chinese Cinema (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995). These two scholars, Mulvey and Doane, and feminist film theory in general therefore have much to offer to the arena of Japanese feminist film studies. I will also, however, use Kawase’s Sharasojyu to demonstrate some of the limits of that theory and to show ways in which Japanese cinema is indeed capable of creating a ‘feminist visuality’ which in turn is capable of informing a process of feminist or gender-neutral identity construction. Sharasojyu, while very much about the problem of the ‘look’, is also (and primarily) a graceful, even lyrical exploration of love, communication, and family, set in a residential district of Nara, Japan’s first capital and one of its oldest cities. Nonetheless, this is not a film driven by plot, and not even necessarily by character, but rather by cinematography itself and the creation of a space in which the audience may participate as fully as the characters—granted, as spectators, but spectators whose intimacy with the characters is almost familial: warm, supportive, welcome, and vital. The story is simple: Shun (Fukunaga Kohei) and Kei (Yamamoto Masashi), brothers, are playing in an empty printing shop. Kei runs off through the peaceful residential streets, followed closely by Shun, but as Kei rounds a corner, Shun loses sight of him. Kei has disappeared, and never returns. A few years later, Shun is now a high school student, in love with Yu (Hyōdo Yuka); Shun’s mother, Reiko (Kawase Naomi), is pregnant, very close to term; and Shun’s father, Taku (Namase Katsuhisa), is busy with the community organisation, planning for the fourth-annual Basara festival—a local celebration, involving dancing, costumes, and a parade, and, as he says, held “to give everyone the chance to shine with all they’ve got.” One early summer morning, a knock comes to the door of Shun’s home: Kei’s body has been found in a building under demolition, and the police require Shun’s father to identify him. From here, the family members must each come to terms with the reality of Kei’s death. While they do this separately, they also come closer together as the Basara festival approaches, then passes. The family finally arrives at a deep sense of their shared lives as Reiko gives birth, surrounded by her family, to a baby boy. This is very much a film about community and the functioning of the individual within the social dimensions of a person’s life. There are many scenes of the characters together, with other family members or

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friends, but few shots of them alone, and those shots that do present characters alone are much shorter than those showing them within a group. In this way, while Sharasojyu is also a film about individual identity, it always situates that identity within a larger context—and that context is formed of the community around the characters. The context is also formed by tradition, something which emerges throughout the film in many quiet moments, but especially during the Basara matsuri (festival), as a source of great security and strength, a supportive ground upon which the construction of a modern, connected, and confident identity can take place. The interplay between Yu and her mother, Shōko (Higuchi Kanako), foregrounds the theme of identity, when Shōko reveals to Yu that in fact she is her aunt, sister to her father who died when she was very young. That Yu accepts this revelation as a fact—important though it may be—that cannot change her feelings for Shōko, whom she continues to think of as her ‘real’ mother, highlights the necessity of emotional security in creating an awareness of the self. This emotional security which Yu receives from Shōko sustains her, but this feeling of support and ‘rootedness’ is something which Kawase’s cinematography presents from the very opening. Throughout, Kawase presents sequences of long, unbroken shots, which track around and behind the characters—the camera is handheld, almost never tripod mounted, and thus moves in a very natural way as it follows the characters. In many ways this film’s cinematography is the exact opposite of that of Ozu Yasujirō, one of the great stylists of the classical Japanese cinema, whose camera remained fixed at exactly three feet above the ground in the majority of his films, and which never tracked, tilted, or panned to follow the action within a scene. Here, however, the camera is typically held at shoulder height, and moves with something like an awareness of its own motion—the handheld camera is not a “steadicam,” is not equipped with a gyroscope to counter its shaking and vibrations, but rather utilises those shakings and vibrations to foreground the ‘living’ quality of its gaze as it moves throughout the scene. The takes, too, are quite long—the opening sequence, for example, telling of Kei’s disappearance, takes just under eight minutes but is composed of only three shots. Long takes and self-consciously handheld camerawork bring the audience into this diegetic space as more than merely passive spectators, but the ‘look’ of the camera in no way fetishises, objectifies, or sexualises the characters as I will demonstrate it does in my discussion below of Anno Hideaki’s Love and Pop (1997)

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or Ishii Takashi’s Furiizu mii (Freeze Me, 2000), for example. Rather, this look gives us an insight into the emotional conditions of the characters Yu and Shun by echoing in the audience the often reticent, hesitant shyness of these two. This camerawork serves to root or situate the characters very firmly within their lived spaces—the residential district of Nara, their homes, their rooms. Again, the opening sequence provides a good example of this. As Kei and Shun run off from the printing shop where they had been playing, they weave through the streets of their home town, moving from one side of the street to the other, touching objects as they go: a fence, lamppost, car, garage, a shop door. This act of touching, of reaffirming the solidity of the things they touch, is a way of reaffirming their belonging, their familiarity with these things. The camera, which follows the two, seems also to participate in this act of touching, by letting its gaze linger on the objects it passes, as it lingers on the two boys as well. Later, the camera circles other characters, lingering on them as they go about their routines—meeting with friends, having geta mended, walking home from shopping. I can describe this effect best by resorting to personification—it is as if the camera is indeed a living entity moving within the diegetic space of the film, and bringing with it the audience as invited and cooperative beings. This is a ‘wandering’ camera, and through Kawase’s decision to allow the camera to move in this way, she has inscribed into the ‘look’ of her film a type of identity. The question remains, however, as to whose ‘identity’ the camera presents to us. Typically we might expect a camera to present through point-of-view shots the ‘identity’ of one of the characters, or a ‘neutral’ identity of a disinterested observer. Kenneth Johnson argues that “when we witness wandering camera, we witness cinematic narrative discourse at an initial, enunciatory level that reveals traces of authorial activity” ( Johnson, 1993: p. 49). Further, wandering camera is a unique aspect of cinematic discourse. The value of camera movement within a single shot is normally that of serving character mediation. Its ‘natural’ present tense is normally subordinated by its placement in the narrative’s past tense (via editing). When the camera movement of a shot does not support its mediating role, when it is ‘allowed’ to flaunt its present-tense existence in the face of the narrative’s past tense, then the camera wanders, sometimes appropriated as a ‘semi-presence’ in the story world. But in its purest form, it wanders in the diegesis, having no logical place in the story. When the camera so wanders, we become aware, because our ‘classical’ expectations have been disrupted, of a foreign presence. This is the presence of an authorita-

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tive, narratorial agency, revealing a slant that not only contributes to the nature of the story, but also provides enunciatory sites from which we might infer film authorship ( Johnson, 1993: pp. 55–6).

Thus we could assume here that this moving, drifting camera presents us the director, Kawase’s, own ‘identity’, and in many ways this is justified. After all, it is the director as the ‘authoritative, narratorial agency’ who is ‘responsible’ for what the camera presents, and for which point-of-view it captures. Here, however, throughout the process of presentation, the camera seems always to maintain its own identity: it resists entering into the perspectives of the other characters, resists giving us their point-of-view or reverse point of view shots, and resists ‘insisting’ upon the ‘authorial presence’ which Johnson argues is that of the director. Instead, it gives us its own point-of-view shots, its own perspective of the characters it follows and its relationship to the diegetic space of the film. This is nowhere more apparent than in the opening sequence, in which the camera appears gradually to “come awake,” or to “find itself ” in the printing-press store room near where the two brothers are playing. The camera tilts upward, and slowly turns about the room, lingering on shelves of equipment before moving out into a walkway, seemingly following the off-screen sounds of Kei and Shun until it finds them. It then follows the two brothers as they run through the streets of residential Nara. There is little explicit “direction” here—little ‘contrived’ or ‘constructed’ in the look of the film. The camera truly simply seems to ‘wander’ through the structure of the printing shop, until it ‘encounters’ someone interesting. In this way it facilitates an emotional entryway into the characters for the audience, and facilitates the audience’s visual participation, by minimising the ‘ownership’ of the gaze and its encoding, conscious or otherwise, as either ‘masculine’ or ‘feminine’. This camera, moving from close-up to medium-distance, also only rarely gives us a character’s face front-on, typically filming from the side, behind, at an angle. Thus while the characters are firmly situated within the space in which they live their lives, the camera—and here too personification is the best way of describing the cinematic effect—remains a separate entity, always present to observe, but never obtrusive into the interiority of the characters—never presumptuous or assumptive of their positions. This is a respectful camera, one that recognises the privacy of the characters’ innermost selves, and one that is willing to recognise the very existence of those innermost selves even while it places them within a group. We see this as the camera presents

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Shun’s mother, Reiko, at prayer with a group of women seated in a circle around a chanting, Buddhist priest. As the characters clasp and turn between them a large string of rosary beads, the camera circles them, moving closely among them, focussing on their faces and their devout though obviously pleasant solidarity. Each of these women is a separate person, an individual with differences which the camera shows quite distinctly: different glasses, different hair, different wrinkles, different voices, but each is a necessary component to this prayer circle—from the youngest to the oldest, all have a part to play in supporting and turning the string of beads. The camera recognises this duality of the characters and celebrates it in this sequence which lasts only a few minutes—short as it may be, it is a metaphor for the community around these characters and for their places in it. The awareness of these characters’ lives is captured and presented with tremendous persuasive power by this camera, here functioning far more as a living observer than as the creator of an artificial world. And, like a living observer, this camera too lives here in this residential neighbourhood, with its narrow streets, its old, wooden buildings with their sliding, wooden doors, steep, wooden steps, small rooms with tatami-mat floorings. This is a traditional setting, though very contemporary, and the reality for the majority of Japanese living outside of the trendiest cores of Tokyo or Osaka. The houses here are close, the streets through which the characters walk are narrow, the atmosphere is homey, welcoming, and familiar—in this place, this camera tells us, identity is not a question: it is a fact to be accepted because part of a history. It is a fact which these characters accept, as Yu accepts that her mother is really her aunt: matter-of-factly, with equanimity. Identity, through this supportive camera, grows from the place and the people around one, and gender, while a biological fact, is not a social barrier to participation and acceptance. It is important, too, that throughout Sharasojyu we see men who are silent, or men who are ineloquent when it comes time for them to express their innermost thoughts. This is most apparent at two emotionally charged moments in the film. The first comes on the morning of the discovery of Kei’s body, years after the disappearance. Shun has overheard the conversation between his father and the police officer come to report the discovery, and is on the point of leaving the house, when his father asks him where he is going. In silence, Shun tries to leave, but his father restrains him. The two struggle—not violently, not with malice, but simply with intensity as Shun resists his father’s efforts

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to keep him at home. The mother enters the hallway, and learns what has happened. She, too, holds on to Shun, who gradually begins to calm down, till his parents release him and he walks to the rear of the house, obviously overcome. This scene is virtually silent; what passes between father and son is only a series of fragmented and clipped phrases. The second moment comes soon after, when the father speaks to Shun about how he himself has been able to sustain himself in the years since Kei’s disappearance. His ‘solution’ is to realise that he’s “thought about it, and some things should be held on to, but other things should not.” This ‘revelation’ is delivered too in fragmentary sentences, but nonetheless Shun accepts what his father says, and the two seem to bond, overcoming their awkwardness. These instances of ineloquence stand in contrast to some of the exchanges between female characters we observe. While conversation between father and son is broken, disjointed, and filled with pauses, in contrast, when Shōko tells Yu of her birth, she is able to articulate her story with tenderness and warmth. This is not to suggest that the exchange between father and son is without emotion—just the opposite is the case, and it is that very emotion which seems to rob the father of his power of self-expression. I mean to say that Sharasojyu in both its visual quality and its use of speech and the power to articulate oneself reverses the formula I will discuss below as typical of Japanese film, which usually privileges a ‘male gaze’ and a ‘male message’. Here, the gaze is inclusive; Kawase has created a visual style capable of presenting both men and women with equal acceptance. Some of the features of this ‘equality’ are the balanced distance the filmmaker maintains between her camera and her subject, and the persistence with which she has that camera move about, around, and with all of her characters. No one character or gender becomes the focal point of the ‘visual pleasure’, to borrow the phrase from Laura Mulvey (Mulvey, 1975: 6), of this film, just as the voice of no one gender becomes that through which the film ‘speaks’ its message. If there is a feminist aesthetics in film capable of permitting gender to disappear, Kawase has come very close to achieving it—but it is precisely this achievement which highlights the resolutely ‘male’ gaze and attitude of the other films I will next discus in relation to Sharasojyu. Through my discussion of the gaze and attitudes of those films, I will demonstrate the ways in which contemporary Japanese cinema both projects and delimits types of ‘identity’ it proposes as appropriate for women. That these types recapitulate traditional gender roles of male

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empowerment at the expense of female emancipation is not surprising, given the still-developing state of Japanese feminism. This nascent or developmental stage of feminism remains a crucial component in the ‘crisis’ of identity this work is tracing, in that on the one hand Japanese intellectuals, law makers, educators, and many young people themselves are aware of the need for gender equality in re-formulating social discourse. On the other hand, however, social institutions, employment practices, and indeed many young people too remain under the sway of ‘traditionalist’ patriarchal attitudes toward gender conceived of as ‘natural’ or ‘self-evident’. Japanese cinema takes part in this dilemma by presenting both sides of the issue—though, far more often than not, only one side in particular. Feminist film theory began, in many respects, with the psychoanalytical, ground-breaking essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” which Laura Mulvey published in Screen in 1975. In that essay, Mulvey demonstrates the ways in which cinema has reinforced visuality as a male privilege—that of viewing the female body as object, present only for the pleasure of the male voyeur. Her argument “takes as starting point the way film reflects, reveals and even plays on the straight, socially established interpretation of sexual difference which controls images, erotic ways of looking and spectacle” (Mulvey, 1975: 6). In this, Mulvey highlights the ways in which film is a product of its socio-historical setting—beyond simply being the growth of an industry made possible by technical innovation and development, film “arose, not exclusively, but in one important aspect, from its skilled and satisfying manipulation of visual pleasure. Unchallenged, mainstream film coded the erotic into the language of the dominant patriarchal order” (Mulvey, 1975: 8). Although Mulvey is speaking of American cinema—exemplified by those films out of Hollywood in the 1930s and 1940s—the same pattern of encoding occurs in European and Japanese film. Japanese film as an ‘entity’ began in 1896 with the importation of the first motion picture cameras. “Cinema was instrumental in defining, through representations of modernity, a social aesthetic of what it was to be modern,” as Isolde Standish argues; “the United States, through Hollywood, undoubtedly had a paradigmatic function within this discourse” (Standish, 2005: 33). Moreover, the first films made in Japan were of kabuki performances—kabuki, the traditional theatre of Japan best known for its spectacular sets, flamboyant costumes, boisterous styles of acting, and for its use of male actors to portray women, the so-called onnagata performers capable, so they say, of capturing the

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essence of femininity better than any true woman ever could. The kabuki presentation of ‘woman’ is thus purely an essentialisation, but one which came to be a prescription for ways of conceiving of feminine ideality, influencing the performing arts of early modern Japan but also the visual arts, as well. Kabuki thus served as a source of ‘visual pleasure’ for an audience already understood to be male. Growing forth from a conception of the performing arts as part of the ‘male domain’ which had within them the ability to present an essentialised male fantasy of the ‘feminine’, therefore, the history of Japan’s cinema and its coding of ‘woman’ as an object of the male gaze coincides with that of Hollywood film. This makes it possible to say that Japanese cinema too has traditionally necessitated a gender division between an active, male viewer, and a passive, female, viewed (even if that ‘female’ was from the first derived from a male fantasy). Taking up Mulvey’s argument, Mary Ann Doane develops the problem of ‘male visuality’ to argue that “the cinema, in its alignment with the fantasies of the voyeur, has historically articulated its stories through a conflation of its central axis of seeing/being seen with the opposition male/female” (Doane, 1981: 22). Doane’s goal is to demonstrate the theoretical limitations of feminist film criticism which cannot overcome “the neutrality of the cinematic apparatus itself ” (Doane, 1981: 22). In doing so she argues that “it is crucial for feminism to move beyond the opposition between essentialism and ant-essentialism. This move will entail the necessary risk taken by theories which attempt to define or construct a feminine specificity (not essence), theories which work to provide the woman with an autonomous symbolic representation” (Doane, 1981: 33). To do so, Doane continues, filmmakers must re-examine “the necessity of posing a complex relation between the body and psychic/signifying processes, of using the body, in effect, as a ‘prop’ . . . The attempt to ‘lean’ on the body in order to formulate the woman’s different approach to speech, to language, clarifies the fact that what is at stake is . . . the syntax which constitutes the female body as a term” (Doane, 1981: 33–34). This is an extreme interpretation of the function of the cinematic gaze, but in general terms, it is a sound proposition. Through this, we can see cinema’s power to affect self-conception, in that the camera’s act of looking favours an actively empathetic response from the spectator of the film, constructing a self-identification of the film’s spectator with the camera’s point of view. Doane argues that “the cinema generates and guarantees pleasure by a corroboration of the

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spectator’s identity,” but I disagree with her assertion that “because that identity is bound up with that of the voyeur and the fetishist, because it requires for its support . . . the potential for illusory mastery of the signifier, it is not accessible to the female spectator, who, in buying her ticket, must deny her sex” (Doane, 1981: 22). I will argue that in some cases, cinema is extremely accessible to the female viewer. As I have shown in my discussion of Kawase Naomi’s work, there is an alternative visuality possible in the cinema hinted at by Doane as a recreation of cinematic ‘syntax’ and redefinition of the ‘female body as a term’; that it is rare highlights both its importance and the dominance of a male gaze against which it situates itself. While feminist film criticism and theory have concentrated their attentions on the ‘look’ or the gaze constituted as masculine, I will take up Doane’s implicit argument that there is another process by which film separates and codes its characters along gender lines. This, I will show, is through language—specifically, the voice, or the power to originate and articulate a message. The ‘look’ and the ‘voice’ of the characters work in tandem to highlight the gender-function of these characters. Here, I will explore ways in which this issue of ‘voice’, that is, the basic ability to articulate individual emotions, desires, and social situation, may differ between male and female characters. While this individual articulation of the self is itself problematic and forms the overall focus of this book, the differences in the ways that men and women are permitted to approach this problem in contemporary film are themselves highly important barometers of society’s ability to accept the notion of gender equality and individual self-awareness. I will concentrate the discussion here on a few key aspects of those selfarticulations: the relation between the individual and technology; the freedom to accept or reject the sexuality of the other; the opportunity to choose between career and parenthood; and the ability to interact in society as an equal participant or an observer. While historically, “the massive reading, writing, and filming of the female body . . . constructs and maintains a hierarchy along the lines of a sexual difference assumed as natural” (Doane, 1981: 24), it is precisely the task of feminist film criticism to deconstruct the received notion of what constitutes “nature” and demonstrate the ideological construction of that term, thus revealing the potential for a cinema which resists the traditional gender classification assumed by a “male gaze” or “female objectivity.” In this the project of feminist film criticism is the project of feminism: ultimately, the erasure of gender itself.

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“Feminism,” of course, is a term which carries considerable baggage. For some, it is a rallying cry; for others, an accusation; for others still, a target, but at root, it is an idea of equality. Discovering the nature of this equality is in fine the project of feminism, and the source of its internal controversies. As Judith Butler approaches the issue, the very notion of ‘gender’ as a category is problematic when “the system” which creates this category “can be shown to produce gendered subjects along a differential axis of domination or to produce subjects who are presumed to be masculine. In such cases, an uncritical appeal to such a system for the emancipation of ‘women’ will be clearly self-defeating” (Butler, 1999: 3). In such a system the very conception of equality is impossible because of the inherent assumptions of what constitutes the substance of selfhood or autonomy. From this, Butler argues, grow some theoretical conundra for feminism in general when it seeks to operate with existing definitions of masculine or feminine, when it assumes “that there is some existing identity, understood through the category of women, who not only initiates feminist interests and goals within discourse, but constitutes the subject for whom political representation is pursued” (Butler, 1999: 2). As Hayashi Fuyuko puts it, the aim of feminism is to “ change the received conception of ‘woman’ which male society has hitherto created” (Hayashi, 1988: 77). The problem is one of a received, essentialised difference between ‘men’ and ‘women’ which creates division in access to power, to representation, and to social position. But this leads to an opportunity: an occasion to approach social organisation and the fulfillment of individual potential from a starting point of support and acceptance, based neither on privilege nor prejudice. In this opportunity feminism stands as in fact the most basic of humanisms, suggesting the absolute unimportance of biological sex in any determination of individual ability or suitability for a given social function—it is, in effect, the abolition of gender. As Karen Offen puts it, feminism emerges as a concept that can encompass both an ideology and a movement for sociopolitical change. . . . Feminism opposes women’s subordination to men in the family and society, along with men’s claims to define what is best for women without consulting them . . . Feminism is necessarily pro-woman. However, it does not follow that it must be anti-man (Offen, 1988: 151).

Rather, as an ideology based on the equality of all people in terms of their worthiness to benefit from and enjoy the beauties of life, it should be truly blind to any consideration of biological sex. Thus feminism

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“makes claims for a rebalancing between women and men of the social, economic, and political power within a given society, on behalf of both sexes in the name of their common humanity” (Offen, 1988: 151). This of course is a key point—the common humanity of men and women which serves to unite them and define them as fundamentally important to one another, and to any healthy, functioning society. It is not a question of a society being economically viable—the notion of societal health encompasses security, support for an individual’s needs and dreams, as well the creation of an economically and politically stable sphere in which all of a society’s members are free to pursue their own goals while fulfilling their shared obligations. In many ways, Japan has achieved this, as have the countries of Europe, Asia, Africa, North, Central, and South America, and so on—all to greater or lesser extents have laws prohibiting in various circumstances the systemic prevention of women’s achievements of their individual goals. However, to a very real extent, it is possible to consider Japan, as well as the countries of Europe, Asia, Africa, North, Central, and South America, and so on, as failures at protecting and fostering women’s equal access to the mechanisms of political and economic power. This is apparent in even the briefest consideration of the relative numbers of men and women in positions of political or economic—or even educational or cultural—power throughout the world. In virtually every “modern” country—and in every “premodern” one—men hold by far the preponderance of power. Thus it is clear that much of the world in general is not “feminist,” and by this I mean that it does not correspond to the three criteria which Karen Offen has suggested are necessary for the applicability of that term. A feminist, according to Offen, is one who can “recognise the validity of women’s own interpretations of their lived experiences . . . as distinct from an aesthetic ideal of womanhood invented by men; . . . exhibit consciousness of, discomfort at, or even anger over institutionalised injustice (or inequity) toward women as a group by men as a group in a given society; . . . [and] advocate the elimination of that injustice by challenging . . . the coercive power, force, or authority that upholds male prerogatives in that particular culture” (Offen, 1988: 152). Following this, it is apparent that in fact Japan, in the history of its cinema, has known feminist directors—most notably, Mizoguchi Kenji, in both the pre- and postwar periods. His film, Gion no shimai (Sisters of the Gion), from 1936, represents a highpoint for feminist cinema from any country, exposing as it does the dehumanising conditions in which

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geisha lived during Japan’s early modern era. Nonetheless, Mizoguchi stands out as an anomaly—a male director truly sensitive to the aspirations of women around him, and were it not for biographical details in his life—his own sister having worked in a brothel—it is entirely possible that his films would not have presented such a consistently sympathetic outlook. Following Offen’s definition of feminism, however, it is apparent that many attitudes can be considered “feminist,” while many apparently progressive attitudes will reveal themselves to be in fact conservative of gender differences. It is also apparent that it is not enough to show women in the workforce or participating in the consumer economy for a novel or film to be considered progressive—the method of presentation is more indicative of the underlying ideological orientation of the work than its surface. That there is indeed an underlying ideology at work in popular cinema is beyond question: as the Japanese-Canadian independent filmmaker, Midi Onodera, has observed, “the ultimate power of film . . . rests in its potential to directly reflect the social morals and climate of our time . . . Mainstream film can . . . be seen as a social barometer” (Onodera, 1995: 21). Further, “film theory has argued that mass culture can be interpreted symptomatically, and that it functions as a massive screen on which collective fantasy, anxiety, fear, and their effects can be projected. In this sense, [film] speaks to the blind spots of a culture and finds forms that make manifest socially traumatic material through distortion, defense, and disguise” (Mulvey, 1993: 6). The symptom that we are considering is the widespread resistance to true female participation in the economic, educational, and cultural production of contemporary Japanese society. We are able to deconstruct the forms of popular cinema to expose the cultural blind spots, the gaps in public discourse, which overlook the fundamental exclusion of women from full social participation. As bleak as the issue of ‘blind spots’ and gaps may seem, however, as I have shown through my discussion of Kawase’s Sharasojyu, overcoming those gaps and shining light into those blind spots is indeed possible. However, precisely what do some of those gaps and blind spots ‘look’ like in their own right? That is to say, if Sharasojyu offers a glimpse of a visuality that is ‘feminist’ in opposition to a mainstream cinema, what can we find in that mainstream which is so opposite? Through the issue of look and voice I will demonstrate some of the ways in which contemporary Japanese film resists or subverts the potential for inclusivity which Kawase so eloquently creates in her work.

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One film that works very well to illustrate the function of the voice as working in tandem with a ‘male visuality’ to undercut its presentation of female access to power is Stereo Future by Nakano Hiroyuki, from 2001. This work is a comedy which weaves together several stories, the two main ones of which revolve around a struggling young actor, Keisuke, and his relationship with a beautiful young woman, Eri, who has lost her voice through a psychological trauma, and the young woman’s older sister, Kaoru, a TV documentary producer whose current project is about to be cancelled. These two women are extremely interesting from an interpretive point of view. Both are confident, competent, attractive, and technologically aware women. Their use of technology here is significant. As Mary Flanagan writes in the journal Wide Angle, women and technology form a “threatening relationship . . . Unlike issues of property ownership, the right to vote, wage discrepancies, and other calculable inequities, the use of technology by women is dangerous because it not only allows for immediate access to information, but because it is also immeasurable” (Flanagan, 1999: 77). We see both women using technology comfortably, and even—in the case of the documentary producer—more correctly than her older, male colleague. This comfortable use of technology by these women is doubly important when we consider that, very often in Japanese science fiction, women embody technological advances in the forms of cyborgs or subservient robots—as Sato Kumiko has it, “female cyborgs and androids have been safely domesticated and fetishised into maternal and sexual protectors of the male hero, whose function is usually reduced to either maid or a goddess obediently serving her beloved male master” (Sato, 2004: 349). Here, however, the female characters are able to use technology to serve their own purposes—the film thus establishes a framework which on the surface appears supportive of feminist progress and empowerment. However, I will argue that this framework is illusory, for at root, the film presents women whose function is ultimately as subservient as the cyborg maids and goddess against whom they seem to stand in opposition. This becomes apparent when we consider in detail the types of jobs the women have. The documentary which Kaoru is producing concerns the negative effects of industrial pollution on the trees and mountain forests of Japan, and despite the passion she feels for the subject and her determination to make the project a popular success, it is her role in the documentary to serve as an on-screen audience for

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the male scientists whom she interviews. Here, although she appears as driven, intelligent, and technologically capable, Kaoru is subservient to the ‘authentic’ figures of scientific knowledge—the men whom she presents through her work. This woman becomes in effect a model for the point I wish to make: it is through her voice, through the willing subservience of her independent voice, that the male and authoritative words which form the substance of the message, become audible. Woman, in this model, is but a mouthpiece for a male communication—her function is that of conduit, not interlocutor, not originator of the message, and her comfortable use of technology only serves to facilitate this transmissive function. In this, Kaoru appears quite different from a male on-screen interviewer, for she does not interact with her documentary subjects beyond nodding in agreement with what they say. Kaoru is not given the opportunity to offer an anecdote, a supporting piece of experiential evidence, a corresponding opinion. Her participation in her interviews is strictly limited to presenting her subjects, and allowing them to speak. One may argue that this is what a good interviewer should do, male or female, and there is some validity in that point. However, Kaoru’s silent nodding during her interviews indicates more than her simple polite self-constraint. She is silent precisely because of the expectation that a woman should listen to male authority. We see this very clearly when Kaoru’s supervisor (Osugi Ren) chastises her for presenting a segment without first receiving his approval. He demands her apology, visually “beating” her with his wagging finger, while she bows humbly and silently accepts his criticism. This scene, together with Kaoru’s behaviour during her interviews, reinforces Kaoru’s function as a conduit rather than an originator of a message. This is her gendered function, and one which Stereo Future cannot fully overcome. In Kaoru’s on-screen function—doubled, because she is on two screens, that of the film proper and of her own documentary—she corresponds to what Laura Mulvey has defined as the role of the female in the Freudian view of a patriarchal world. It is not my intention here to debate the appropriateness of Freudian psychoanalysis in the Japanese context; nor is it my intention to critique Mulvey’s work as bound to a particular historicity. Indeed, there are fundamental flaws in both Freud’s work and film theorists who draw upon it—primarily the problem of postulation and essentialisation as divorced from verifiable psychological experience—but nonetheless there is utility in the premise, logically and historically sound overall, that woman “stands in

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patriarchal culture as signifier for the male other, bound by a symbolic order in which man can live out his phantasies and obsessions through linguistic command by imposing them on the silent image of woman still tied to her place as bearer of meaning, not maker of meaning” (Mulvey, 1975: 6). Mulvey sees the Freudian proposal that woman is the ‘bearer, not maker’ of meaning as coming from woman’s role of “raising her child into the symbolic” (Mulvey, 1975: 6), the world of language which to classical psychoanalysis is male. Mary Ann Doane, in pursuing this issue through a critique of Michèle Montrelay, postulates that “the woman must have a different relation to language from that of the man” (Doane, 1981: 30), and that therefore “to take up a discourse for the woman . . . that is, the discourse of feminism itself, would thus seem to entail an absolute contradiction. How can she speak?” (Doane, 1981: 30). The characterisation of Kaoru very much plays into this theoretical stance of woman outside of language, ‘bearer, not maker’ of meaning in that she transmits the messages of others rather than of herself. Kaoru’s sister, Eri, however, carries this even further—rather than simply a bearer of messages, she herself is completely silent, mute and so ‘unable’ to generate a message of her own. Eri, the other central female character in the film, works in a fairly responsible position, as a translator. Here, too, her occupation becomes a persuasive component of the metaphoric theme we are tracing—as a translator, her function is to pass on the contents of a message. She is not to originate that message, nor is she to comment or act upon it—simply to convey it. She does this despite her inability to speak (presumably she functions more as a true translator rather than as an interpreter). Even her condition of being mute, we learn, came about as a result of her inability to generate an “authentic” message: she lost her voice when Keisuke had told her that he intended to give up his fledgling acting career in order to take a more secure job, and so be able to marry her. The trauma of being put in a position to affect his dreams and his plans, and the pressure of having to respond spontaneously to his demands for an answer, have so overwhelmed her, that her voice has simply disappeared. Let us consider the implications of this. If she were to reply to Keisuke, either positively or negatively, she would be engaging him in discourse—she would be an equal participant in his plans, and would be accepting the responsibility to share the creation of their future together. But we have seen how the film has established a model for female participation: women are to be conveyors of a message, are to

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be mere voices for the authentic sources of communication, the men of the film. For Eri to reply would be for her to challenge this role, and so, the film requires her silence. Interestingly, and tellingly, this silence seems to come at considerable cost, as Eri appears to be rebelling against the role thrust upon her. In this way Nakano has Stereo Future engage its own visioning of feminine silence through this character to reveal an ideological schism. Nakano’s construction of the film shows him to be aware of its presentation of the oppression of its female characters, but, like Eri who cannot break through her own psychological condition, Nakano’s film cannot break through its own resistance to a social progressiveness. In this way Stereo Future presents a tangible contrast to Kawase’s Sharasojyu through the issue of voice and the function of its female characters. While the two sisters, Kaoru and Eri, are each capable, competent, and apparently successful in their careers, they nonetheless have subjugated their own voices to the messages of the male characters in the film. The film highlights communication as an issue central to these women, but foregrounds their inability to communicate either effectively, in the case of the TV producer, or at all, in the case of the girlfriend. This lack of communicative ability on the part of these women is quite different from Shun and his father’s awkward exchanges in Sharasojyu, which demonstrated the emotional bonds between them, and still permitted them to be effective participants in the social events around them. Kaoru’s reprimand by her supervisor and Eri’s inability to respond to her boyfriend’s proposal, on the other hand, demonstrate the active silencing of these characters. This silencing is in effect a male denial of the female voice, a resistance to the legitimacy of the female right to participate in social discourse—it is, in effect, a male withdrawal from the threatening reality of a mature, feminist society. We can see elements of this in the character of Mika, Keisuke’s co-star, who insisted upon his being cast in the leading role (in the “film within the film”) because of her physical attraction to him. This character, while young, vibrant, and successful within her profession as a popular actress, emerges as someone driven by fleeting attractions, vanity, and sexual desire—in short, not as a mature adult capable of participating in an enduring relationship, but as an over-indulged child dependent upon her (male) director and (male) scriptwriter for providing her with the material for her art. This character completes the presentation of “woman” which the film undertakes, and firmly establishes the gender functions which it proposes as legitimate: woman

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is to be an actress bringing to life the creations of man. Woman is to pass on the male message—preferably willingly—but if not, then at least without protest. Now, my argument here certainly does not imply that the director, Nakano Hiroyuki, consciously and misogynistically constructed Stereo Future to be an anti-feminist diatribe condemning women to lives of silent servitude—quite the contrary. I believe these issues are so deeply embedded within male perceptions of the social reality in which men live as to be accepted virtually unconsciously. And I by no means want to imply that the male characters in this film appear as sterling role models for a new generation of chauvinistic Japanese men, for on this point, too, the film’s content is contrary to that idea. The men in this film appear uniformly weak, indecisive, technologically backward, or self-centred—far from positive models, at all. The film is a comedy and as such presents caricatures of its subjects, and yet nonetheless, its presentations of the functions of the men and women who make up its cast of characters are uniformly conformist to a conservative, “traditionalist” conception of gender roles, seeing men as positively active, and women as negatively passive. The film has used the issue of communicative ability and function to establish this division. We can continue this division between ‘properly’ active men and passive women by considering a film which breaks that pattern, Furiizu mii (Freeze Me) by Ishii Takashi, from 2000. The story briefly told is this: Chihiro, an attractive, apparently successful office worker, had been raped by three men five years previously. She now lives in Tokyo where she has a boyfriend whom she will marry, but one evening she is startled to see one of her rapists in her apartment building lobby. The rapist forces his way into her home, where he assaults her and insists that he will live with her. After several days, she kills him, stuffing his body into her refrigerator. Unfortunately for Chihiro, however, the rapist had contacted the other two, who show up in turn—Chihiro kills all of them, stuffing their bodies into freezers which she has had specially delivered to hold them. In the evenings, she drinks heavily, opening the freezer doors and talking with the corpses. Her boyfriend comes to visit her after she has avoided him for a long while—he seduces her, they make love, but then he discovers the corpses in the freezers. She kills him, too, before finally committing suicide. This is a gruesome story of violent though justified revenge, but the director brings considerable sensitivity and sympathy to the film. The camerawork, utilising predominantly middle—close-ups and interior settings, highlights Chihiro, creating a sincere connection between

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the viewer and this character. As audience members, we feel great sympathy for her, while we are disgusted by the rapists, who get what they deserve. So, all well and good—except for the nagging issue of Chihiro’s incredible silence on the conditions of her situation, and her suicide. Beneath the sympathy which the narrative calls forth, what is the ideology of the film? Chihiro leads a life of extreme secrecy and seclusion—she has told no one of her past, not even mentioning the name of her home town to her boyfriend. She is terrified by the prospect of her apartment neighbours discovering the truth about her rape, to the extent of being forced—of forcing herself—to accept the continuing presence of her rapists in her home. Of course the aspect of shame which many Japanese associate with being raped does much to explain Chihiro’s reluctance to have her past known, but the film goes far beyond this, presenting Chihiro as someone who ultimately determines to punish herself for the ‘crimes’ which she has committed—the crime of actively seeking justice and revenge for the brutality which she had experienced. Moreover, the issue of voice and communicative ability forms a central theme here, too, in that we see Chihiro able to open herself and speak freely only to the frozen corpses in her room. The pattern works this way—woman, in revolt against her role as a sexual object, appropriates for herself the male privilege of active pursuit of justice. Through this activity, transgressive of a traditionally prescribed mode of existence—passivity and silent acceptance of her lot—she becomes communicative, able to speak of her wants openly and directly, but only to the victims of her act of transgression. This communicative ability is a symptom of instability, of insanity in the woman, and it becomes a motivation for her destruction, when she discovers that she cannot communicate openly or ‘normally’ to someone whom she expects to be supportive of her. She has destroyed the ‘normal’ relationships around her, having isolated herself from her former coworkers (changing jobs and changing apartments), and having abandoned her fiancé, and has destroyed the possibility of entering into new ‘normal’ relationships by keeping near her and communicating her innermost thoughts to the victims of her ‘unnatural’ activity. She discovers this through her boyfriend’s reaction at finding the corpses in her room, and so must destroy herself when the extent of her transgression of ‘normal’ social codes becomes clear to her. Furiizu mii presents a seemingly sympathetic portrayal of a woman’s response to a terrible injustice, only finally to destroy that woman. This is particularly disturbing in that that destruction comes at the woman’s

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own hand—she has so internalised the social code according to which she had been expected to live that her own legitimate desire for justice and revenge has become a condemnation. Camerawork, lighting, and the actors’ performances all create deep connections between the audience and the characters, but the film undermines this connection—and of course visually this connection centres very much on the corporeality of Chihiro, on her physical beauty. Shots emphasising her body predominate, and the use of nudity highlights the fetishistic portrayal of the female form. It is not surprising that Chihiro’s nudity is most prominently displayed as she is about to kill her boyfriend—as a flash of lightening illuminates her and creates an association between her and the destructive force of nature’s fury, she towers over him, arms holding a heavy vase upraised, her breasts bare and placed at the most aesthetically engaging point of the screen, the intersection of the upper- and right-most thirds. This visual presentation undercuts the characterisation of Chihiro as a self-aware woman whose actions are justified under the circumstances of her life, reducing her instead to an object of voyeuristic delight. The destruction of Chihiro through suicide emerges as an act of male judgment, an attempt by a male-dominated society to penalise and remove the threat of an active, openly communicative, powerful woman. If it is true that whom the gods destroy they first make mad, then it appears that the women whom Japanese men would destroy are first made able to speak. A more subtle manipulation of the female voice occurs in some of the films of Anno Hideaki, a director best known for Neon Genesis Evangelion, an extremely popular, critically successful science fiction anime series that deals first and foremost with issues of personal responsibility and a desperate quest for individual identity. In his live action work, Anno has focussed on young female characters who often question the bleak sameness of Japanese daily life, but this social criticism becomes in effect a subterfuge, a mechanism whereby Anno may express his own criticism of young Japanese women. This is apparent in his film from 1997, Love and Pop, which follows Hiromi, a sixteen year old high school girl as she goes from home to shopping to meetings with friends, and to meetings with older men who pay her for her companionship. Hiromi, in voice-over narration, complains that she has never known great joy or great sorrow, that every day passes as every other, that she can’t imagine how her future will be any different from her present life of shopping and spending time with her friends. The conversations she has with her friends are

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uniformly shallow; the secrets they share with each other are uniformly not profound; and the time she spends with her older companions is uniformly filled by listening to them speak, virtually nonstop, about their own problems. In fact at one point one older man who has paid the girls to have dinner with him complains explicitly that the problem with these young girls is that they never truly listen—that they never truly communicate with him. We can go beyond this instance to say that the film itself highlights the lack of communication between any of the characters, while visually highlighting (through extremely interesting camera placement and filming techniques) the fetishised bodies of Hiromi and her young friends. While ostensibly about the lives of its characters, the film’s visual focus, its thoroughly consistent, objectifying gaze, reveals its true fascination with the physicality of the young women whom the camera follows with voyeuristic obsession. In this regard, Love and Pop accepts Mary Ann Doane’s proposition that the act of filming the female body necessarily reifies that body, stripping it of its subjectivity, and forcing it to perform for the male voyeur. The gaze of Love and Pop is strictly male. It presents the male desire for the female body, and openly presents the female body as valued only as an object of physical desire: this becomes apparent in the number of shots which appear to lurk behind the female characters, or which attempt to peer through, under, and into the recesses of the school uniforms Hiromi and her friends wear, and becomes obvious to the point of pain when Hiromi is almost raped. The camera here superimposes the faces of Hiromi and her attacker, simultaneously presenting their two points of view and forcing the audience into both roles, but the effect is to deepen our sympathy for Hiromi and strengthen our hope that she will find a more substantial mode of existence for herself. That is, our sympathy serves to criticise her for in effect living without having found a strong core of identity. Love and Pop’s camera reflects a male desire to possess, control, and enjoy the physicality of the female body, but it does so by first fetishising that body, dehumanising it through the process of segmenting it, separating it into its component parts. We see this in the many shots which highlight Hiromi’s hands, legs, feet, or torso—the camera creates objects of all of these body parts, not only for the audience, but for Hiromi, as well, by presenting the body parts often from her own point of view. This process places the viewer within Hiromi and creates a perspectival ambiguity: we are encouraged to identify ourselves with Hiromi while simultaneously objectifying her. The purpose of this, I believe, is to create of

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Hiromi and the physicality of her friends a fetish, an object endowed with a conceived ability to fulfill the male desire. “Fetishism, broadly speaking, involves the attribution of self-sufficiency and autonomous powers to manifestly ‘man’ derived objects. It is therefore dependent on the ability to disavow what is known, and replace it with belief and the suspension of disbelief. The fetish, however, is always haunted by the fragility of the mechanisms that sustain it” (Mulvey, 1993: 7). This fetish reconstitutes Hiromi as an embodiment of a male-created, feminine ideal: she exists as an object of physical desire, unable to resist satisfying the male gaze, and disavows what both the male viewer and the objectifying camera’s gaze know must be true, that Hiromi is a self-willed subjectivity. This disavowal of Hiromi’s subjectivity, of her potential for feelings, aspirations, and full social participation, is significant, for it speaks to the camera’s occasionally ambiguous portrayal of the various points of view: “through disavowal, the fetish allows access to its own cause. It acknowledges its own traumatic real and may be compared to a red flag, symptomatically signalling a site of psychic pain” (Mulvey, 1993: 6). What is painful of course is the clash between an objectifying male gaze, on the one hand, and the implicit male knowledge of the potential resistance of the object of that gaze, of its potential to reassert its subjectivity. This tension gives Love and Pop its visual interest and its thematic richness, even as it ultimately reveals itself to be a film of male fear of the subjectified, modern woman. Anno Hideaki continues his examination of female identity in his film from 2000, Shikijitsu (Ritual). This work is centres on the relationship which develops between a disillusioned film maker (played remarkably well by the director Iwai Shunji, whose own films, such as Swallowtail (1996) and Riri Shushu no subete (All About Lily Chou-Chou, 2001), present compelling female characters created with psychological depth and questing, yearning independence) and an emotionally disturbed young woman who tells him constantly that tomorrow is her birthday; on a deeper level it becomes an allegorical fantasy of the function of male power in the creation and valorisation of female self-identity. The young woman is estranged from her family, and is convinced that she has murdered her sister. Throughout the course of the film, the character of the filmmaker calmly and persistently comes closer to the young woman, till at the end his sincere attentions permit her to have a psychological breakthrough—she no longer spins a tangled web of self-protective fantasies, but accepts the reality of her life and attempts a reconciliation with her mother.

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The film itself is visually stunning, containing many shots of sheer beauty and colour, and while the young woman consistently attracts the camera’s gaze, the interplay between her and the filmmaker highlights the male character as emotionally, intellectually, and psychology stronger. It is his strength which is able to guide the woman to her breakthrough, and his persistence which is able to allow the woman to accept her reality-based identity. This may represent a rescue fantasy of elaborate nature, but more plausibly it demonstrates a traditional, conservative understanding of the relative social positions of men and women in Japan, and fulfills the function of a traditional, anti-feminist work in which the man “knows what is best” for the woman, without consulting her. Here, the character of the film maker “knows what is best” and insists upon it—the film justifies this by having the young woman not only accept the man’s guidance, but thank him for it—and by having that guidance prove correct. The films we have considered so far have various features in common, but most significantly, they function as indicators of “a pernicious process of marginalisation, where the marginalised subjects are forced by the dominant culture to adopt a self-repressive pattern and even internalise their own reality” (Testaferri, 1995: xii). The pattern of repression here concerns the expression of legitimate female desires and opinions, in favour of an imposed, idealised, artificial view of ‘what a woman should be’. This view reflects male fantasies of control—it allows male filmmakers and spectators to think of themselves as protectors, rescuers, or mediators for women, as educators able to guide women to a ‘correct’ form of self-understanding. That is, this pattern of repression and the underlying ideology which sustains it while supporting a male-centric approach to gender expression, is a self-fulfilling, self-satisfying symptom of a male-dominated cultural industry. In the absence of strong female directors, writers, and producers, Japanese cinema can hardly develop other models of male/female behaviours and interactions, and can hardly hope to influence new generations of Japanese in progressive ways. And yet nonetheless there are directors capable of overcoming the limitations of ‘traditional visuality’ and thus making gender vanish as an issue in their work. As I have shown, Kawase Naomi is one such filmmaker. The gender of the characters in Sharasojyu is never foregrounded as it has been in Stereo Future, for example, or Shikijitsu—men do not dominate the women, do not presume to ‘know what’s best’ or to educate them, and both men and women are shown to be capable of both

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eloquence and silence. As a feminist work Sharasojyu succeeds in making gender vanish, in presenting the characters as equally important, equally mysterious, equally vital for each other. Gender and identity here fuse into a self—into a whole individual whose self-worth and self-awareness come not from a socially-prescribed position or set of expectations but rather from lived experience and psychological uniqueness, from the nurturing environment of the home and the community which accept the individual as distinct but also integral. From this issue of gender and its potential for support or hindrance of identity formation, I will move into the site where an individual first receives his or her sense of self and all that entails: the family. As my next chapter will show, this site is often the location of alienation, frustration, and occasionally even real violence.

CHAPTER THREE

FAMILIES, CRISIS, AND FILM Beyond the issue of gender, one of the first places a person will receive an idea of his or her identity is of course the home—the family is the first exposure to social life and values and the first formative influence on the development of an individual in every country. As such, the central importance of the family in creating the individuated selfhood of its members cannot be overstated. This is true when the family structure and situation are stable, supportive, and nurturing, as we saw at the close of the previous chapter, but it is also true when the family is in chaos. Japanese cinema of course has been no stranger to images and representations of the family from some of its earliest days, but these images and their connotations have undergone considerable change since the postwar period of the 1950s. To chart the progress of this change, this chapter will focus on four contemporary films by quite different directors whose work in these examples shows parallels that offer devastating critiques of the modern Japanese family: Kazoku geemu (The Family Game, 1983) and Kuroi ie (The Black House, 1999) by Morita Yoshimitsu; Bijita Q (Visitor Q, 2001), by Miike Takashi; and Dare mo shiranai (Nobody Knows, 2004) by Koreeda Hirokazu. As my discussion of Sharasojyu (Shara, Kawase Naomi, 2003) in Chapter 2 indicated, contemporary presentations of the family are not exclusively negative, and do not always see the family as a locus of impending social strife, nor a measure of individual fragility and irresponsibility. In the films under discussion here, however, that is precisely the image that will emerge. The family exists in these four films as a microcosm of social collapse, as existing in a moral crisis of alienation. From the outset of its modernisation, Japanese intellectuals have been keenly aware of differences in emphasis between ‘traditional’ value systems, based on the family as the fundamental social unit, and those of ‘the West’, based on the individual. Takakusu Junjirō, for example, to whom I referred in Chapter One, addresses these differences and the conflicting paths along which they seek to pull a changing Japan. For Takakusu, the conflict between family and the individual is the defining feature of the challenge facing a modernising Japan; for him,

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the family system is the root of all of Japan’s successes, both military and economic, in its ambitions to transform itself into a “new and completer nationality” (Takakusu, 1906: 106). As he writes, The problem before us today [ Japan in the early 20th Century] is how to build up a strong and great new nationality. From some points of view what may be called Western individualism must be heeded if we are to stand up in the severe competition of modern life, for Western civilisation is entirely the product of individualism; but on the other hand, if the family principle is overthrown then Japan will certainly be in grave danger. There is among young men a strong tendency to adopt the individualistic basis and make self-interest central. . . . From this time on we must give particular attention to this great problem, both in politics and in education. Without individualism we must recognise that a complete character cannot be developed, and also that to prevail in competition we must sharpen each man’s faculties by taking lessons of the individualism of the West, but . . . at the same time, for the sake of Japan and her maintenance among the nations of the world, we must hold to the family principle which has prevailed among us for 2,000 years, supplementing it by the individualism of the West (Takakusu, 1906: 105).

Current media attention, bearing “full measure of anxiety about contemporary Japanese family life” (McDonald, 1989: 55), suggests that little has changed in the attitude with which intellectuals consider the situation of the family as central to the overall well-being of the nation. However, far from sounding the essentially optimistic, though cautionary, note which Takakusu did, wide-spread media attention on the family now insists that it is in a state of collapse and crisis. Andrea Arai speaks of media attention which defines the child as the “site of a newly intensified nexus of social anxiety” (Arai, 2000: 841), while Merry White speaks of a contemporary “restylisation of the Japanese Family in face of critical concerns about the future, a future whose security and continuity [are] in doubt because of the varying choices of families. Conservative politicians and policy makers see families as both victims and perpetrators of antisocial influences and keep family making on the state agenda” (White, 2002: 5). This tendency to see the family as a problem typically looks for easy scapegoats: the parents are neglectful, the father is excessively devoted to work, the education system has failed to instill a sense of social responsibility, children are overly influenced by television, video games, fashion, or the pressures of school entrance examinations. This almost desperate search for scapegoats belies a deep-seated social anxiety toward the future that, since the start of Japan’s economic

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downturn in the early 1990s, has become something of a national obsession. Focusing on the family as the root of the national malaise is understandable—and is a pastime by no means exclusively Japanese. Efforts to ‘save the family’ are part and parcel of conservative political and religious movements in North America and Europe, as well, movements which also aim for a strengthening of criminal laws and a return to ‘traditional’ values. These movements, for obvious reasons, are beyond the scope of this chapter. Rather, here I will position our four main films against a historical backdrop of shifting images of the family to balance the conflicting attitudes therein, centred on a perceived abdication by the parents of their duties, and the consequent crisis in identity coming from that abdication. Many academics have considered the state of the Japanese family during their respective periods, often with the aim of discovering where the deficiencies they see in it come from. Sano Chiye, for example, in 1958 charted shifting familial structures from pre-modern to postwar times working with “the hypothesis that the Japanese family system and its associated norms are undergoing rapid transformation due to the impact of Westernisation and industrialisation” (Sano, 1958: 99), two concomitant phenomena which had already affected Japan, at that point, for over 80 years. Sano found that, despite increasing liberalisation of parental attitudes towards their children’s, specifically daughters’, educational opportunities, for example, families often “hesitated . . . to apply the principle of equality without qualification where the traditional role of the mother was concerned” (Sano, 1958: 99). Further, her research demonstrated that already in 1958 considerable concern existed for the “weakening [of parental control] as a result of increased emphasis on the rights of the individual” (Sano, 1958: 100), and that in response to this weakening, “parents are searching for new social sanctions to supplement their dwindling control” (Sano, 1958: 100), seeking specifically within the educational system for these sanctions. Through this, however, it is apparent that the concept of parental control itself remains a potential solution for the problems of a weakening family structure; the parent remains a source of authority and stability. This attitude exists in films from this immediate postwar period, as well. Working in this postwar period of the 1950s, directors such as Kurosawa Akira, Ozu Yasujirō and Mizoguchi Kenji produced films critical to one degree or another of a decline in familial solidarity or filial

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piety—indeed, virtually the entirety of Ozu’s opus is directly related to the problem of change in the contemporary family. A representative film here is Tokyo monogatari (Tokyo Story, 1953), which draws a clear parallel between urbanisation and the breakdown of the nuclear family structure, something itself not typical of the pre-modern family (Sano, 1958: 9–26). Tokyo monogatari tells the tale of an elderly couple (Ryu Chishu and Higashiyama Chieko playing the father and mother, respectively) who come to Tokyo to visit their relatively affluent children, but who, in doing so, come to realise the distance that is more than geographical which separates them. “The very fact that [the parents] must travel to see [the children] rather than vice versa is indicative of the profound social changes taking place in Japan,” as Arthur Noletti argues (Noletti, 1997: 33). After the death of the mother, the children, too, come to realise their neglect of their parents and regret that this realisation has come too late, but—cautionary tale though it is—the film does not close with an inspirational message for its audience. Rather, it presents its view of social change—from rural to urban, from close family ties to isolation and alienation—as inevitable. The hope, however slight, that this film holds out is not necessarily for ‘the family’ (in a social sense), per se, in that the responsibility for carrying on the tradition of the family (in a particular sense) here falls to the daughter in law (Hara Setsuko), wife of the son killed in the war. Human compassion and social obligation therefore, while still possible, no longer rest upon the undeniable foundations of kinship and the family but now assume the individual as their basis in a construction which the viewer cannot help but feel is remarkably weaker than that which it is poised to replace. That the basis for this social obligation lies on a character explicitly identified as not only from outside of the family but also female is a significant indicator of Ozu’s hope for the future construction of Japanese society, in that it permits for a shifting imagination of the types of roles which women may assume. That the mother has passed away is also significant: in the gender coding of the period of the film’s production, the mother stands as undeniably the emotional core of the family—and, by extension, of society, as well. The death of the ‘good wife and wise mother’ is what signals the shift in social participation of women in a post-war Japan, but this shift does not, by the film’s close, present an unambiguously positive optimism for the future. As Darrell Davis argues, “it is commonplace to regard Ozu’s work as an extended, exquisite elegy to the traditional Japanese family. But in reality, his

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film’s hypertraditional style and characterisation are a compensatory image for a reality . . . urban Japanese have long lost. . . . [ The parent’s] fantasies are dashed on the rocks of modern Tokyo, but new possibilities of affiliation arise” (Davis, 1997: 96–97). These ‘new affiliations’ come as a result of the weakened family structure of the ‘new’ Japan, a family structure urban, diffuse, and in many ways contingent on mere chance—and, of course, shaped by the changing realities of children’s lives and work. These realities are pessimistic in Ozu’s Tokyo monogatari, for they demonstrate that “the centripetal, metropolitan kinship bound by images has taken over those bound by blood or proximity. . . . We see dreams of migration, progress, and prosperity exchanged for disillusioning realities of modern urban survival” (Davis, 1997: 98). This social pessimism is echoed in the work of Kurosawa Akira whose Ikiru (To Live, 1952) also features a family without a mother. Here, the story centres on the relationship between father and son, estranged even though they have shared the same house for many years following the death of the mother while the son was still a young boy. This powerfully humanist work follows the protagonist, a civil servant named Watanabe Kanji (Shimura Takashi), who discovers he has only a few months left to live, on his search for meaning. He learns that meaning is something for each individual to create independently, through choice and action in contributive service to others—in his own case, through the process of helping to create a park for an economically depressed neighbourhood. Much of the tension in the film comes from the strained relationship between Watanabe and his son, Mitsuo (Kaneko Nobuo), who sees his father as a burdensome obstacle between himself and his inheritance, an attitude which his conniving wife encourages. That Watanabe is ultimately able to achieve his two-part goal of seeing the park through to completion and of finding an enduring meaning for his life—becoming what Sato Tadao has termed one of Kurosawa’s “noble fathers” (Sato, 1982: 126)—remains a personal accomplishment in which his son is unable to share. Kurosawa’s handling of the film critiques the son and his wife for being shallow and self-absorbed, concerned only with their own material gain and excessively focused on their private goal of building a new, Western-styled house, something they hope that their inheritance from Watanabe will make possible. While Kurosawa resists the easy solution of a happy ending—refusing a reconciliation between father and son, a recognition on the part of his superiors and co-workers of Watanabe’s efforts to build the park, or even a last-minute cure for Watanabe’s illness—he reaffirms the fundamental correctness

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of Watanabe’s social conscience as well as his basic, constant, and profound, though silent, love for his child. In this sense Ikiru is conservative in its view of the responsibility and propriety of the role of the father in providing a moral lesson—even if it is one that the father himself learns almost too late—to his children, and the children’s duty to respect and at least try to appreciate not only the lesson but the parent (here specifically the father) as well. Society in Ikiru may be in decline—Watanabe’s coworkers quickly revert to their inefficient, indeed lazy, habits at City Hall, deliberately ‘forgetting’ the example he has set for them; his son has not fully realised his own blame in the tensions between himself and his father, instead insisting that Watanabe had been cruel to hide his illness from him—but there is still the possibility that an individual may make a difference in the lives of his fellow citizens. Resolutely urban in its setting, Ikiru like Tokyo monogatari maintains a critique of urbanisation as at least in part to blame for the decline in social cohesion with which its story deals, and to blame as well for some of the familial tensions which it shows, for in flashback it has presented Watanabe as too preoccupied with his work to become closer to his son. Urbanisation here, as in Ozu’s Tokyo monogatari, is a detriment to the family and a source of decay in the social fabric. And yet despite the acknowledgement in Ikiru of Watanabe’s distance from his son as a (partial) result of his having buried himself in his work, ultimately the discourse of social decline in Ikiru and Tokyo Monogatari places responsibility clearly at the feet of the younger generation, the children who, having become “shallow and flippant” (Sato, 1982: 128), neglect or (willfully) misunderstand their parents. For both Ozu and Kurosawa, the parents represent a warmth of personal relations, dedication, drive, and an obligation to their fellow countrymen which their children either do not or can not feel. One may argue that while these qualities serve these characters well as citizens, they fail them as parents, and in part this is justifiable, for both Ikiru and Tokyo monogatari do on occasion present criticisms of the parent, specifically the father, as neglectful—something especially clear during an extended flashback sequence in Ikiru in which Watanabe recalls the many instances on which he had disappointed his son; and also both explicitly remove the mother from the family through death. Nonetheless, these films ultimately redeem the figure of the parent as still deserving of respect, care, and even admiration. This is clear also in Mizoguchi Kenji’s (1898–1956) Sanshō dayū (Sanshō the Bailiff, 1954), which presents a similar view of

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the parent as paragon, an optimistic, though also nostalgic, icon for the possibility of improvement. Mizoguchi’s film, adapted from the short story by Mori Ōgai (1862– 1922), contains a number of significant changes from its progenitor which space here will not permit me to discuss. The most important of these, however, serve to emphasise the role of the father (played by Shimizu Masao) in the moral maturation of the son, Zushio (Hanayagi Yoshiaki). The film, set at the end of the Heian period (794–1192), tells the story of a noble family on their way to be reunited with the father, a governor exiled from his domain for having refused to permit the conscription of his peasantry. As we meet the principal characters on their journey, we also meet, in flashback, the father—on the day of his departure he instructs his son in his central tenets: that all men are equal; that a man without mercy is but a beast; and that a leader must be hard on himself but merciful to others. These three beliefs resound powerfully within the post-war reality of the film’s production, and as I have argued elsewhere (Iles, 2005) point to an essentially optimistic view of a benevolent-dictatorship model of government in which a vanguard safeguards the happiness of the general population while postponing its own comforts. This governmental model is essentially paternalistic, in keeping with the emphasis which Mizoguchi places here on the figure of the father as enlightened, benevolent, compassionate, and morally superior to his era. That this view of the father is redemptive goes without saying but it is also critical of the governmental reality of the decades preceding the film’s release, pointing out as it does a potential for governance which Japan at that time (indeed, even at this time) had not fulfilled. Yet despite this social hope for governmental redemption, this undeniable optimism which contributes much to the pathos of the film’s close, it is still the father from whom the son inherits his morality; it is the father from whom the son inherits his legitimate social position. Society’s amelioration comes from the family; and to the family from the father come continuity, security, morality, fortitude, and an awareness of responsibility. The mother in Sanshō dayū is equally respectable and serves as a model of endurance, sacrifice, and long-suffering certainty that the family will one day once again be reunited. This mother (Tanaka Kinuyo) has complete faith in her husband as a man, as a governor, and as a father—it is the mother who reminds her son of his father’s principles, and who keeps alive in his young imagination the memory of his father’s greatness. As a concrete embodiment of the ‘good wife

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and wise mother’ ideal, here, this mother exemplifies undying love and hope for the future; it is her broken condition at the film’s close that elicits the most heart-rending response from the audience for the depth of her commitment and patient endurance of overwhelming hardship. Her reunion with her son is one of cinema’s most powerful achievements, in part because of the way in which it redeems the son’s earlier abandonment of his father’s teachings through the force of circumstances. In essence then these are the values which these (admittedly select) immediate postwar films permit us to see: that the figures of the parents, while perhaps on the edge of cataclysmic change, remain the source of stability and emotional security for the members of their family; that from their parents children are able to learn morality and social responsibility; and that from the family comes social structure, tradition, yet also hope for society’s improvement in the future—“a beautiful relationship between a parent and a child is the most secure form of social order” (Sato, 1982: 129). That the family remained at root of this hope is to be expected in this immediate postwar period, a time when the need to rebuild Japan was coupled with a desperate clinging to recognisable continuity with the past in the face of overwhelming social change. The family and specifically the figures of loving, devoted parents, served as examples of that continuity. But this essence, this fundamentally optimistic view of the family and parents, has changed considerably in the 50 years since Kurosawa’s Ikiru and Mizoguchi’s Sanshō dayū—and the root of this change lies in the view of the parent now no longer a paragon or source of moral education but instead absent, incompetent, over-indulgent, or completely unknown. The “fatherless society” which the psychiatrist, Doi Takeo, discussed as a symptom of postwar Japan (Doi, 1973: 152–3) has indeed come to be—but more so, there is now a ‘parentless society’, and in its place there is a society of dysfunctional families. While it is possible to suggest that, essentially, the issues which inform the films to which I will presently turn stem from Romit Dasgupta’s contention that “most men do not or cannot measure up to” an ideal of masculinity (Dasgupta, 2000: 191), there is a wider view of this which I will argue, that the parents, both father and mother, have abdicated their responsibility within their home. During the past two decades, the ‘problem’ of the family has come under increasing public scrutiny (Takeda, 2003: 452) as the site of heightened interpersonal tension, violence, and alienation. “The stan-

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dardised image of the Japanese family evidently started to disintegrate in the1970s, and by the 1990s, the ‘collapse’ of the post-war family system became a focus of the national government’s agenda” (Takeda, 2003: 453). This agenda manifested itself in the Japanese family and its constellation of associated issues becoming the subject of laws attempting to regulate a perceived increase in domestic abuse (both directed from and to the parents) since the enactment in 2001 of a new Domestic Violence Prevention Law (Ikeuchi, 2006: 1). Moreover, greater media attention has focused, since the so-called “Shōnen A” Incident of 1997 (during which an apparently normal teenager murdered and beheaded four children in Kōbe), on the problem of anti-social, abusive behaviour amongst Japanese youth. While domestic and anti-social violence form an emerging reality in the perception of the Japanese media, it is problematic to suggest that these types of issues constitute a new phenomenon. As Iida Keisuke points out, various kinds of abusive or exploitative behaviours have existed in the Japanese family since at least the pre-war era (Iida, 2004: 428–453, passim), something which Ikeuchi echoes when she quotes the Japanese Consul to Vancouver, Canada, on his arrest for spousal battery in 1999, as having said “Since olden times in Japan, it has not mattered if a husband hit his wife” (Ikeuchi, 2006: page 1). Further, Ochiai Emiko has written that “the realisation that the family continues to undergo rapid transformation has come to the general population through the government, mass media, and scholars . . . We are all compelled to consider exactly what will become of the family, and where it is headed, in the 21st century” (Ochiai, 1994: 4). Ochiai identifies a “vague sensation of danger for the family [as having existed] throughout the postwar period more as a feeling fundamental to people’s consciousness, rather than as something based on any definite data” (Ochiai, 1994: 6). While Ochiai proposes that despite media assertions to the contrary, the type of change occurring within the family structure does not constitute a crisis but is simply that, change, media attention does highlight a deeply- and widely-held fear that the family is in trouble—this is an attitude reflected in the cinematic texts with which this chapter will engage, and one that has its roots in more than simple media exaggeration. It is not surprising, given the state of flux in which the nation as a whole did indeed undergo periods of incredible hardship, sacrifice, and destabilisation—including a period of lost sovereignty for the first time in two thousand years—that issues of the family occur with great

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frequency in the Japanese expressive arts, from literature to theatre to film. Natsume Sōseki (1867–1916), of course, dealt with the tensions within the family and the conflicting pulls of individual freedom and social/familial obligation in many of his novels, Kokoro, for example, as did Tanizaki Jun’ichirō (1886–1965). In the post-war period novelists as diverse as Abe Kōbō (1924–1993), Mishima Yukio (1925–1970), and Oe Kenzaburō (1935–) have all dealt with issues of alienation and the search for personal meaning in an overwhelming and isolating social environment. Amongst contemporary writers Murakami Haruki (1949–), Kanai Mieko (1947–), and Kurahashi Yumiko (1935–) continue the tradition of questioning the role of the family in the formation of both the self and society. Japanese film, too, contains many presentations of the family in crisis. The four examples I will use to help illustrate this come from films spanning roughly twenty years, yet are linked by thematic and plot similarities which contain a socially-critical and occasionally viciously satirical stance. Morita Yoshimitsu’s Kazoku geemu and Miike Takashi’s Bijita Q each centre their narratives around ‘typical’ contemporary, urban families headed by salaryman or professional fathers, using the absurdity of this figure and the weakness of the mother to highlight their social criticism, while Kuroi ie and Dare mo shiranai each present psychopathological mothers who are either extremely violent, directing their aggression against men who are weak, deceptive, and ineffectual; or else completely negligent of their responsibilities and duties to their children, to the point of not even living together with them. These four films disallow the possibility of a healthy family integration achieved through open, nurturing, supportive communication. Instead, they propose the family to be inevitably torn apart by social pressures far beyond its control: consumerism, recession, and the isolating effects of urbanisation. Because of the thematic, plot, and character similarities of the two pairs of films here, I will discuss them sequentially, as sets: Kazoku geemu and Bijita Q work well together to critique the father as an absent or absurd figure of authority, and present the mother as over-indulgent and thus damaging to her children; while Kuroi ie and Dare mo shiranai each dissect the figure of the mother as dangerous, irredeemably psychotic, yet potentially much more capable than the men whom they desire and whom the films present as recessive, weak, and incapable of direct, positive action. Morita’s Kazoku geemu was his first commercially successful film, and tells the story of a middle school student preparing for his transition

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to high school, thus providing much opportunity for a critique of not only the father/family structure but also the Japanese educational system as well. As Aaron Gerow characterises the critical reception of this work, “in most discourse on [it] . . . the title is emblematic, a metaphor for the family reduced to role playing in which individual worth becomes quantified in terms of [school] class rankings . . . Morita becomes a biting social satirist, taking skilful jabs at contemporary Japan” (Gerow, 2007: 240) while demonstrating the ‘commodification’ of educational achievement as a measure of familial commitment and parental ‘success’. Shigeyuki (Miyagawa Ichirota), the younger of the Numata family’s two sons, is one of the lowest-scoring students in his class, and so his parents (played by Itami Jūzō and Yuki Saori, father and mother, respectively) have decided to hire one more private tutor (Matsuda Yūsaku) out of the line of tutors they have already tried. The tutor, in contrast to the boy’s father, becomes close to him, sitting with him while he does his homework, disciplining him (sometimes physically quite roughly) when necessary, but first and foremost, making it clear to the boy that his attention, concern, and even affection are devoted to him. Under the careful guidance of the tutor, the boy’s marks steadily and dramatically improve, until he achieves scores sufficiently high to allow him to move on to the better of his high school choices. He gains confidence in himself, as well, and is able to overcome antagonism from the class bully, a former friend whom rivalry and pressure had driven to enmity. However, while the boy’s progress is improving, his father remains a distant, detached, and critical observer—not a participant—in his youthful development. In fact the father, rather than devoting his own time to his son’s education, has done what, for him, is most expedient: he has offered the tutor a financial incentive to help Shigeyuki study. This attitude of the father’s, that money is the central requirement for a solution to the problem of his son’s poor achievements at school, commodifies his involvement in his boy’s life, and transforms his relationship with his son into a commercial venture, an investment opportunity which, he hopes, will pay off in the dividend of a good high school. Shigeyuki’s ‘success’ will become the proof of the father’s ‘success’ as a parent. It is against this attitude that the tutor’s careful attention to Shigeyuki stands in contrast, for his attitude is one of true fraternal, even parental, concern. But despite the example which the tutor sets for the father, indeed, for the whole family, their relationship with each other remains one strained by distance and lack of communication.

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Although the family lives together in a small apartment located in a newly-built complex of reclaimed land in Tokyo Bay, and although they inhabit this space in claustrophobically-close proximity to one another (a condition which the film’s cinematography highlights, emphasising close-ups indoors and long shots out of doors), they demonstrate an almost insistent lack of intimate communication with each other. Tanaka Eiji sees much influence from Stanley Kubrick in Morita’s work, specifically in his willingness to explore the leading edge of cinematic technological innovation “not simply to create newness for its own sake—he makes no distinction between the newness within film and the newness of real life, and by introducing the newest technologies this way, he is able to make us see film as something still not fully comprehended” (Tanaka, 2003: 122). In Kazoku geemu, shots of the emptiness around the apartment complex and the fields, through which the boys walk on their way home from school, awaiting new construction sites, highlight the ‘newness’ of the family’s living space, but this ‘newness’ does not appear vibrant with an optimistic hope for the future. Rather, the claustrophobia of the family’s apartment and yet their fundamental disconnection from each other are harbingers of a social crisis looming on the horizon—“these easily identifiable icons add up to an indictment of contemporary family life as foredoomed to fail, thanks to the ‘compartmentalisation’ . . . they include” (McDonald, 1989: 57). That Morita presents a caricature of the Japanese family is apparent from the first frame, in which we meet the members of the Numata family, seated side by side along a narrow dining table “dreadful [,] rectangular, itself unmistakably analogous to assembly-line life in Japanese factories” (McDonald, 1989: 57), not speaking, but instead concentrating with disturbing energy on eating their meal. The soundtrack presents a noisy symphony of slurping and chewing. Shigeyuki, in voice over, says that “everyone in the family is deafeningly loud,” thus indicating the basic lack of communication between them all—deafeningly loud, to the point of drowning out what any of them might try to say. Aaron Gerow comments on the function of sound in this film, when he writes that: Although The Family Game features no music track, it is an extremely musical film, and not simply because of its rhythmicality: music is repeatedly cited in the text, from Doris Day’s “Teacher’s Pet” to Togawa Jun (an eccentric rock singer who plays the neighbour), from Aki Yōko (a famous singer-songwriter who appears as Yoshimoto’s girlfriend) to Oscar Peterson’s rendition of My Fair Lady. When the mother and Shin’ichi lis-

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ten to Peterson’s album, and all we hear is silence, Morita is establishing both a model for spectator involvement (i.e. we supply the music) and an alternative to all the sounds that invade every space in the film (Gerow, 2007: pp. 248–249).

Indeed, sound so insistently “invades” every space here that the family members are virtually guaranteed to have difficulty communicating. We do see instances of family members trying to speak with one another, but these scenes present the awkwardness and gulfs between them. Several of the most poignant of these involve the mother and father—in one, they both go out to the family car in order to speak openly, but the conversation they have there is one dominated by the mother rather weakly regretting the lifestyle she has, and asking the father at least to try to come home a bit earlier, while he simply smokes. The camera presents the characters here from a middle distance, cutting between shots inside and outside of the car, placing our gaze ever further away from the mother and father as they, too, move ever further away from finding a durable solution to their separate disappointments. In another scene, during which the father eats his breakfast, we see him in extreme close-up about to “suck up” the yoke of his fried egg, only to discover that because the egg has been overcooked, he can’t do it. He complains to the mother that he can’t “suck up” the yoke—chuchu dekinai, he says, in a pun that echoes the sound of chu, the word representing a kiss with which young women may sign a letter or—now—a cellphone text message (similar to the string of “x” and “o” at the end of an English letter, representing hugs and kisses). Not only, he seems to be saying, can’t he “suck up” the yoke, but more significantly, he can’t “kiss,” can’t be intimate. While Keiko McDonald may characterise this exchange as an instance of the “hard-driving executive sublimating desire for escape into infantile dependency” (McDonald, 2006: 142), more is at stake here than the father’s need to avoid his familial responsibilities: his statement amounts to a confession of his emotional failure. This is also only the second shot in the film which presents the father in close-up, the first having come at the very beginning when the family members are being introduced. Typically the father is presented in medium shots, despite the overwhelmingly claustrophobic closeness of the film’s setting; the father’s arrival home, his time in the bath, even his conversations in the car with his wife and the tutor are all seen in medium shots. In contrast to this, we see the tutor in several scenes in close-up, either with other family members or alone. We also see the tutor in several

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very physical embraces with his girlfriend, and, too, we see him being quite physical with Shigeyuki: sitting near him, teaching him to wrestle and box, placing his hand on his bare thigh after Shigeyuki has been beaten up by friends of the classroom bully, even—on their first meeting—kissing him on the cheek. This physicality is in no way sexual but is in every way creative of a close bond of trust and respect between the two. Through this physicality, but also through the intellectual and emotional commitment which the tutor demonstrates for Shigeyuki, he is able to legitimise his position as a substitute father-figure for not only the boy but his older brother, Shin’ichi, as well. The tutor provides a clear, alternative relationship marked by presence—emotional and physical—which the father is unable to match. This is apparent in his physical presence for the boy, but also in the cinematic text which brings us close to the tutor through the device of the close-up. The cinematic text uses proximity effectively to present changing degrees of closeness between family members and spectator throughout the film, commenting in this way on shifts in the family’s degree of communication. For most of the film, as I have said, the father is presented in medium shot or else from a greater distance, appearing in close-up only twice, while other family members and the tutor are typically presented closer than medium distance. This patterning changes on occasion, depending on the location of the characters—when Shigeyuki is in class or outside being bullied, the camera maintains a medium distance or greater. So, too, when the tutor and Shigeyuki are practicing boxing outside or are walking together, the camera affords them a measure of privacy by presenting them from a distance. When Shin’ichi visits the girl to whom he’s attracted, the camera stays farther than medium distance—even the soundtrack occasionally fades out, leaving their conversation a private matter from which the spectator is cut off. However, the final quarter of the film begins to change the patterning of camera distance, starting with the scene of the celebratory dinner to congratulate Shigeyuki for entering the better high school. Here, the entire family is presented in a middle-distance shot, seated side by side along the narrow dining table that dominates their small kitchen. The tutor is seated in the very centre of the table—and thus in the very centre of the frame. As the dinner progresses, the father offers the tutor money to ‘cure’ Shin’ichi’s falling grades, resorting to his favourite expedient of solving problems through financial means rather than through physical or emotional involvement. At this point,

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the tutor, in a fantastic bit of absurdity, begins literally to destroy the dinner—tossing food and spilling wine liberally on the family members, finally striking each one and overturning the table onto their collapsed bodies, then bowing politely and taking his leave. This entire scene, lasting many minutes, is presented in a single, continuous shot from a fixed camera position: middle-distance, slightly below seated-level, and perpendicular to the long table. The next scene, however, shows the aftermath of this destruction, as the family together clean up the mess made by the tutor. This is the only instance in the film during which the family is presented together in close-up, as they pick up the fragments of shattered plates and glasses, the camera moving among them, coming to rest occasionally on their hands or on the debris of their meal. After this point, however, till the end of the film, the various family members are presented in only medium distance shots. We see the two boys in their classes, once again daydreaming. We see Shin’ichi, shot completely in medium-long distance, being attracted by a group of martial artists practicing in disciplined unison. This distancing of the spectator from the family by the camera is especially pronounced in the final scene, at the family’s apartment on a lazy afternoon. The two boys have drifted off into midday naps, while the mother wonders why a helicopter continues to buzz overhead outside the building—and of course the father is once again absent from the setting. This single-shot sequence is filmed entirely from an elevated position, looking down from middle-distance onto the characters, here emphasising our now separate situation from them, and our receding sympathies for this family which has lost its one best chance to work together to build a meaningful set of relations. With the departure of the tutor, the outsider able to set a good example of devoted attention, the family reverts to its earlier, uncommunicative mode, having passed more or less unchanged through a situation that had the potential to change it for the better. Miike’s Bijita Q also presents a family visited by a similar outsider, a figure who in a similar though more ethically ambiguous way becomes a surrogate or substitute for an absent husband/father, but this film is far more vicious in its satirical critique of the Japanese family. As Tanaka Eiji describes it, this “odd direct-to-video film takes as its motif a certain family filled with every imaginable perversion: incest, domestic violence, bullying, teenage prostitution, narcotic abuse, infidelity, rape, murder, necrophilia, shit, a flood of breast milk, vaginal constriction—it reads like an insane collage of every shocking grotesque theme ignored

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in cinema before its production” (Tanaka, 2003: 133). The visitor here is an anonymous young man (Watanabe Kazushi), bearded and mostly silent, who on first meeting the father (Endo Ken’ichi) strikes him violently in the head with a large rock—something he does twice to the father, and once to the daughter, as well. The family consists of the unnamed father, a soon-to-be-unemployed television journalist, his heroin-addicted wife Keiko (Uchida Shungiku), their daughter Miki (credited only as Fujiko), a teenaged prostitute (she engages in enjo kōsai, or “compensated dating,” a social issue which began to receive widespread media attention during the early-middle 1990s, in which young women receive money—often large sums—from businessmen for their companionship; while enjo kōsai does not always involve sex, and while in real numbers only a small percentage of high school girls engage in this activity, the media has focused on its socially-detrimental nature), and their son Takuya (Mutō Jun), a middle school student who, to make up for constant bullying from his classmates, beats his mother brutally and spends most of his time locked in his room. The plot here is simple but compelling—and also quite disturbing, as it follows the father on his quest to create a video news report on contemporary youth that will win him the favour of his supervisor, thus safeguarding his job. In the course of the film, however, the stranger effects a great change in the family, inspiring in them familial love, respect, and the will to defend one another from the trials that beset them. The film ends with the family huddled together suckling at the mother’s breasts—a tremendous change from the opening scenes, which see the father paying his own daughter for sex (while filming them together the whole time) and the son beating his mother relentlessly. This is not an ‘easy’ film, but rather an absolutely absurdist assault on the notions of middle-class domesticity which, once observed closely, emerges as anything but ‘normal’. The aim of the film is—as the visitor Q does to the father—to strike the spectator over the head in order to awaken him or her to the absurdity inherent within the structure of the contemporary family, a structure the film suggests is crumbling under the weight of its own shortcomings and the weight of its own members’ lack of communication—weights the family desperately seeks to deny and ignore. The lack of communication here is every bit as central as in Morita’s Kazoku geemu—in the first scene with the father and daughter in a love hotel, the father asks his daughter about her ‘work’: how often she’s done it, why doesn’t she study instead, and so on. The daughter of

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course doesn’t answer, but rather teases the father, tempting him, and snapping digital photos as his expression changes from nervous hesitation to desire. When the father and the stranger are at the family dining table, eating the dinner which the mother has served them, the father describes the visitor to the son as his friend who’ll be staying for a few days—nonchalantly neglecting to explain or even mention the heavy bandages which cover the wounds on his head, and scrupulously ignoring his son’s cursing and striking the mother for having carelessly allowed commercials to be recorded along with his favourite TV programme. Here, too, we have the father escaping to his car for privacy away from his family—he watches the video he’d filmed of himself trying to interview a group of teenagers about “young people today,” a video which recorded his humiliation as the teenagers assault and strip him (we learn later that he had actually aired this video on his news programme). And here, too, we have the visitor forming a bond with the son through physical contact, in contrast with the negligent distance his father maintains, and the fearful desperation with which his mother treats him. As bullies bombard the family’s home with fireworks, the father, frantically videotaping the spectacle as part of his documentary project, bellows into the microphone that he doesn’t know how he should feel, how he should react to this vandalism—he says explicitly that although he doesn’t know how to react, he does know that his family is being destroyed. It is precisely this lack of response that forms the crux of the familial dilemma for the contemporary urban father—his reactions are typically so prescribed that, now, in the face of an extraordinary situation, his faculty to respond is paralysed almost beyond hope. That the father is exponentially more communicative to his imagined TV ‘audience’—encapsulated within the mini-DV camera he carries with him—than his own family, even at the height of the vandals’ attack, is indicative of his inability to respond to a reality that must exist as an unmediated present. For the father, it is this unmediated, immediate ‘now’ that exists as the site of his failure (specifically sexual, as he admits finally to himself at his point of self-realisation), and thus is the thing from which he continually flees. Through fleeing from the present he also flees from his family and from an awareness, an acceptance, and a solution to his own ineffectuality. That the route of his flight is through the device of mediated sight and communication—the video camera, which also becomes his confessor and ultimately accepting, non-judgmental confidant (“Some things truly are strange,” the father

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quips to the camera)—helps to focus the film’s attention on the role of the media as a barrier to open, spontaneous, interpersonal communication (immediate, unmediated), for after all it is of the essence of the media to mediate, to stand in place of an interlocutor physically and emotionally present to the one hoping to communicate. Visitor Q thus doubly includes the media in its social critique—through the father’s profession as a journalist, but also through his flight away from his responsibilities through the media’s mechanism which he carries with him at all times. In this way Miike’s choice to shoot Visitor Q on digital video itself becomes a meta-narrative comment on the function of the news media in contemporary Japan. Tom Mes in his book Agitator: the Cinema of Takashi Miike, suggests that “the perception of the video image as being closer to reality than film is something the director deliberately appeals to, employing it to draw the audience closer to the events portrayed” (Mes, 2003: 207), and to a certain extent this characterisation of the visual appeal is justified. However, Miike’s decision here has further ramifications: by utilising the instruments of the news media explicitly to comment on those media, Miike’s critique serves to co-opt the look of ‘mediated’ reality and insidiously subvert the opinions held by the spectator regarding the social milieu in which s/he lives. Part of this process involves direct quotation of the nightly news: in one brief sequence, on the night of the visitor’s first arrival at the family home, while the son beats the mother, the visitor switches TV channels to watch a report on the news about the naming of a baby raccoon recently born at the zoo. This, the diegesis tells us, forms the substance of reporting: trivialities and items designed to reassure the viewing public that their social reality is comfortable, normal, and ‘cute’. Another part of the process involves the absurd willingness of the father to broadcast his own humiliations as an exposé of the ‘truth’ of that social reality’s decay: this becomes an escapist reaction to his inability to prevent the destruction and decay of his own family, exactly the type of infantile regression Keiko McDonald identified in the father of Morita’s Kazoku geemu but here a pathological, willful denial of individual responsibility and failure. The association between the father and the media thus becomes a twin-pronged attack on each institution’s culpability for what the film presents as a directionless decline in familial and social cohesion, strength, solidarity, and even sanity. That this decline is the responsibility of the father is a point which the film makes repeatedly—and the root of the father’s failure, as I

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have mentioned, is his sexual inadequacies, specifically, his problem of premature ejaculation which leaves him incapable of satisfying his sexual partners (his daughter, his wife, and his lover, the female coworker (Nakahara Shōko) whom the father ends up murdering late in the film). The father himself speaks of his sexual inadequacies to his ‘video audience’ during his moment of epiphanic breakthrough: this comes when he has murdered his lover and, before butchering her corpse, attempts a frenzied necrophilia, admitting to the video camera that he feels more energised than he has in years. The mother, too, undergoes a sexual transformation at the hands of the visiting stranger, who helps her to discover that her breasts are still lactating. This discovery revitalises the wife (the father remarks that he has not seen her so alive since they first married) and transforms her into someone actively able to resist her son’s beatings. Sexuality here emerges as an essentially intimate form of communication, a mechanism for self-discovery and the communication of that discovery to another person—this is contrasted with the sexual exchange rooted in financial commodification between the father and the daughter at the film’s outset, an exchange which the father insistently characterises as “wrong” despite his eagerness to engage in it. Too, that earlier sexual exchange between father and daughter ended in the father’s humiliation for the premature termination of the sex act, before the daughter could be physically satisfied (she compensates for it by doubling her price, expressing her strongest disappointment when she learns her father doesn’t even have enough money). The father’s realisation of his sexual dysfunction becomes the first step in his transformation into a man able to reconnect (emotionally and, by implication, physically) with his wife—he also becomes a defender of his son, rescuing him from the bullies (whom the father and mother together murder). Sexual dysfunction and the ‘resurrection’ of the father’s sexual ability are symptomatic metaphors for the father’s physical, psychological, and emotional transformation and his acceptance of his responsibilities within the family. It is quite significant, of course, that the father goes from addressing his video camera, predominantly, to expressing himself to his wife openly and with enthusiastic excitement, only after his sexual transformation—his need for mediation in his relationships has vanished with his discovery of his ‘restored’ physical masculinity and his re-installation as the head of his family. The mother’s transformation is no less complete than that of the father, and hers, too, is effected through a fundamentally sexual experience

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(an experience essentially dependent upon her sex), the discovery that her breasts still produce milk at the caress of the stranger. This discovery brings the mother obvious and tremendous satisfaction—she tells the stranger that she has realised she is not defined by her pronounced limp, nor by her disappointing home life, but that she is simply a woman. This acceptance of her ‘normalcy’ liberates her, and allows her to accept herself as a mother, homemaker, and wife. It is not my intention here to pursue what constitutes gendered social ‘normalcy’ in Japan for either the father or the mother, beyond the range of what the film expresses as ‘proper’ for these characters: for the father, it is ‘proper’ for him to act with determination and physical resolve to safeguard his family; while for the mother it is proper for her to accept her ‘function’ as a nurturer—something we see in the final scene, in which the mother suckles her husband and daughter on her newly productive breasts. This notion of ‘normalcy’ extends to the family’s children, as well: the son, lying in a pool of his mother’s milk, thanks the stranger for coming to their family in order to ‘destroy’ it—to destroy it in its dysfunctional incarnation to enable its successful reconstruction—and promises that from the very next morning he will begin to study in earnest. He has returned to the ‘normal’ role of a young middle school student, serious and concerned with his upcoming entrance exams. The daughter, too, returns home (after soliciting the stranger on a city street, and after being hit on the head by him with a grapefruit-sized rock). She returns to her ‘normal’ family, a tearful smile of gratitude and promise playing about her bruised face as she greets her mother, nude, cradling the father in her arms and inviting her daughter to join them in a blissful, secure, familial embrace. The film’s final scene, of the father and daughter lying on either side of the mother, and suckling at her breasts, is an absurdist exaggeration of the nuclear family, but a sympathetic, touching, and very moving one. While it is possible to see this scene as suggesting a degree of infantile escapism on the part of the father—“the fact that the father drinks from the breasts that are meant for the children . . . serves as the final confirmation of his ineptitude . . . his wife is stronger than him and he willingly reverts to the position of a child in her presence” (Mes, 2003: 213)—it more strongly serves as an acknowledgement of the resurrection of the family, a resurrection which after all includes the father as well. It is not that “he has recognised and accepted his failures and is able to live with them” (Mes, 2003: 213), as Tom Mes suggests, but rather that he has found a way to overcome them, and is

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also able now to accept and appreciate his wife in her role of nurturer. The father has reclaimed for himself the position of head of the family through his reinvigorated sexuality and through his acceptance of his wife’s sexuality, as well, and the family will emerge from this episode stronger, more committed to one another, and ‘normal’. Even though both Kazoku geemu and Bijita Q contain criticisms of their mother-figures as over-indulgent and lenient on their children, the central focus of criticism seems to be the fathers, who are each presented as far more ridiculous, on the one hand, and far more ‘absent’ from the family, on the other. However, both Morita has made a film that is centrally and specifically critical of the mother-figure, presenting her as dangerously psychotic. This is Kuroi ie, an effective horror film. In some ways Koreeda’s Dare mo shiranai can also be considered a horror film, for the terrifying possibility of a world completely devoid of family structure and parental—specifically maternal—support and guidance which it presents. The criticisms of the mother-figure in these two films complement those of the father-figures in the films we’ve just considered, and together form a scathing ‘attack’ on the family, presenting a dim view of its structure and future. Morita’s Kuroi ie tells the tale of a hapless insurance agent, Wakatsuki (Uchino Masaaki), as he investigates the suspicious circumstances around the Komoda family’s claim following the apparent suicide of their ten year old son. As his investigations proceed, Wakatsuki comes to suspect the mother, Sachiko (Ootake Shinobu), of having murdered her child—as indeed she has, hanging him in the family’s front room. She has also murdered her previous husband, and has chopped off the arms of her current husband, Shigenori (Nishimura Masahiko), himself an emotionally disturbed, weak man with a history of mental issues. These two, husband and wife, have known each other since childhood, and together have inordinately large insurance policies on each other’s lives. Wakatsuki, after first suspecting the husband of harbouring a plot against the wife, comes to realise that the wife plans on murdering her husband in order to cash in on the claim. In trying to save the husband, he cancels the policy, thus incurring the wife’s wrath—Sachiko kidnaps his girlfriend, Megumi (Kobayashi Kaoru), and vandalises his apartment. Although Wakatsuki is able to rescue his girlfriend, Sachiko tracks him to his office and attacks him in a particularly bloody confrontation. Almost by luck Wakatsuki is able to kill his attacker, the psychotic Sachiko, who has murdered, the police discover, as many as ten people, burying their corpses in the basement of her home.

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While this brief outline of the film’s plot is enough to place it in the genre of horror films based on psychopathic killers, what’s intriguing here are the contrasting characterisations of men and women throughout, and specifically the characterisation of motherhood through Kodama Sachiko. Wakatsuki (Uchino Masaaki) is a particularly weak man, constantly cringing before the clients who come to see him at his life-insurance company, but he is also an impotent man, unable to perform sexually with his girlfriend. Similarly, the Kodama husband, Shigenori, is an edgy, disturbed character, constantly fidgeting, twitching, and begging for his claim to be speedily processed. In contrast to these almost hollow, spiritless men, Kodama Sachiko seems to be a creature of instinct who, despite her apparently low intelligence, is able to defeat her opponents through viciousness and ‘low cunning’. Sachiko is also carnally avaricious—she is presented in a variety of clothes which emphasise her physicality; when she attacks Wakatsuki, she kisses and fondles him, smearing him with blood; and when Wakatsuki searches her house for his kidnapped girlfriend, he comes across a collection of sex toys which, the film implies, Sachiko uses to satisfy herself because of her husband’s physical debilitation. However, she has no emotional attachment to anyone in her life, and easily kills her child (as Wakatsuki’s investigations indicate she has done before) in order to safeguard her financial security. This lack of emotional attachment definitely disqualifies Sachiko from being a ‘good wife and wise mother’, but more, it disqualifies her from being a legitimate member of society. As Megumi discovers, upon analysing a school-time composition which Sachiko had written, she is actively anti-social, pathologically withdrawn and remorseless. Morita here displays an especial ‘dissatisfaction’ with the figure of the contemporary mother, one much more critical than that in his earlier Kazoku geemu. Keiko McDonald has characterised the mother in that film as “immune . . . to fellow feeling: a thoroughly postmodern mother not bothered at all by the alienation and emptiness of her life” (McDonald, 1989: 59), but nonetheless she was the embodiment of a type of parental concern for the future well-being of her children. Her flaw was that despite being indulgent to them, she had been unable to guide them properly through their educational challenges, relying instead on the tutor and school system to bring them into society. Here, however, Kodama Sachiko sees her children as nothing more than opportunities to receive insurance settlements. Morita’s presentation of this character is far from sympathetic—the lighting and camera angles used to frame

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her image on screen are never flattering, never soft, and the camera maintains at least a medium distance from her except during her final fight with Wakatsuki—and yet her single-minded determination to get what she is after stands in stark contrast to Wakatsuki’s constant bowing, cringing, and overly-delicate style of speech. Kodama Sachiko is not the only female character which Kuroi ie presents as intimate with the pathologies of the human mind—even Wakatsuki’s girlfriend, Megumi, is familiar with psychosis and its symptoms. She studies psychology, and it is through her analysis of Sachiko’s writings that Wakatsuki is able to understand the Kodama family plot to defraud the insurance company. This association of the female characters with pathology complements the association of the male characters with weakness, ineffectuality, and deformity—neither men nor women here are presented as ‘healthy’ or ‘fit’ characters, and the parents we have, Kodama Sachiko and Shigenori, are both actively dangerous to their children. This family is even more dysfunctional than that of Morita’s Kazoku geemu—indeed, it is a family in name only, a family that feeds on itself and uses its young as nothing more than a means to a financial end. That there is no communication in this family is an understatement—the camera never presents Shigenori and Sachiko together in conversation, in fact only rarely presents them together at all outside of childhood flashbacks or the hospital room in which Shigenori recovers from the amputation of his arms. While Kazoku geemu, made at the height of Japan’s so-called ‘Bubble Economy’, a time of tremendous prosperity based on the seemingly endless export of high-quality consumer goods, presented at least the possibility of the Numata family rebuilding their lives together after the tutor’s destruction of their dinner, here, Kuroi ie, made sixteen years later at the peak of Japan’s post-bubble recession caused by challenges to key foreign markets, thoroughly destroys the family and its members, obviating even the potential for a reconstruction. This impossibility of a family construction or reconstruction is continued in Koreeda’s Dare mo shiranai which tells the story of four children left to fend for themselves by a mother more intent on finding happiness for herself than on caring for her offspring. The story is simple, but heartbreaking. Keiko (played by the actress, You), is an immature woman who has had four children by four different men. We meet her as she is moving into a new apartment—smuggling in her children in secret. She leaves some money for her oldest son, Akira

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(Yagira Yūya), for daily expenses, and then leaves, promising to send more and to come back soon. As the days pass and the money runs out, little arrives from the mother. The children stay at home, unable to leave for fear of being spotted by the landlord and sent away. Akira shops, buying instant noodles and other inadequate supplies, till one day, being completely out of funds, he tries to telephone his mother. He finds that she has left her job and disappeared. A young girl has befriended him. When she learns the children have no money, she prostitutes herself for their sake. Tragedy strikes the children, though, when the youngest sister, Saki (Kan Hanae), falls from a chair and dies. The children are discovered by the authorities, and removed. This almost plotless work, a poetic, painful, and beautiful film, meanders along with the children as their days drift by in pointless procession. Koreeda’s background as a documentary film maker is evident here in his approach to this set of characters. His camera alternates between tender close-up and protective middle-distance. Very often hand-held, the camera is thus able to follow the children with ease through their daily routines. Its gaze functions almost as a surrogate parent for the children, but a helpless parent, unable to intervene or prevent the death of the youngest girl. The camera instead bears mute witness to the irresponsibility of the mother as she recedes further from the lives of her children, going from at first a temporary, fleeting presence, to a voice on the telephone, a signature on a letter, and then finally nothing more than an absence. It is the mother’s abandonment of her children which dooms the youngest to death, but even so, the camera does not condemn her. Rather, it maintains an ‘official’ distance. In the few scenes in which she is present, the camera presents the mother from medium distance and from a slightly elevated position, almost as a sternly concerned outside observer would watch someone of whom s/he does not approve. This lack of approval is not a condemnation—the film does not dwell on the mother’s absence through the use of flashbacks, for example, or voice-over. After Saki’s death, the camera does not present a shot of the mother’s letter, for example, or a photograph of her as a reminder of her negligence. Rather, the camera accepts her absence as inevitable in the urban space of modern Japan. And this film is indeed urban. It focusses on the buildings of Tokyo, on the streets and concrete, the balconies and interiors of this enormous city. The plants which the children try to grow in styrofoam cups hold-

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ing soil scraped from rocky playgrounds all wither and die. There are no forests for them to play in, no fields in which to run. Instead we have the claustrophobia of their small apartment, the artificial lighting of the convenience stores where Akira meets the schoolboys he envies. And throughout the film’s concentration on its urban space, we have emptiness—scene after scene devoid of people, devoid of anyone with whom the children can interact, can turn to for help. They are alone in an urban world full of strangers. These strangers are not all strangers, for the mother, too, becomes one of them, as is Akira’s father (Kimura Yuichi) to whom Akira goes for money. But this father, as the others we’ve encountered in this chapter, also abdicates his role in his son’s life. Parents are absent, uninvolved, uncaring—useless. The mother’s promises of money and of a return do nothing to comfort her children, but instead only cause disappointment. Better, the film seems to say, for them never to have known her at all than to be continually waiting in silent despair for her to come back. The family thus is impossible in Koreeda’s Dare mo shiranai—it is an ideal, a dream, which can never be realised. Its members are pulled apart by the urban distances and realities which hold them in their concrete hands. If the family is impossible as a site of protection, of nurturing, of safe growth, affection, and care, then how can its members discover themselves in any meaningful context? How can its members develop a psychologically stable sense of identity connected to that most basic of social units, the family? They cannot. And so Koreeda’s film, while denying the possibility of the family, also denies the possibility of these children growing with secure senses of themselves as parts of a healthy, functioning society. As Morita’s and Miike’s films destroy the family through absurdity or pathological violence, Koreeda destroys it through negligence and immature irresponsibility on the part of parents incapable of transcending their own desires to be left alone. Neither vision redeems the parent. Blame for the dysfunctionality of the contemporary family is no longer placed at the feet of ungrateful children, as it was for Kurosawa or Ozu. Instead the parent, once the source of moral guidance, is now a ridiculous figure, dangerous, destructive, or vanished. The family has now become a site of social absurdity and decay, violence and abuse. In this environment, one wonders, how is an individual to grow, to learn, to thrive? “Nobody knows,” as Koreeda’s film tells us, but we

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can guess that the answer cannot be positive. It is with one possible answer to this question that my next chapter will deal, as it explores the fate of the individual in a rapidly changing society through the medium of the horror film.

CHAPTER FOUR

HORROR, THRILLER, SUSPENSE: “WHO ARE YOU?” Throughout this study, one of the key terms by means of which I have been approaching contemporary film is that of ‘crisis’, broadly conceived of as a state or condition of instability, uncertainty, dread, or panic. As we have seen in the preceding chapters, this condition exists in issues of gender, the family, and modern Japan’s relations with its past and traditions. As I will show in the chapters to come, it also exists in issues of technology, spirituality, and the process of travel as an enterprise recuperative of a sense of ‘selfhood’ or identity. But in this term ‘crisis’ we have an opportunity: a chance to reconstruct that which has gone through crisis, to make it more resilient, more adaptable, more durable, or simply more personal. We also have an occasion to confront a variety of roots or sources for that crisis, and to do so in a way that leads to resolution. This sounds familiar—and of course it is, especially in the context of cinema, in that there are genres of film that concern themselves specifically with crisis. These are the genres of horror, thriller, and suspense, which collectively have produced some of the most popular and effective examples for demonstrating both cinema’s affective capabilities and its capability to exploit social fears or points of contention. In this chapter I will propose that some of the most pertinent examples of cinema’s engagement with the problem of identity—as crisis, threat, or source of dread—come precisely in the genres of horror, thriller, and suspense. Few of the works we will examine here offer an easy solution to the issue of identity-as-problem, and in fact, many actively resist the suggestion that a ‘solution’ is either possible or even conceivable. Through this resistance the films I will discuss present an understanding of contemporary society as imperiled, often by its own structures. These structures include the family, the media, consumer economics, and the alienation from neighbours and traditions which comes along with haphazard urban growth. The popularity of these genres—often so intertwined in a given film as to make their separation or categorisation difficult—stretches back to the earliest days of cinema and beyond. Even the Noh theatre of the

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Muromachi period (1333–1573) had its examples of ghost and demon plays, and the Kabuki theatre of the Tokugawa Era (1603–1868) existed to create spectacle—the theatrical equivalent of the aim of the thriller. As Richard Hand demonstrates, Time and again in Noh and Kabuki theatre we see the iconography of demonic women and other horrors in worlds that oscillate between the real and the supernatural in a manipulated structure of suspense. Similarly, the Kabuki’s invention of keren [specific techniques for creating specific, spectacular effects] demonstrates the development of technology for gruesome or uncanny effects, while the performance practice of the Kabuki actors requires stylised intensity to capture moments of terror, fury, or demise so familiar in horror performance. Moreover, while classical western drama uses horror as part of the ennobling process of catharsis, the Kabuki stage has no qualms in claiming that it is going for the ‘goosebumps’ effect to take the sting out of summer’s heat. As demonstrated, one of the most striking features of Kabuki is its aesthetic of cruelty, whereby the taboos of sadism or Todesangst are explored through the high-stylisation of art. The contemporary horror film plays the same game, often juxtaposing the arcane with the contemporary or the mundane with the extraordinary in carefully developed structures (p. 27).

Thus contemporary works of ‘spectacular’ cinema—horror, thriller, or suspense films—grow from a historical tradition and context of willing exploration of ‘gruesome’ or ‘shocking’ themes. I will show, however, that a tangible change has occurred in the past twenty years especially to problematise the function of our main concern, identity, in works of horror, thriller, and suspense. This change will be particularly apparent in the films of one of Japan’s most internationally recognised contemporary horror directors, Kurosawa Kiyoshi, in whose opus the question of identification—and, equally, its ultimate negligibility—of the ‘enemy’ or ‘monster’ as a source of terror or suspense forms a powerful, recurring theme. A similar problematisation of the identity of the antagonist, and frustration of the ‘easy solution’ that typically comes from discovering the identity of that character in classic or traditional thrillers, comes in the work of Nakata Hideo, best known for his remarkably successful, eponymous adaptation of Suzuki Kōji’s novel from 1991, Ringu (Ring), from 1998, but who in other films presents us with characters whose identity from the outset is an artifice, a ‘break’ of the contract between filmmaker and viewer that so often exists—that Character A is Character A and we, the audience, are privileged to know that, whether or not other characters do as well. This frustration or ‘breaking’ of the viewer’s expectations brings innovation to the films which Nakata

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has directed, but also signals an awareness of one of the destabilising features of contemporary urban life—that the person one ‘knows’ as A-san or Miss Y, is probably in fact someone else entirely—that the ‘normal neighbour’ may be anything but ‘normal’. This awareness is something we will encounter in several examples here. I have mentioned two directors whose work will form a central focus of this chapter, as we examine the films Kyua (Cure, Kurosawa Kiyoshi, 1997), Kairo (Pulse, Kurosawa Kiyoshi, 2001), Ringu (Ring, Nakata Hideo, 1998), and Kaosu (Chaos, Nakata Hideo, 1999), but we will also examine several other principal works. These include Sono Sion’s Jisatsu saakuru (Suicide Club, 2002), Miike Takashi’s Odishon (Audition, 1999), Kon Satoshi’s animated Perfect Blue (1998), an adaptation of Takeuchi Yoshikazu’s novel of the same name from 1993, and a parallel, though low-budget, more minor film, Yume nara samete (Perfect Blue, lit., “If This is a Dream, Wake up!,” 2002) by Satō Toshiki, based on the same novel but substantially different in its execution, characters, and mood. Along the way I will refer to other supporting films to illustrate my argument that works of horror, thriller, and suspense have shifted their attentions away from objectives of discovering the ‘identity’ of the threat, criminal, or ‘monster’ and so discovering a solution to the crisis that drives their plots, to the very process of questioning ‘identity’ itself and so disallowing the possibility of a ‘solution’ or ‘way out’. My analysis will centre around the situations of the films’ protagonists and other characters as they work through the often elaborate quests the plots embark them upon. These are quests for identity: of themselves, first and foremost, but also of the ‘monsters’ or threats that menace them. It is from this interaction between characters and ‘threats’ that these works of horror, thriller, and suspense acquire their particularly relevant discursive potential, for it is this interaction that allows the films to transcend traditional limitations of these genres as simply a psychological reassurance of the audience that the ‘status quo’ is stable and unassailable. As I will argue here, the status quo in works of Japanese horror, thriller, and suspense is never a ‘safe place’. But first, we have the issue of terminology, that is, of ‘identifying’ the genres I have mentioned: horror, thriller, and suspense. These are all substantively different, and yet they exist in overlapping areas of affect, all aiming in some way to excite the sensations of the viewer in difficult, frightening, or ‘thrilling’ ways. As I have said, often a single film will contain many elements from all of these categories. This is especially true in the eclectic approach to filmmaking which, for example,

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Kurosawa Kiyoshi takes. It is for this reason that I am bringing these different terms together in this chapter. Their aims often overlap, as do the cinematic and narratological techniques by which the director achieves those aims. Nonetheless there are differences in these terms which I will describe here, to give us a set of working criteria with which to approach the films in question, and by which to explore the ways in which they offer departures from traditional or classic examples. As Martin Rubin writes, “the label thriller is widely used but highly problematical” (Rubin, 1999: 1). This is because of the heterogeneous quality of most works one may describe with this term—it is capable of encompassing police dramas, political intrigues, spy stories, and indeed works of action, adventure, horror or science fiction. “The concept of ‘thriller’ falls somewhere between a genre proper and a descriptive quality that is attached to other more clearly defined genres” (Rubin, 1999: 2), but as a collective shorthand for films which contain “an excess of certain qualities and feelings beyond the necessity of the narrative: too much atmosphere, action, suspense—too much, that is, in terms of what is strictly necessary to tell the story—” (Rubin, 1999: 5) this term is quite useful. This notion of ‘excess’ is in itself helpful in providing the basis for a taxonomy of films which can fall under a given category. When a filmmaker aims at creating excessive feelings in the viewer of fear, for example, we have a ‘horror film’; an excessive sense of anticipation leads to ‘suspense’; while excessive exhilaration leads to the ‘action’ or ‘adventure’ film. “The thriller works to evoke . . . visceral, gut-level feelings rather than more sensitive, cerebral or emotionally heavy feelings, such as tragedy, pathos, pity, love, nostalgia” (Rubin, 1999: 5), and it is precisely the enjoyment of these visceral reactions that motivates the popularity of the thriller in a general sense. In many ways this speaks to the Aristotelian notion of drama as a form of necessary social catharsis for the appeasement of strong feelings, for “in a thriller, we find pleasure in intense sensations—discomfort, anxiety, fear, tension—that might ordinarily be considered unpleasurable, as well as in the ultimate release from such pleasurably unpleasurable sensations” (Rubin, 1999: 31). While classically the thriller may serve to afford not only a release from such unpleasurable sensations but also a release of them, I will argue that one of the purposes of the evocation of strong sensations in contemporary works of horror, thriller, and suspense is to critique the presence of those feelings in daily life in order to problematise their sources.

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Understanding this term ‘thriller’ as particularly fluid and capable of encompassing a range of films, throughout this chapter I will often use it as a general denominator for the trilogy of types I have mentioned: thriller, horror, and suspense. I will do so for convenience’s sake, but also because in the context of some of the films we will discuss, the very generality and fluidity of the term is necessary to describe the ‘genre-defying’ content which constitutes the work. And yet in this set of categories defined by their willingness to provoke ‘excessive’ and visceral reactions, a special place exists for works of horror. As a genre, horror serves in a number of ways to highlight social unease or indeterminate fears—“Horror films function as nightmares for the individual viewer, as diagnostic eruptions for repressive societies, and as exorcistic or transcendent pagan rituals for supposedly post-pagan cultures” (Kawin, 1985: 468). It is not surprising that horror films are most popular during periods of societal anxiety; the classics of western horror—Dracula (Tod Browning, 1931), Frankenstein ( James Whale, 1931), and The Invisible Man ( James Whale, 1933), for example, growing out of fin de siècle fascination with mystic, psychic, or terrifying literature, all come during the turbulent years following the Great Depression, while a second “golden age” of Hollywood horror films and sci-fi “B” movies coincides with the Cold War, commencing in the early 1950s and extending through the 1970s. This period saw the production of classic horror films (as well as innumerable less-than-classic movies) from not only Hollywood, but also England, Spain, and of course Japan, with such films as Honda Ishirō’s Gojira (Godzilla, 1954) and its sequels, the same director’s Sora no daikaijū Radon (Radon, Monster of the Sky, 1956), and so on. Times of tremendous change or peril on a national or global scale bring with them tremendous personal anxiety to be cathartically expunged through an almost ritualistic confrontation with something all the more frightening for its concreteness. During transitional periods, when one’s nation or world is faced with the unknown, the defeat of a “known” monster becomes a source of reassurance. In this sense, it is possible to suggest that “both horror and science fiction open our senses of the possible . . . especially in terms of community” (Kawin, 1985: 470), for these genres present us with alternative visions of the existence we know while permitting a visioning of working through change, either positive or negative. However, while science fiction accepts the possibility of change, classically speaking, “most horror films are oriented toward the restoration

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of the status quo” (Kawin, 1985: 470), are oriented towards purging what is unknown, what is terrifying, from the human community. “In works of horror, the humans regard the monsters that they encounter as abnormal, as disturbances of the natural order” (Carroll, 1987: 52). Thus traditionally horror in particular, although also the thriller in general, has represented an attempt—on the part of the characters, obviously, but equally on the part of the audience—to obtain reassurance, to obtain a sense of security in a world made threatening by forces beyond individual control. In this sense, horror and thrillers may be seen as a desperate act, a last hope for redemption and the reclamation of a lost sanctuary of stability. In effect, horror becomes a quest for stable identity, concrete and unquestioned. As I will demonstrate in this chapter, however, contemporary works of horror and thrillers present this quest as interminable—as insoluble—and present instead sources of horror as springing forth precisely from the mundane, the everyday, the known. Susan Napier has suggested that: science fiction is a particularly appropriate vehicle for treating the complexities of the Japanese success story. The very vocabulary of the genre—that of technological, social, and cultural advancement—reflects the cultural instrumentalities that characterise modern capitalism. These instrumentalities include the rapidity of change, the ideology of progress toward some anticipated ‘future’, and the omnipresence of the machine (Napier, 1993: 329).

These points are well made, and reflect the aura of ‘infallibility’ which surrounds Japan’s economic concentration on advancing technology. However, it is apparent to me that the trilogy of horror/thriller/suspense provides a more suitable metaphor for the issues facing the modern urban individual in postindustrial, consumer-capitalist Japan. This trilogy represents the inchoate fears, the shocks and disturbances, of an urban citizenry who daily encounter strangers—countless scores of seemingly ‘normal’ though unknown people, whose motives, desires, and potential capacity for harm remain immeasurable. In many works, the shocks and disturbances come precisely from behaviour of ‘ordinary people’ conceived of as unpredictable, as in some way contrary to an expected social norm. This unpredictable behaviour constitutes the people who carry it out as potential opponents, threats, or ‘monsters’. The modern, urban model presents a vast stream of potential opponents, who transcend the traditionally-held view of the social, of the natural. Thus this presentation of ‘normal’ people as ‘abnormal’

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monsters is especially disturbing. These ‘normal monsters’ “are unnatural relative to a culture’s conceptual scheme of nature. They do not fit the scheme; they violate it. Thus, monsters are not only physically threatening; they are cognitively threatening. They are threats to common knowledge” (Carroll, 1987: 56). As I will show below, two key events from the mid-1990s, the period which saw the re-emergence of the horror/thriller as one of the dominant cinematic genres, demonstrated to Japan that its ‘common knowledge’ of itself was becoming frayed, tattered, inaccurate: the Aum Shinrikyō attacks in 1995, and the Shōnen A incident from 1997. No cultural group has at its foundation the conception of a society composed of strangers—this is antithetical to the very notion of ‘society’ which by definition expects a shared knowledge, value system, and trust among the individuals who comprise it. The modern, urban form of existence is an unaccountable variable in the national self-conception of all contemporary states, which continue to appeal to that shared set of qualities which constitute an “American,” “Canadian,” or a “Japanese” way of life. The presence within these various national myths of the urban reality disturbs the appeals to traditional life-structures, and creates an obvious contradiction between the substance of the appeal and the reality of the nation. The contradiction calls into question the very shared values which form the basis of the appeal, and so calls into question the nature of the individuality and identity of the people who form the urban experience. This is apparent when we compare the types of “monsters” in, for example, contemporary Japanese horror films, wherein psychological deviation becomes a standard, with the range of “traditional” antagonists in classic works of horror: the “undead,” staples of the vampire subgenre, for example, or ghosts, creatures from unknown realms. “Things that are interstitial, that cross the boundaries of the deep categories of a culture’s conceptual schemes, are impure . . .” (Carroll, 1987: 55) and thus become elements of threat, of horror, but in the contemporary, urban world, it is the countless strangers whom one meets throughout the day who are ‘interstitial’, who cross the boundary of known/unknown—they are manifestly human but potentially vastly different from the shared conception of ‘human’ that a non-urban national ‘memory’ still holds dear. Thus the ‘monster’ in contemporary Japanese horror, thriller, or suspense is very often a person—a stranger, perhaps, but also indeed someone whom the protagonist knows well—whose psychology is warped, different from ‘normal’ in unexplainable ways.

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This is precisely the type of ‘enemy’ or ‘monster’ we find in Kon Satoshi’s genre-defying Perfect Blue, which, in a masterpiece of animation, combines elements of drama, action, suspense, murder-mystery, psychological thriller, and horror, all wrapped within a tale of personal growth and struggle for individuality in the pop music/idol industry. This film forms a compact entryway into the issue of identity-as-crisis with which this chapter deals. The story is relatively simple, even though its unfolding in the plot is at times particularly complex, as the film engages in numerous games and feints with chronology and narrative structure. In essence, though, the story follows a pop-singer, Kirigoe Mimarin, as she makes the transition from singer to actress. She leaves her girl-group, Cham, to embark on her new career, much to the dismay of her fans, and her own apprehension as well. This transition is troubling in particular to one fan who has become obsessed to the point of stalking Mima. The fan, a reclusive, disfigured man, acts as her ‘avenger’, taking it upon himself to murder ‘for justice’ fans who interrupt Mima’s final concert, the scriptwriter who pens a rape scene for the television drama in which she has been given a small part, and the photographer who convinces her to pose nude for a magazine feature. As Mima becomes increasingly disillusioned with her new career, she discovers that a fan—the mysterious stalker—has created a Web site, “Mima’s Room,” on which he publishes her ‘diary’. This fan, it turns out, may be working together with Mima’s manager, the failed, former pop-idol Rumi, who also has become obsessed with Mima, to the point of impersonating her and decorating her own apartment as an exact duplicate of Mima’s. The film closes with a violent, bloody confrontation between Rumi and Mima—now grown neurotic and confused about her own persona/identity—which leads to Rumi’s total breakdown and the submersion of her own personality into her assumed guise as Mima. Mima, on the other hand, emerges strong, whole, and assured of her true existence—the film closes with her confident announcement that she is the “real Mima.” In following Mima’s transition from singer to actor, the film delves directly into the substance of identity as something which can be lost almost without one’s being aware. Mima, in discovering ‘her own’ online room and diary, says at first that the writer knows her better than she does herself. This she considers amusing, but as she spends more time at the fan site, she grows increasingly disturbed by the depth and detail of that ‘self knowledge’. In fact, over time she comes to check the Web

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site to discover what she herself has done on any given day, and how she has felt about events. As the process of changing her career becomes more challenging and traumatic, Mima begins to suffer from hallucinations in which she is visited by her ‘old’ self, Mima-as-pop-star, who tells her that she is a fake, someone dirty and fallen, while the hallucination is the ‘real’ Mima, still pure as a member of Cham. These hallucinations intensify in frequency and the degree of condemnation which they contain, as Mima’s TV character also undergoes a crisis in the plot of the drama in which she appears. It is significant of course that Mima’s first line in the drama is “Anata, dare na no? ” meaning “Who are you?” She repeats this question over and over again, nervously at first as she prepares for her on-screen debut, but with a growing desperation as the phrase comes to have a deepening personal meaning. Kon Satoshi makes good use of this plot development, doubling and redoubling the narrative back onto the same points of Mima’s TV-drama character’s behaviour on screen, to highlight the overlapping worlds of Mima’s TV-drama ‘self ’ and her ‘real’ self ’s intensifying sense of ‘loss of self ’. This doubling and overlapping serve to demonstrate the blurring of the boundaries between Mima’s reality and her ‘performance’, but also serves to frustrate the simple linearity of the plot and to confuse or destabilise the audience’s sense of security in terms of following the unfolding of the film. Through this process of destabilisation, Perfect Blue involves its audience in Mima’s own growing personal alienation and her loss of confidence in her identity—the film resolutely clings to Mima’s point of view even as that point of view becomes indistinct, diffuse, and uncertain, thus positing that the audience’s uncertainty as to which actions of Mima’s persona are real, hallucinations, or part of her performance in the TV drama parallels her own confusion and crisis. The film also plays with the problem of identification in ways typical or traditional of the suspense genre, by concealing from the audience clear knowledge of which character is responsible for the crimes of ‘vengeance’ committed against the people who have ‘wronged’ Mima—the unruly fans, script writer, photographer, and so on who have ‘harmed’ or ‘corrupted’ her image. In this Perfect Blue enacts Noël Carroll’s ‘question-answer’ model of the suspense film (Carroll, 1984: 65–89), by posing the question “Who is responsible?” and deferring answering until the final confrontation between Mima and Rumi. The answer given, that it is Rumi acting out her dreams to compensate for

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her own failed career, is not totally unexpected, but it does come as a shock in that it is predicated on a broken trust—Mima, throughout the film, has relied on Rumi to be her guide, her guardian, her mentor, and her friend. Rumi’s betrayal of Mima’s dependency at her most vulnerable point is thematically telling, but it also gives Mima the opportunity of discovering her own self-reliance through the necessity of violent self-defense. Following the bloody episode of Rumi’s attack on the ‘false Mima’ of her psychotic imaginations—that is, the real Mima, herself neurotic and unstable—Mima discovers the strength to affirm that she is indeed “the real Mima” and so, the film’s close implies, is able to find success in her new career as an actor. Identity, Perfect Blue tells us, is real, desirable, and achievable—but this insistence on the part of the film is not without a particular irony. Perfect Blue explicitly refers to the problem of ‘identity’ as something constructed either through personal effort—which the film valorises as correct—or else through appropriation, which the film associates with violence, illness, and failure. In this construction, however, the film plays multiple and ironic games with the issue of a ‘true’ personality: not only has it explicitly questioned the sources of identity to propose that only struggle can provide an ‘authentic’ ground on which to base one’s individuality, but through the doubled nature of the story-withina-story structure, with Mima playing several characters in the TV drama (as those characters themselves wrestle with the psychological condition of multiple personality disorder), it overlaps the conundrum of acting as a model for identity with its ‘message’ of the possibility of a personally-created self. Acting, Mima’s goal as a new career, while emerging as something which she successfully achieves, by definition is the constant deferral or erasure of identity—the constant substitution and replacement of one persona for/by another. Thus we may argue that in achieving her goal of becoming an actor she has also achieved the goal of ‘losing’ her identity, now not through the machinations or usurpation of a nefarious other out to steal who and what she is, but through her conscious choice and effort. While Perfect Blue presents its protagonist as accomplishing something positive, ironically, the very nature of that accomplishment calls into question or undermines the optimism Mima so triumphantly declares at the film’s close. Her struggle has given her something—but what it has given her may not at all be what she imagines. More fundamental than the ironic valorisation of the actor as someone with a concrete or ‘true’ identity—which, after all, can be an issue

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for every dramatic or cinematic work—is the question of animation as a venue for the questioning of identity. Animation by its very nature cannot present something which has an ‘identity’ or a ‘personality’, in that it can only present the illusion of an object, abstracted through the processes of drawing, firstly, and then the mechanics of giving motion to the drawing through the projection of rapidly-changing frames. There is not sufficient space here to pursue this, either theoretically or practically, but it remains an area of enquiry capable of producing fascinating results. Instead, it will be productive to turn to a live-action rendition of the story in Perfect Blue, Satō Toshiki’s Yume nara samete (Perfect Blue, 2002), in order to focus our attentions more explicitly on the function of fandom and obsession with celebrity as a source of identity confusion in popular culture. Here the story is substantially different from Kon’s version. We meet a young model, Ai (Maeda Ayaka), who is about to make her ‘debut’, her first concerted campaign for publicity and celebrity. Her manager (Toda Masahiro), Bando, intends her to become a singer, and hopes she will record a song written by her friend (Shimizu Yumi), a young woman who, we are told, has committed suicide over a failed love affair with her high school teacher. A convenience store employee, Horibe Toshihiko (Omori Nao), is obsessed by Ai—each morning after bathing, he prays before her poster (which also hangs on the wall of his convenience store) that he and ‘Ai-chan’ (“dear Ai”) can have a good day at work together. One day, Ai, who has recently moved into the neighbourhood, comes into Horibe’s convenience store, and the two strike up an awkward though touching conversation in which Horibe confesses to being a fan of the young model. She is pleased, in a hesitant way, and the two form the basis of a friendship. As the film progresses, though, we watch while Horibe “becomes” Ai—that is, experiences what is apparently more than an extended hallucination of physical transformation in which as a result of his fascination with her, he feels himself to be changing into the young model. This transformation leads to the film’s climax, the murder of this ‘second’ Ai by the jealous wife (Watanabe Akiko) of Bando, leaving the way clear for the ‘real’ Ai to achieve success as a pop idol. The film opens with an interpretively rich series of images, beginning with the view from the passenger seat of a car travelling over a long bridge. The view, looking out from the passenger window, is of the rear-view mirror and the passing scenery, the bridge rail and the outskirts of Yokohama in the distance. This shot, lasting 25 seconds,

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gives way to a 20-second close-up of Ai as she whistles the tune, “Yume nara samete,” which her dead friend has written. The camera then cuts to a shot of the manager as he drives the car in which they both ride. The real interest here comes from the opening image of the mirror and the passing scenery—the shot presents a visual contradiction of movement in two opposite directions at once. To reinforce the feeling of frustrated transition, of course the car moving across a long bridge serves as a convenient metaphor for the process of change, from one condition to another. This shot in many ways foreshadows the story to come; the cut to Ai’s face as she whistles emphasises that this is her process of transition, from unknown model to potentially famous idol, as indeed it is, and her dream from which ‘someone’ will awaken her. But the film plays with points-of-view in its introductions of the main characters in a way which ‘dilutes’ or diffuses our sympathies with Ai’s role as protagonist—or to put it another way, which gives us an opportunity for intimacy with the antagonist before such an opportunity has come for us with Ai. Even before we see Horibe meet Ai, we are given access to his thoughts in voice-over narration, in which he tells us that he wants to keep back the ‘special secret’ of how he has known her since before her debut. This playing of point-of-view too foreshadows the events of the film, the transformation (henshin) of Horibe into Ai and the resulting overlapping or confusion of identities between the two. We are also given Horibe’s voice-over at the moment of his transformation, when he tells us that the process is not entirely complete—that love must end in tragedy. Here, too, the ‘confusion’ of points of view or the overlapping of audience ‘intimacy’ with a character serves to frustrate a simple identification or sympathetic relationship with a single protagonist, the better to emphasise the issue of dependency as a form of self-identity. Horibe’s transformation comes as a result of his conscious decision to emulate her, to base his self-conception on his ability to live as her. More than this, in fact, for on their second meeting, he tells her that since childhood, he has been “living” her (Ai-chan o ikiteiru), not simply imitating her way of life (seikatsu no mane ja nai), but living her. He decided quite consciously, upon first meeting her as a child in the home town they had both shared, to take on aspects of Ai’s life, and in the many years since then has become so immersed in her existence that he is able to state that, aside from their genders and ages, there is “nothing different” between them. Needless to say this revelation shocks Ai, who declares Horibe to be “just a stalker” (tada no sutōkā) before running away from him.

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Several times throughout the film, technical effects emphasise the process of reversal or transformation which the opening sequence of images suggests and which the plot demonstrates. For example when Ai leaves the convenience store in which Horibe works after their first meeting, playing over the scene change is a short musical piece, unremarkable except for the effect applied to it—it is played backwards, the decay of the musical notes coming before, and leading into, the attack. This technique had been popular during the periods of recording experimentation during the 1960s, but here it is used as a secondary foreshadowing device to ‘set the tone’, as it were, for the process of the film’s playing with identity. The scene leading out from the transition is of the next morning; Horibe is in his shower, and we watch as water and soap swirl down the drain. Together with the foam, however, are quantities of hair apparently fallen from Horibe’s body—indicating the first step of his change from a man to a woman, but something of which he is not aware. This same musical piece and effect occur as Horibe much later notices that his hands have become the hands of a young woman, and when he discovers that his penis has disappeared, accelerating his total transformation into Ai, finally completed—in a stirring parody of classic horror films such as Frankenstein—on the night of a terrific electrical storm, lightning flashes marking the exact moment of change. After this transformation Horibe, in the guise of Ai, and the real Ai meet again. Horibe reveals to Ai that he knows her secret—that she had murdered a high school friend in order to steal the song the friend had written. This revelation, and Horibe’s later insistence that he is the ‘real’ Ai, brings the plot close to that of Kon’s adaptation, with these two characters enacting the Mima/Rumi transformation in that earlier film. Here, however, Ai’s secret and her repressed guilt seem to form a substratum of plausibility for her acceptance of Horibe-as-Ai. Ultimately however Ai ‘remembers’ in a flashback what had ‘really’ happened on the day of her friend’s death—her friend had told her to record the song and become famous, because she was about to die, upon which she leapt to her death from the roof of an apartment building. This flashback takes place while Bando’s wife plunges a large knife into Horibe-as-Ai, who has been standing outside the real Ai’s apartment, waiting, perhaps, for the opportunity to take over her life completely and finally. This film plays with the issue of celebrity as a source of identity confusion, or celebrity as model, in that Horibe enacts the role of a true ‘fan’ in its fullest sense—a fanatic, someone who is willing to

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suppress his self-conception, or reconstruct that conception, in favour of an alien or ‘other’ model. Horibe has always been aware of his decision to “live” Ai, but this decision effectively consumes him, to the point of causing his apparent physical transformation. In this way, Yume nara samete proposes the consequences of ‘living through’ another person at the expense of one’s clear self-awareness. As this pair of adaptations of Perfect Blue demonstrates, identity is something closely linked with “the real,” with what is beyond doubt—a strong sense of self-identity, of individuated selfhood, is a hallmark of confidence and security. The crisis in this pair of films comes precisely because, in the age of the “simulacrum,” the definition of the ‘real’ has disappeared. This is an issue to which we will return below in discussing Nakata Hideo’s Ringu. Here, however, we may use this term productively in the context of these two films and their characters. Horibe lives as a simulacrum of Ai and so loses his ‘real’ physical form. For Mima in Kon Satoshi’s version, there was no difference between her ‘real’ self and the simulacral self of “Mima’s Room,” the cyber-self whose diary she reads in order to discover what she has done during the course of her ‘real’ day. We may argue that Mima, in confusing herself with her simulacrum, has become divested of a framework in which her individuality could find nurturing support—has lost a ‘metanarrative’ about herself. This becomes the metaphor for a postmodern Japan, in which its national, historical metanarrative has become displaced by the contradictory pull of internationalisation or globalisation. As Lyotard would have it, in the absence of a commonly held metanarrative, the narrative function is losing its functors, its great hero, its great dangers, its great voyages, its great goal. It is being dispersed in clouds of narrative language elements . . . Conveyed within each cloud are pragmatic valences specific to its kind. Each of us lives at the intersection of many of these. However, we do not necessarily establish stable language combinations, and the properties of the ones we do establish are not necessarily communicable . . . There are many different language games—a heterogeneity of elements. They only give rise to institutions in patches—local determinism (Lyotard, 1984: xxiv).

On the personal level as Mima demonstrates, what emerges is a world of fragments, perhaps sufficient unto themselves, but more often simply disconnected from a substantiating frame; a world of indeterminates—a world in which the unknown threatens to become the norm, in which instability is the constant, and in which ‘the normal’ may harbour a hidden though imminent threat.

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There is thus an ‘evil’ hidden within contemporary Japan. As Bruce Kawin suggests, watching a horror film may be a way of “confronting a hidden evil in the culture” (Kawin, 1985: 468), but what the nature of this evil may be is a historically contingent issue. In the Japan of the postmodern era, the “evil,” as I am arguing, is the emergence of threats and terrors lurking just below the surface of a ‘normalcy’ which presents itself as mundane, benign, and successful. Yumiko Iida addresses this and one of its potential sources when she suggests that: The intellectual, sociocultural, and historical climate of the 1990s appear[ed] to be . . . in a state of profound disarray, deeply troubled by the effects of postmodernity . . . In the case of Japan, the 1990s witnessed a multiple breakdown of political, economic, and sociocultural orders and induced a visible shift in the mood of society reflecting an end to the glorious age of Japanese economic success on the global stage (Iida, 2000: 424).

It is possible to see that in Japan, as in other late-capitalist, consumer societies, “everyone lives to a degree in an artificial reality, such as the virtual family and the virtual society” (Iida, 2000: 428), a reality in which communication takes place more often via email, cell phone, or text-message than through face-to-face interaction, and in which identity becomes a purchasable, ultimately disposable commodity. In a world of artificial reality, identity itself becomes artificial, becomes doubtable, if not after all thoroughly suspicious. Trust, that quality which comes from knowing another person and being able to predict—to rely on—a particular behaviour, becomes untenable. Thus Kon’s Perfect Blue in which trust is the very source of the crisis for the protagonist. Together with this loss of trust through ‘virtual’ contact, however, comes a loss of trust more concretely demonstrated by two instances of extreme, public violence which effectively eroded the hitherto imagined security of the Japanese: Aum Shinrikyō, and “Shōnen A.” It is not appropriate here to analyse in detail these two events, but together, they amount to an assault on the sanctity, the sense of a close-knit family, of the Japanese and Japan’s “island mentality” which saw it as a safe country in some way immune to the social ills of the outside world. Aum, of course, is the religious cult headed by Asahara Shoko, responsible for the release of sarin gas in the Tokyo subway system in March of 1995. “Shōnen A,” on the other hand, was a young high school student who in 1997 murdered several younger students, beheading them and taunting the police with notes left in his victims’ mouths.

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What was most disturbing about these events is the way in which they called into question the received notion of who was capable of committing such acts: no longer were horrible crimes the exclusive purview of ‘criminals’, of the insane or the pathological. The members of Aum were for the most part young, intelligent, university educated people from stable, affluent families (Metraux, 1995: 1149). Many expressed deep concerns about the consequences of the materialistic lifestyle they saw around them (Metraux, 1995: 1145), and many sincerely felt the need to find a true sense of self-identity (Metraux, 1995: 1145) grounded in spirituality. “Shōnen A,” conversely, was by all accounts a normal young boy, a “futsū no ko,” (“typical child”) from a “regular family” (Arai, 2000: 843) whose actions transformed the concept of “child” into “the site of a newly intensified nexus of social anxiety,” just one part of a “larger discourse of social crisis and collapse” (Arai, 2000: 841). Thus during the 1990s Japan experienced on multiple fronts an assault on its self-image, its sense of security and social stability—these attacks translated into deeply-felt personal attacks, for a society after all is always collective, made up of shared personal experiences. Personally, on an individual level, the stability which had come to a generation of Japanese who had lived without first-hand knowledge of the hardships of the immediate postwar period, who had grown during the 1970s and 1980s, decades of phenomenal economic strength, was now experienced as lost. For those Japanese who had known hardship, the shock must have been so much the greater, accompanied by fatalistic feelings of a return to a nightmare—the known, the stable, has become the unknown, the unstable. How could horror not emerge in cinema as a reflection of this social condition? Thus both Kon’s and Satō’s version of Perfect Blue hinge on the unknowability of someone whom the protagonist ostensibly ‘knows’, either as a friend or as a member of one’s daily community. These works thus highlight the fear associated with an inability to trust fellow human beings, a fear of encountering the unknown not outside of a society but within it, at its very heart, in the guise of an apparently normal, benign person. Thus it is possible to suggest that in Japan the trilogy of horror/thriller/suspense has become the most appropriate genre for highlighting the clash between the unidentified and the desire for identity, and as such is the genre most able to form a discursive basis for questioning the function of ‘the normal’ in a social formation. We have seen this in the two versions of Perfect Blue, but there the problem was in many ways isolated to Mima/Ai and their ‘private’ struggle.

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Other works however present a more encompassing—and therefore bleaker—imagination of the modern condition. Nowhere is this more apparent than in Kurosawa Kiyoshi’s 1997 film, Kyua (Cure). Kyua is a haunting yet seemingly anticlimactic work which blends elements of the mystery, detective thriller, and horror genres. Its plot and ‘monster’ are explicitly concerned with the problem of identity of both the victims and the source of the threat. The film follows two parallel stories which eventually meet. In brief, these are on the one hand that of a police officer (Yakusho Kōji) who investigates a series of brutal killings which all share common features: the killers and victims are known to each other, often working or living together, and the killers have hitherto been perfectly law-abiding, mild-mannered citizens who, after committing their crimes, can remember nothing of what motivated them to do so. The second story is that of a young man (Hagiwara Masato) found wandering along a beach, apparently suffering from total amnesia. This young man, however, has the uncanny ability to hypnotise the people whom he meets. As the film progresses, we come to realise that this young man, through the simple yet probing questions he asks, provides the impetus for the people whom he meets to commit seemingly random acts of murder. The film’s conclusion is open-ended—after tracking down, arresting, and perhaps murdering the amnesiac young man, the detective enjoys a solitary coffee at a café. In the background one waitress whispers briefly into another’s ear. This second waitress then walks casually into the back, carrying a large knife—for what reason we do not know, but the implication is that there she will murder the cook. It is useful here, in connection with the stranger in Kurosawa’s Kyua, to consider what Noël Carroll has suggested about the origins of monsters, that they often come from “marginal, hidden, or abandoned sites . . . It is tempting to interpret the geography of horror as a figurative spatialisation of the notion that what horrifies is that which lies outside cultural categories, and is, perforce, unknown” (Carroll, 1987: 57). The young man able to hypnotise his victims is first encountered at the seaside, the liminal, boundary space between land and water, the solid and the fluid, the known and unknown. Without name or apparent knowledge of where he is, this man is an enigma, an identitiless person with neither goal nor background, yet with the ability to create within the people whom he meets a profound instability. He seems able, effortlessly, to hypnotise almost anyone, drawing from them their most hidden, violent desires. As one character in the film states

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explicitly, no one who is hypnotised can be made to do anything which s/he does not already want to do—the vicious murders which these random people commit are therefore part of their innermost thoughts. This is the true source of the terror in Kurosawa’s Kyua, the realisation that anyone—everyone—has the potential to become a killer, that everyone has the potential to become a monster. The identity of the nameless wanderer is, ultimately, completely irrelevant, as is the identity of the people whom he influences. Identity as such is neither defense nor excuse for the acts of violence which occur, themselves identitiless and random. Even if a coincidence of timing, it is ironically significant that this film was produced in the same year in which Shōnen A committed his atrocious crimes—the same year in which this futsū no ko, this “ordinary child,” proved himself capable of what should never be “ordinary,” the brutal murder of young children. Kurosawa’s vision of the monstrous is precisely this ability of the “ordinary” to conceal within itself the horrible; that is to say, his vision of the “ordinary” equates it to the horrible, the brutal, the violent. The film highlights this in the relationship between the police detective and his wife (Nakagawa Anna). She, in fact, is the first character we encounter, as she reads a book (a translation of Helmut Bartz’s Blaubart), in what appears to be a medical or psychiatric clinic. Later we discover she has issues with her own memory and psychological condition. The strain of caring for her and hoping for her recovery has worn the detective down, to the point where he, too, expresses his frustrations in isolated, personal, violent outbursts. Unable to reach his wife through open communication, he gradually withdraws from her throughout the course of the film. Initially he had promised her a vacation together after concluding the case upon which he was working; however, the wife herself later tells him that there is after all no hope for a vacation, or for an improvement in their lives together. The ordinariness of their life itself—the very quality of their work, their home, their reality—prevents their happiness. Coming to this realisation overwhelms the detective’s sense of purpose, and in effect defeats him in his investigations of the random murders sparked by their perpetrators’ encounters with the anonymous, wandering “monster” who brings with him the key to society’s inevitable power to alienate its members and cause them to destroy one another in the most “natural” way imaginable.

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It is in Kurosawa’s films that a critique of the postmodern, or “postindividual,” form of identity finds its most consistent expression, and where characters struggle most desperately against the overwhelming erasure of their individuation. Kairo (The Pulse, 2001) offers another aspect of this issue, for its plot and characters are explicitly concerned with the preservation of individuality in the face of a subsuming, alienating nihilism. Kairo tells a simple—though surprisingly enigmatic—story, not without a certain irreverence toward logic and coherence, but one which has profound implications for the modern/postmodern age. The film opens with a series of close-up shots of computer monitors, and the flashing text that appears on one of them: “Do you want to meet a ghost?” As the film progresses, various characters simply disappear, vanishing into thin air and leaving behind only black smudges, highly reminiscent of the shadows which victims of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki left on steps and sidewalks. The world of ghosts has become overcrowded, and through an appropriation of the computer technology which makes the Internet possible, they have become able to trap living human beings within their own personal eternities, forever isolated from one another—so doing, the ghosts are able to return from their dimension, to “repopulate” the world as a “ghost-colony.” People throughout the world resist vanishing as best they can, but eventually only a small handful of survivors remain aboard a ship headed out onto the open ocean. There is no resolution to this problem, no conclusion to this story, only a haunting, overhead shot of the ship, miniscule, against a grey, endless sea. Quite ironically, and despite its promise to link people from around the globe, the Internet is the medium of transmission of the problem—as the central male character, Kawashima (Katō Haruhiko), says, he had wanted to try the Internet because everyone was using it. He seemed to have hoped it would bring him closer to others. Another character, Harue (Koyuki), however, tells him that the Internet is not capable of doing that—everyone leads their own fragmented lives. She shows Kawashima videos of the victims of the ghosts’ entrapments, before they disappeared, the lonely, homebound people who soon vanish, and tells him that their lives were no different from that of the ghosts’—they had been living as if they were already dead. This aspect of the film deals with the issue of hikikomori, homebound people, usually male, usually young, who have withdrawn themselves from the pressures of the social world, often to avoid “exam hell,” the time leading up to

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their university entrance examinations. The Internet is a way for these young people to maintain some minimum form of human contact; here, however, it becomes the mechanism whereby they are destroyed, trapped in isolation, and so make way for the return of the ghosts. What the Internet in effect seems to offer is an anonymous, safe existence in which identity is of absolutely no importance—but in which the only words these hikikomori exchange are “Help me! Help me!” Kawashima is a contradictory character—on the one hand, we see him to be without strong will, unique abilities, or even a clear opinion of his likes and dislikes. He tells Harue that he has no real reason to use the Internet, but because it is fashionable at the time, he is curious to try it. He tells Michi (Aso Kumiko), the central character in the subplot that eventually merges with Kawashima’s storyline, that he may have had a girlfriend in the past, but he can remember little of her, and in fact he can not remember even his own name at this point—his personal relations, his personality, are developed to only the minimal degree. And yet when he rescues Harue from her first psychological crisis, when she may first be on the point of joining the trapped, lonely individuals in their private eternities, Kawashima tells her that he knows they both exist, that they both have a certain identity and a sure, determined confidence in their futures. He tells her that together, they are enough for each other—they are enough to create a worthwhile life together. What is lacking in Kawashima is not passion, nor is it energy: it is simply a foundation of individuated identity, personally created and personally valued, upon which to build the life for himself which he tries to convince Harue awaits him. Kairo thus deals explicitly with the issue of identity and personal existence, particularly through the character Kawashima who, as we have seen, expresses his confidence and his certainty of his own (ultimately unestablished) individual identity. The film deals with these issues explicitly in a pivotal scene near the end of the film, after Kawashima and Michi have found Harue, and have been unable to prevent her from committing suicide. Kawashima unwittingly follows a rolling gas-tank cap into a “red room” prepared to facilitate a ghost’s return to the human world. He meets the materialising ghost, all the while resisting acknowledgement of the ghost’s reality. This is in keeping with his attitude up to this point, and reaffirms his belief in the value of personal identity. As the ghost forms an ever clearer, emerging image, Kawashima berates it, denies its reality, and attempts to prove its illusory nature by trying to pass his hands through it—to

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his overwhelming shock, however, his hands land firmly on the ghost’s solid shoulders. The film functions here quite differently from a work of traditional horror, in that at this scene, which reveals the ghost, it becomes clear that there is no possible solution to the problem: the ghost cannot be defeated. Traditionally, the revelation of the nature or origin of the threatening entity provides the “hero” of the film with the means by which to destroy it and save him- or herself—here, however, as the ghost materialises into a tangible corporeality, its potential to destroy Kawashima intensifies, to the point where his earlier certainty and confidence in his own identity, an identity which as we have seen is already without precise definition, are fundamentally shaken. This scene presents a visual denial of the climax of traditional horror films, through the gradually sharpening focus of the ghost’s features, from grainy indeterminacy, to clear, humanised, and surprisingly banal facial expression—but this is part of the ghost’s threat, his apparent normalcy and lack of obviously vicious, demonic, or “other worldly” appearance. This, too, is central to the issue of identity common to many of the works of horror we are considering here—horror is found in the everyday, in the banal, in the mundane. Similarly, this theme is present in the films of Nakata Hideo—most notably, Kaosu (Chaos) from 1999 and of course his most well-known work, Ringu (The Ring) from 1998, but even his first film, Joyūrei (Ghost Actress) from 1997 hinges on a quest for the identity of the ghost character (even the title alludes to ambiguous identity in its conflation of two words, joyū, “actress,” and yūrei, “ghost,” thus implying the presence of the terrifying within the mundane, as does the work of Kurosawa Kiyoshi). It is in his films that we see clearly the “endlessness” of the threat facing the main characters: in Ringu, even when the identity and history of Sadako (Shirai Chihiro), the originator of the video-taped curse that destroys its viewers unless they copy the tape and pass it on to someone else, are known to the protagonists, the threat is not eliminated. In a traditional thriller, as I have said, discovering the identity of the “monster” or the threat, discovering its origins and its goal, is the first step in conquering it. Once the “reality” of the threat is known, it is no longer part of the interstitial, boundary-crossing realm of terror that is so dangerous to the status quo. Once the identity of the thing is known, it joins the categories of the world, becoming analysable and ‘treatable’, its destabilising power neutralised. However, in the works of Nakata Hideo we see most clearly the trend which we have been

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discussing here, that of focussing not on discovering a solution or ‘way out’ for the protagonists through learning the identity of the threat, but of focussing on the process of identity itself as a crisis. The process of discovering Sadako’s story, and then her corpse, does not result in the end of the curse, and does not “save” the protagonists from their fate. Identity here becomes, ultimately, unimportant, for knowing that identity is without benefit—Sadako’s identity does not pull her out from the realm of the indeterminate, does not root her in the categorised reality which harbours the “safe” status quo, but rather affirms her as in effect a commodity to be transferred from one person to the next, bringing with her the constant deferral of a concretised, unique individuality. As Eric White describes this process, Sadako creates a world of ‘simulacra’, of copies-of-copies incapable of standing as authentic originals. This introduction of the motif of the simulacrum—understood as the copy of a copy—is of considerable interpretive consequence. It turns out that Sadako’s revenge upon a cruel world entails the inauguration of a new cultural logic, a logic of the simulacrum according to which copies of copies vary continually from an always already lost original. At the moment of their deaths, the horrified faces of Sadako’s victims instantaneously change from bodily flesh-and-blood into the black reverse of photographic negatives. They thus cross over to the other side of everyday life as simulacral images that copy, but do not identically reproduce, their former selves (White, 2005: p. 41).

The implications for the issue of identity here are apparent. The presence of a simulacral copy frustrates the question of an ‘originary’ source. The copy-of-a-copy can never be traced back to the original. Even when an attempt is made to find that original, the effect is negligible—even when her “identity” is known, Sadako’s origins, intentions, and abilities remain a mystery and so too the method whereby her threat can be overcome remains a mystery. Similarly, having a name, a brand identity, leaves the individual member of a consumer society still a mystery, still, as Erich Fromm phrased it fifty years ago, a commodity on the “personality market” (Fromm, 1955: 5). This is true in Nakata’s Kaosu, as well. Kaosu presents a plot in which the identity of the protagonist’s wife (Nakatani Miki) is from the outset a lie, a subterfuge, for the climax of the film reveals her to be an imposter, standing in for the real wife, murdered before the action of the film takes place. The work’s structure distorts narrative time to present the story in reverse, to good effect,

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and foregrounds the impossibility of knowing with certainty the identity of anyone—by presenting to the audience a character with ostensibly one set identity, and yet to reveal that to be a falsehood, the film calls into question our “willingness” to accept at face value the criteria by which we “know” the people we encounter. This highlights the problem of urban alienation, of course, but more profoundly, it highlights the unimportance or even futility of a quest for identity: once the film reveals the “truth” of the characters, it destroys them. Knowing who they “are” does not provide the basis on which a “stable” relationship can become possible. So, too, the film suggests, is it impossible to create a stable relationship in the consumer-market based urban world, in which identity is assumed, worn, updated, as a new set of clothes—and significantly, the motivation for the husband (Mitsuishi Ken) to murder his wife in order to be free to pursue the relationship with his lover, is, he tells us, simple expediency, simple boredom with her, as with an outdated model of a consumer product. Related to this treatment of the wife as ‘consumer product’ is Miike Takashi’s presentation of the search for a new wife—and its consequences!—in his disturbing film, Ōdishon (Audition, 1999), based on the novel of the same name by Murakami Ryū. This film tells the tale of a family attempting a reconstruction that is doomed to fail. Aoyama Shigeharu (Ishibashi Ryo) is a single father who decides, for the sake of his son, Shigehiko (Sawaki Tetsu), to remarry. At the urgings of a colleague, Yoshikawa (Kunimura Jun), he sets up a fake audition for a non-existent TV program, in order to interview young women and so meet someone in whom he may be interested. He meets, through this ruse, Asami (Shiina Eihi), a quiet, attractive woman whom he invites for dinner. He becomes involved with her—falls in love with her—goes on a short vacation with her—but comes to discover that her past holds dark secrets. What he does not discover till much later is that her apartment holds a prisoner: a horribly mutilated, ragged, abused man whom Asami tortures and keeps as a pitiful captive, feeding him on her own vomit. Asami insists that Aoyama promise to love only her; when she learns of the depth of his love for his son, she breaks into Aoyama’s home intending to kill the son and to mutilate and imprison Aoyama. Although she drugs and tortures Aoyama, his son is able to save his life and to kill Asami. Father and son escape the awful fate she had planned for them, and live on together. The author of the novel-source for the film, Murakami Ryū, has written many works for publication and for the screen which are highly

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critical of the contemporary Japanese woman: Tōpazu (Tokyo Decadence, 1992), for example, presents the bleak story of a prostitute’s (Nikaido Miho) empty circuit from client to client, her downward spiral into insanity propelled by abuse, alienation, and drugs, any possible sympathy from the audience strictly undercut by the character’s near-total inability to assert herself as anything other than a commodity. In Ōdishon, Miike has emphasised the deceptive danger inherent in the figure of Asami by casting Shiina Eihi, whose tangibly ‘weak’, exaggeratedly ‘feminine’ appearance masks the reality of a psychotic woman whose rage and violent jealousy are fueled by feelings of competition between her and Aoyama’s child. These feelings of self-centred greed—in this case for affection—compel her to destroy the people around her. Here, we have the ‘normal’ story of a ‘normal’ love affair gone horribly wrong. The story is told from the point of view of the male protagonist, himself a seemingly ‘normal’ man who wants nothing more than a new mother for his son, and wife for himself. “Aoyama, though far from perfect, does nothing to deserve Asami’s ferocious violence. On the contrary, Miike goes to great lengths to present him as a wellintentioned, decent man” (Hantke, 2005: 58–59). It is Aoyama’s distance from ‘perfection’ which makes him so very normal; and in contrast, it is this normalcy which makes Asami’s actions ultimately all the more savage. Odishon thus offers a strong critique of the ‘normalcy’ of the wife/mother-figure. This young woman, deceptive in her own way and ultimately completely unknown to Aoyama, is equally completely unsuited to being a wife or mother, to raising a child to adulthood and equipping him or her with the necessary graces and skills to become a member of society. She is incapable of loving in a ‘healthy’ way—and while the film does not suggest what a healthy way might be, it certainly shows by explicit example what it is not. While it is possible to focus on the relationship between Aoyama and Asami as an allegory for the impossibility of knowing another person (as Tom Mes does (Mes, 2003: 181–191)), and to focus on the relationship between Aoyama and his son as a redemptive visioning of the role of the father-figure in post-Bubble Japan, the aim of this film which I find most compelling is the presentation of Asami as a vindictively violent destroyer of the ‘propriety’ of the family. In this, we may see both a critique of women, and also a critique of social oppression of women, as Steffen Hantke argues when he suggests that: it is nonetheless striking that Asami’s revenge, which is directed in all its premodern excess against the body of Aoyama, makes visible the social

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areas, such as the domestic incarceration of women, over which modernisation seems to have passed without leaving a trace. These social lacunae function as historical spectres haunting modern Japanese society. They have the power to disrupt the smooth functioning of a modern society by reminding it that it still depends on the social and cultural subjugation of women (Hantke, 2005: 61).

This is indeed true, and adds to our understanding of Asami as an avenging figure. Asami had been abused as a child, the film reveals to us in flashback, but had also exacted her revenge on her abuser by amputating both of his feet. In order to guarantee that Aoyama will stay with her, and will care for her alone, she plans on amputating his feet, as well. This explicitly-stated intention which Asami holds becomes something she inflicts upon the audience, as the camera presents her attack from the point of view of Aoyama, lying prostrate and helpless beneath her. The camera position here, placing the audience within the subjectivity of Aoyama, creates victims of the audience as Asami proceeds with the torture. Throughout, she very calmly expresses to Aoyama her happiness at being able to educate him on the beauty and necessity of pain—this act of education becomes her enactment and acceptance of ‘motherhood’, of functioning as a mother-figure imparting knowledge to her ‘child’. Needless to say, this view of the ‘mother-figure’ is critical, highly critical, of that figure’s mental, familial, and social health. It is also critical of social oppression of women. But most importantly, it is a very disturbing demonstration of the abnormal lurking within the normal, the banal, and, in Asami’s case, the apparently helpless, the weak, the beautiful. The motivation behind Asami’s torture of Aoyama is precisely her desire to be loved exclusively, completely, and eternally by another person. Her intended mutilation of Aoyama will guarantee his inability to leave her—his continuing dependence upon her and her alone in a reversal of the Freudian Oedipal complex which here sees the ‘mother’ desiring to kill the rival in order to keep/sleep with the son in security. It is this twist of the psychology of maternity which reveals the figure of the mother to be a destructive, insecure and dangerous presence within the home—which reveals the normalcy, the very basic normalcy, of the mother to be a potential source of incredible violence and destruction. But more than this, we have the explicit process of ‘selecting’ Asami from a group of prospective young women. This process at the film’s outset is indeed precisely an audition, an interview, as if for employment.

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It is a process of shopping—of checking the available brands and models of a product the husband wishes to possess. As such, it mocks many aspects of the consumer experience. Most clearly, it mocks the conception of ‘relationships’ in a consumerist world, and the ‘normalcy’ of consumerism is here taken to an extreme. But this is precisely Miike’s point, to mock an exaggerated view of the ‘normalcy’ in such an everyday occurrence as a widower taking a new wife. Normalcy in a consumerist society creates products out of its individual members, stripping them of their distinctions as people in order to emphasise their functions as purchasable goods. In this way Miike’s film is a corollary to Kurosawa’s Kairo, in that both see the individual as an anonymous object, replaceable as needed. Shimizu Takashi’s series of films entitled Juon (variously given in English as The Curse or The Grudge) builds on this theme of anonymity. It also develops the idea the purely random nature of the danger facing the urban world. These films (five exist now, two versions each for Japanese television and cinema, and one remade by the same director using American actors) present disconnected chapters in which a victim unwittingly encounters a cursed place—a house where murder has been committed. The curse does not remain exclusively associated with the place, however, for as the film progresses, the vengeful spirit finds victims throughout the city. The victims are all merely accidental, people who for a variety of chance reasons encounter the cursed house or spirit. What this series brings to the horror genre is precisely this, the lack of a clear connection between the victims and the vengeful spirit. Whereas in Nakata’s Ringu series, the victims through curiosity or simply bad luck viewed a cursed video tape, and so condemned themselves unless they pass on a copy to another victim, here, the victims are purely unrelated to the original source of the curse. Moreover, there is no ‘way out’, no mechanism whereby the curse can be transferred to another—the random quality of the curse, once it encounters its victim, stays with that person, creating the individuating mark of at least a personal death. The film highlights this structurally—it presents a series of chapters, each one named for the victim whose death it portrays. This is the only form of “identity” in the series, however, for even though the final chapter tells the story of the original victim and her murder at the hands of her husband, the motivation for that murder remains a mystery, an unimportant detail lost in the endless chain of chance, urban encounters that here initiate a process of destruction.

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The final film I wish to consider is Jisatsu saakuru (Suicide Club, 2002) by Sono Shion. This work offers a developed though enigmatic view of the problem of fashion and individual identity, and a disturbingly believable presentation of the pressures for conformity which both sustain and accept the consumerist “agenda.” The film is a horror/ mystery which presents its social critique in the form of a sudden and inexplicable wave of suicides which sweeps over Japan. Its apocalyptic vision of modern life presents a complex imagining of group dynamics, fashion, and the commodification of the pop music industry, while destroying the notion that interpersonal care is enough to redeem the consumer-oriented, urban mode of existence. The film opens with one of the most disturbing scenes in recent cinema: on the platform at Shinjuku Station in Tokyo, at the start of the evening rush hour, a group of fifty-four high school girls, perfectly normal in every respect, arrives, apparently awaiting their trains home. As a train approaches the station, the girls, as one, link hands, and form a line along the edge of the platform. Seemingly full of youthful energy, they swing their linked arms, counting down one, two, and three—at which they jump before the train, to be dragged and ground to their deaths. This scene, so normal in its presentation, the camera moving in cinema verité style through the various sub-groups of the girls as they talk, laugh, and wait, conveys with sterling clarity the impossibility of understanding the thoughts of the strangers whom one may encounter in the urban world. The mass suicide, while shocking and indeed gruesome, sparks competition among other groups of students keen on beating the number, fifty-four, to achieve distinction through setting a “record”—but the distinction, of course, is not on an individual, personal level: it is to be achieved by the group that consumes its separate members. Visually, this is apparent in the camera’s treatment of the victims of the mass suicides, presenting their corpses as a jumbled assortment of body parts, the identity of one indistinguishable from that of any other in the pile. Further, a sub-plot involves clues found at the scene of each mass suicide, specifically, a gym bag containing, in a long, continuous roll, shavings of human skin stitched together into a patch-work strip, the contributions of each victim thus transformed into a whole the precise nature of which receives no resolution in the film. Identity is thus meaningless here—each separate member of the various “suicide clubs” is average, unremarkable, but within that very banality possesses the ability to destroy the substance of urban society itself, as

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an inevitable outcome of the willingness of modern, urban consumers to follow trends and fads. The film highlights the complete meaningless of the various deaths in a long section that shows the spreading grip of the “suicide mania” that captures urban Japan: two stand-up comic entertainers in the middle of their act stab themselves in the neck; a young wife, blissfully preparing her family’s dinner, cutting off her fingers, while her young daughter stands at her side, upset only that her mother pays her no attention; and so on. These people, apparently on a whim, engage in extremely bloody, violent acts of self-destruction, all the while—almost appallingly—as if behaving in the most natural of mundane activities. To confirm the film’s focus on fashion and fadism as the seeds which lead to the random acts of suicide, the plot tracks the efforts of one young woman, Mitsuko (Hagiwara Saya), to decipher a “code” seemingly transmitted by cell-phone, inspired by the current hit song of a pre-teen, female pop group—the lyrics urge “you” to call “me,” or else “I will surely die.” At the film’s close, this group announces its disbandment, its lead singer telling their followers that it is time for everyone to lead their own lives, to “live as you please.” A subplot leads Mitsuko to discover a group of children who ask her whether she has come to them to “repair her connection with herself,” whether she has found a connection with herself, her boyfriend, and with the young children—the connection between “victim and assailant.” Despite her insistence that she is herself, an insistence which draws applause from the group of children, and however tantalising these aspects are to the hope that the ending will justify interpretive optimism, the film shows us Mitsuko standing with a long line of anonymous people, about to have a strip of skin shaved from her shoulder, to be stitched into another long roll. The final scene mirrors the opening mass suicide at Shinjuku Station, but here, while there is no repeat of that event, Mitsuko rejects the concern a police detective, Shibusawa (Nagase Masatoshi), shows for her—rejects his desire to help and protect her. This is ambiguous: it presents Mitsuko as strong willed and independent, thus it is a positive resolution. However, it also breaks the human bond of care which is redemptive of the alienated, urban individual—this is the bond which the protagonist, Detective Kuroda (Ishibashi Ryō), had symbolised in his devotion to his family, but which he witnesses broken in his own home when his family commits suicide, leading him to do the same. Jisatsu saakuru thus presents no resolution to the problem of urban normality, only a critique of its sources and analysis of its form. Its rejection of interpersonal communication and care is pessimistic, sug-

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gesting the impossibility of urban, consumerist society as something sustainable—and yet its suggestion that children hold an answer to overcome the alienation of the age is a welcome hint of hope. The various films I have considered address the problem of personal and social identities in different ways, but with a consistent theme: identity as it functions in the globally-proposed, politically motivated consumerist agenda is a contradictory arrangement of fashion-consciousness and atomised alienation against which urban individuals have little ability to resist, and into which they have little option but to fall. The subsumption of the urban individual into a global whole emerges convincingly as a fitting subject of the modern thriller, but the air of desperation and resignation that hangs over these films presents the drive for an integrated identity able to fuse both traditional and postmodern elements as illusory. From Kurosawa Kiyoshi’s destruction of his characters who speak most passionately of their own confidence in their identities to Kon Satoshi’s and Nakata Hideo’s willful confusion of the audience’s trust in a character’s stable identity, these directors demonstrate the inevitability of a conflict in the reception of identity as something given, fixed and verifiable. What comes from this is a rejection of the struggle for concrete, atomised existence, in favour of a fluid acceptance of urban, postmodern anonymity, able to adapt itself to any situation, to any changing fashion. This is a pessimistic vision, to be sure, for—unlike in classic works of horror/thriller/suspense—there is no reassurance at the close of the film of a re-establishment of the existing social order. Rather, what presents itself through Japanese horror is the certainty of a dystopic vision, the confidence of a destruction of hope. Identity remains a challenged, threatened thing, a commodity unable to resist the forces of the marketplace. The elegiac air of regret that hangs over the final frames of Kurosawa’s Kairo creates a yearning for a lost sense of stability, but this yearning is futile—even in the Japanese context, the traditional, relational self was never something capable of resisting the total abdication of its self-centred, social fluidity. Here, the self is truly at the mercy of global whim, and while Sono Shion’s Jisatsu saakuru closes with children telling the audience to be “who they are,” that exhortation cannot receive a reply, for as the film has made clear, even should the audience believe they have a will to answer who indeed they are, the response is already a deception. Identity is intangible, unknowable, and in the contemporary Japanese thriller, the most frightening threat to be encountered.

CHAPTER FIVE

TRAVELING TOWARD THE SELF IN JAPANESE FILM The “road trip” is one of the stand-by tropes of cinemas from around the world. It is one of the simplest metaphorical devices for presenting a character in search of meaning—personal, familial, spiritual, social—for his or her life, and of course it presents the scriptwriter and director with many ‘easy’ opportunities for destabilising situations in which to put their characters. So common is this device that it is virtually a cliché to modern audiences—they expect the character or group of characters to emerge from their journey enlightened in ways at least important, at most profound. And fair enough: the road trip is indeed an accurate metaphor for the journey of life that brings us from a point of departure to a point of destination and (hopefully) teaches us something along the way. The road trip movie certainly has a valid place in a study of identity in film, and it also certainly has a valid and popular place in Japanese cinema. This place evolves from the function of travel in pre-modern Japanese literature where it existed as a source of inspiration for wandering poets who, through travel, were able to connect themselves with both tradition and a supporting, natural world. However, while travel still plays an important role in contemporary Japanese art, both its function and its site of situation for the modern traveller are different than for his/her premodern counterpart. This chapter will explore the ways in which the two dimensions of travel—outer movement through space and inner movement through time, memory, and the self—cohere in contemporary Japanese cinema, proposing, after Graburn and other scholars (Graburn, 1989; Adler, 1989), that travel does indeed function as a multi-faceted secular ritual, here highlighting the process of identity-formation and self-discovery not situated, as in the works of pre-modern writers, in the natural world, but rather within the urban space of the modern, westernised Japan. I will first construct a context in which we will read several contemporary films; this context will consist of historical, literary precedents for the emergence of the ‘road trip’, in order to establish the transition in that style of film to emphasise the urban condition of modern Japan. From this initial contextualisation I will move to more recent cinematic

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examples of the genre, including Yamada Yōji’s Otoko wa tsurai yo (Torasan, Our Lovable Tramp, 1969), the first part of a popular and enduring series of films centred on an inveterate vagabond. From here, I will explore two principal films, Vibrator (Hiroki Ryuichi, 2003), and Drive (Sabu, 2002), with mention of others such as Kikujirō no natsu (Kikujiro, Kitano Takeshi, 1999), and Tony Takitani (Ichikawa Jun, 2004) along the way. This principal analysis will utilise both narratological and visual/ semiotic methods, to examine ways in which directors have captured the complementing aspects of temporal, spatial, and psychological movement in works fundamentally concerned with the process of creation of self-identity, both to situate this self-identity within and to overcome the potentially alienating, modern, urban space. As I will demonstrate, the reality of Japan as fundamentally urban, at least in its imagination of itself, requires filmmakers to reconceptualise the issue of travel as an equally fundamentally urban enterprise. And yet, nonetheless, the function of travel as a component of ‘finding oneself ’ remains of a type with pre-modern conceptualisations of this process. Travel is certainly nothing new in the Japanese arts, from the earliest days of literary expression to the most contemporary notions of virtual travel in animated video games. It is no exaggeration to say that even an early work like the Taketori monogatari, the Tales of a Bamboo Cutter, from approximately 900 AD, is centrally concerned with travel, for after all its protagonist, the princess Kaguyahime, has travelled all the way from the moon in order to beguile her many earthly suitors before she returns there at the tale’s close. Many of the poems from Japan’s earliest poetic anthologies, the Man’yōshū (Collection of 10,000 Leaves, c. 759), Kokinshū (Collection of Old and Recent Poems, c. 920), and Shinkokinshū (New Collection of Old and Recent Poems, c. 1205) too, are concerned with travel and the sorrow it brings to those who must leave and to those who must stay. Travel has not always been conceived of as a source of heartbreak or danger, however—with the Japanese haikai poet, Bashō (1644–1694), travel becomes an art form in and of itself, a source of inspiration for the poet as well as a means of reconnecting the artist with the antecedent classics of Japanese art. This recuperative or redemptive view of travel is akin to the transformation in the attitude towards the sublime that occurred in European literature in the 19th century—a change that saw awe-inspiring nature shift from a source of terror to a source of aesthetic inspiration. It is an attitude towards travel which still resonates today—travel “is functionally and symbolically equivalent

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to other institutions that humans use to embellish and add meaning to their lives . . . it has antecedents and equivalents in other seemingly more purposeful institutions such as medieval student travel, the Crusades, and European and Asian pilgrimage circuits” (Graburn, 1989: 22). Travel existed for Bashō as something which he could not resist, as a force of nature within himself that compelled him to explore the literary landscape of Japan. As he himself has it in the famous opening lines of his most well-known work, Oku no hosomichi (Narrow Roads to the Interior, 1689), “I, too, now when would that have been—I, too, could not stop my thoughts of wandering, of drifting like a cloud blown by the wind . . .” What we have here is, on the one hand, a very personal account of the relationship between the poet and travel, and a very intimate connection between the poet and the natural world. I have left out for brevity’s sake the continuation of this sentence which flows forward from idea to idea very much as a traveller moves forward from sight to sight—the structure of Bashō’s prose passages is brilliantly designed to convey a tremendous sense of restless motion, mirroring the psychological restlessness of the poet eager to embark on his journey. The key point here, however, is the necessity for travel in this poet’s life to resituate both his life and his work within the wider arena of his era, his literary tradition, and his place. This necessity still exists in the modern world, within not only poets but all of us who seek to understand our situations and our relationships to history, contemporary culture, and the natural world. But it is precisely this situation within the natural world that is problematic in the modern conception of travel, for the simple fact that the modern world is precisely urban. Travel in premodern times afforded the traveller an opportunity to reaffirm his/her cultural and spiritual stability by taking him/her out into the natural world. In contrast to this, modern travel even when conceived of as an escape from urbanity still remains marked as occurring within urbanity’s spaces—from station to station, via public or private transit, modern travel is inescapably part of the technologised, urban world. Air travel, sea travel, land travel by bus, car, or train, all serve rapidly and efficiently to transport the traveller from one point to another fundamentally in isolation from the natural world, depositing the traveller in more often than not an urban space which, while perhaps different in appearance from his/her starting point, is not necessarily different in substance. Ways of conceiving of travel, however, have not necessarily kept pace with travel’s changing face: it is possible even now to perceive in

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travel a romanticism that calls to something fundamentally necessary to the human psyche. Writing about Bashō, Thomas Heyd remarks that “wandering—the act of leisurely, albeit attentive, traversing the land in a relatively unaided way—has an aesthetic that may help us to recover a sense of the depth of space, of the real diversity of places, and of our human lives within the larger context of nature” (Heyd, 2003: 291). This act of recovery is important because “the practice of wandering may constitute a way to resist the de-aestheticising effects of the trends in modern society” (Heyd, 2003: 291) such as urban crowding, the commodifying influences of consumer culture, and the scheduled, almost regimented, predictability of the career day, which alienate modern urban dwellers from not only the natural world but more significantly from the community around them and ultimately from their own sense of individuated self-identity, as well. While I may disagree with Heyd’s term “de-aestheticising” to describe the contemporary urban milieu, I can certainly accept his intentions—the urban world is essentially cut off from the natural world, and thus urbanites themselves are essentially alienated from that which in previous ages had been accessible to them in demonstrably more tangible ways. Given that the natural world—however inobviously—always sustains their lives, the process of overcoming alienation from the natural world is of fundamental importance especially to urban dwellers—and given Japan’s traditional aesthetic which draws heavily on the relationship between the human and the natural (even though that ‘natural’ typically had been heavily mediated by artistic intervention before being appreciated as “nature”) the process of travel through the natural world remains potentially doubly important. Nonetheless, this process of travel as it is expressed in contemporary Japanese art itself comes to accept its urban situation. As this chapter will show, while travel still retains its power to resituate the traveller, and to permit the traveller an occasion to overcome alienation (importantly, not necessarily social alienation but personal—alienation from the deepest psychological layers of self-identity) this process occurs within a space highlighted as urban, as technologised, as global. By locating this process of re-situation within a modern, urban space, contemporary Japanese art maintains its awareness of its antecedent traditions, but avoids the problematic of the relationship of the urban world with the natural, instead seeking a solution to alienation and the problem of selfidentity precisely within the urban space conceived of as alienating and anonymous. By re-awakening modern, urban existence to the potential

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for an ongoing engagement with beauty, the wanderer resituates his or her life within a broader context containing transcendent aspects that permit a reconnection with tangibly enduring concepts of community and spirituality—for “the wandering of the poet is similar in certain interesting aspects to the shaman’s journey” (Heyd, 2003: 291). This resituation of the self is not contingent on fashion or the transient configurations of modernity or post-modernity—it requires a historicity and an awareness of tradition, but tradition here is the inescapable fact of the human community, not necessarily the particular traditions of the local or parochial. While Bashō may exist within Japanese literary memory as the exemplar of the wandering shaman/poet, his legacy is not lost on other artists working in many media. For example Murakami Haruki utilises travel in some of his most effective narratives—Suputonikku no koibito (Sputnik Sweetheart, 1999), Hitsuji o meguru bōken (A Wild Sheep Chase, 1989), and Dansu, dansu, dansu (Dance, Dance, Dance, 1994) are all centrally concerned with travel as a process of discovery through which a fundamentally alienated character must pass. Suputonikku no koibito is especially clever in this regard for its insistence to follow the travels of the narrator who manifestly is not the most interesting character in the work, and who remains completely unaware of the travels of Sumire, the character whose disappearance on an island in Greece drives the narrative’s central core. Abe Kōbō, too, uses travel and disappearance in several of his works, notably the novels Mikkai (Secret Rendezvous, 1977), Hako otoko (The Box Man, 1973), Hakobune Sakura-maru (The Ark Sakura, 1984) and the play Tomodachi (Friends, 1967), to demonstrate the alienating forces of an urban space not yet fully understood by its residents, whose loss of self-identity (as in Moetsukita chizu (The Ruined Map, 1967)) comes as a direct result of trying to resist the inevitability of transformative, urban modernity. Modern Japanese cinema, too, has within it well-realised examples of the travel genre which correspond fundamentally to the process of creation of a situated self-identity inherent within the lineage of literary travellers from Saigyō through Bashō and on to Abe and Murakami. This lineage emerges most strongly in post-war cinema when Japan as a nation was faced with the heartbreaking tasks of rebuilding its cities, industry, and economy, on the one hand, but also societies and personal lives, on the other. In the films of Kurosawa Akira, for example, we often encounter rōnin, masterless samurai, who wander from place to place in search of whatever destiny may bring to them. Rashomon

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(Rashomon, 1950), Yōjimbō (Yojimbo, 1961), Shichinin no samurai (Seven Samurai, 1954), and even Kakushi toride no san-akunin (The Hidden Fortress, 1958) all have travelling rōnin or outlaws at their cores, and while these films are not urban, they are all concerned with characters who through the process of travel discover their worth—to themselves, and to others. Other directors too, such as Ozu Yasujirō, use travel as a means of critiquing contemporary Japan—this, after all, is the effect of travel in his most well-known work, Tokyo monogatari (Tokyo Story, 1953, discussed at greater length in Chapter Three), in which an elderly couple travel from their rural home to visit their children in Tokyo, only to discover the gulfs of alienation which now separate them. While Tokyo monogatari is not a narrative about the self in the way that many of Kurosawa’s films from the same period are, nonetheless this work too responds to the lure of travel to motivate its story and to propel its plot towards its socially-scathing conclusion. And of course a very interesting counter-point to the travelling hero—the itinerant anti-hero—may be found in Yamada Yōji’s series of “Tora-san” films, beginning with Otoko wa tsurai yo (Tora-san Our Lovable Tramp, 1969). This series continued till 1995, encompassing nearly fifty instalments focussing on the main character, Kuruma Torajirō (played by Atsumi Kiyoshi), and his various misadventures along the road to love and wisdom—neither of which he ever especially achieves. In the first of this series, the protagonist arrives home in Tokyo after a twenty year absence precipitated by a fight with his father. Now, however, his parents have passed away leaving only his younger sister, Sakura (Baisho Chieko) living with an aunt and uncle. Tora-san’s return results in neardisaster for Sakura’s happiness (as he destroys an arranged-marriage meeting and chases off a potential suitor), much squabbling in the family (as his drunkenness and rude behaviour cause strife between the family and their neighbours), and much humour for the audience who have the distinct pleasure of watching this uncouth vagabond assert his prerogatives as older brother before finally leaving with a younger colleague for the open road once again to seek his freedom, fortune, and recuperation from a broken heart. This is very much a film about the results of travel—it is the story of the prodigal son on his return, but yet, this son is far from repentant of the error of his youthful ways. Despite the apparent sincerity with which he returns to care for his younger sister (who barely remembers him, after all), his incapability of considering the positions, needs, or thoughts of others prevents him from behaving as a member of the

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basic social unit, the family, in anything other than a self-centred way. Travel has not given Tora the chance to grow, despite his claims at the film’s opening, given in voice-over narration, of feeling the warmth of belonging swell within his breast as he gazes upon his birthplace. Indeed, ‘travel’ here remains a mystery, an episode apparently without event or issue—in that opening narration, Tora speaks little of his time on the road, only of the argument with his father that had sent him off. This film about travel focuses on its end point—only to propel the protagonist once again onto the open road at its close, giving us an ‘inverted’ model of the road trip. Travel, here, not rest, is Tora’s ‘natural state’, and so it is with Tora at rest that the film concerns itself. Tora at rest is the anomaly, not a ‘protagonist away from home, able to learn much about him/herself ’, the type of character we will encounter later on. The film’s opening appeals directly to the sentiments of return, as the protagonist in voice-over narration tells us how the blossoming cherry trees have pulled him back to his birthplace, the Katsushika ward in Tokyo. He feels something “beating forth” in his chest when he gazes at his hometown, even though most of his family has now died, leaving only his younger sister there for him to return to. This opening segment, very short though it is at one minute twelve seconds, is semiotically rich in combinations of nature imagery with contemporary urbanity, allowing these two contrasting spheres to overlap in provocative juxtaposition. The twelve shots that comprise the segment show an intriguing transition from Nature to the Urban, and follow this order: middle-distance high-key shot of cherry trees filled with glistening blossoms; middle-distance shot of a roadway covered with blossoms, cars visible at the background; long-distance shot of a bridge over a river, people visible crossing to the shore; long-distance shot of a highway at the edge of a residential neighbourhood, as the camera pans left over a dense field of rooftops; low-angle, low-key, back-lit close-up of a cook, people eating in the background; low-angle, middle-distance shot of an outdoor flight of stairs leading up a river bank; low-angle outdoor shot of a shrine-front stall selling pinwheels; high-angle closeup of a wooden temple gate; low-angle middle-distance shot of a shrine fountain (temizuya or mitarai, for purification before entering the shrine grounds); back-lit close-up of a women making cakes at a street stall, other stalls visible in the narrow background; low-angle shot of a narrow, tree-lined lane; low-angle shot of a temple visible through a wooden gate. As this procession of images unfolds, the voice-over

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describes Tora’s history—his quarrel twenty years earlier with his father, his reluctance to return, and finally the emotion with which he gazes on this shitamachi scene in Tokyo. The progression here is striking—modulating from light to dark, and from open spaces to narrow streets, the cinematography clearly codes Tora’s past with images of bright, sunlit Nature, while the ‘present tense’ of his narration brings him to the urban reality of economically vibrant Tokyo. The association is of an arrival at the modern—and this ‘modern’ contains within it memories of a strained familial decline, in which the family has been reduced to its barest form. Interestingly, too, the voice-over is delivered in exaggeratedly formal language, with humble verbal endings, passive voice, and overly-polite inflection—yet liberally mixed in, too, are the rough tones and ‘cool’ mispronunciations of an almost caricatured masculinity as Tora reveals, against himself, something of his ‘true’ nature. And also interestingly, much of the motion visible in this opening segment follows a right-to-left pattern—that is, the opposite of what Brian O’Leary has identified as ‘typical’ for the ways in which a majority of films introduce new information (O’Leary, 2003: 97–222). O’Leary’s research demonstrates the propensity of cinematic narration to equate left-to-right movement with a forward momentum in narrative development, inspired or influenced by the motion of the eye over the printed page in western-language texts. That is, following the model of writing, new information (and hence the flow of chronology) enters the sphere of consciousness from the right. Here, however, to highlight Tora’s reminiscences, new information enters from the left. In this way, the motion in the frame reinforces Tora’s nostalgia in his narration, but does so ironically, to frustrate his longed-for return to his remembered home: that past is gone, and in its place now stands the field of roofs, the cluster of narrow lanes, and the restaurant stalls that fill Shibamata. Throughout this first installment of the Otoko wa tsurai yo series, travel, as that place (the road) to which Tora must return, functions in a complex way as an occasion for isolation from the responsibilities, etiquette, and yet emotional support of home—it is a place where one matures not as a socialised being but as an outsider, an outcast barely able to behave in civilised company. For all his tears and bluster at trying to be a good older brother, Tora-san really is a ‘disaster’ of a relative, but nonetheless as the English title alludes, he remains lovable as an irascible scamp with a ‘heart of gold’ which unfortunately is only rarely revealed.

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Travel for this character absolves him from the necessity of having to ‘grow up’, to behave with regard and attention for others and to act as a functioning and responsible member of society—it becomes in effect a salvation which removes the necessity of self-examination and change, in a near-perfect inversion of the classical features of the road-trip. Tora-san in Otoko wa tsurai yo acts as a permanent traveller who avoids responsibility by simply leaving, rather than facing difficulties and problems with introspection. In this regard his place in the lineage of travel films shows him to be a model of the anti-hero exactly the opposite of Kurosawa’s anti-hero Kuwabatake Sanjurō (Mifune Toshiro) in Yōjimbō (Yojimbo, 1961), the outsider/outcast rōnin who is able to save the village from its competing clans of outlaws before leaving on his way. Tora-san arrives and departs as a tornado, yet a tornado for which his family waits with inexplicable anticipation. He is also the opposite of the protagonists whom we will encounter in the films to which we will now turn. As I will show, the lineage of travel within contemporary Japanese cinema contains a positive potential, something which speaks directly to the enduring necessity of travel for urbanites whose daily journeys, while often exceeding dozens of kilometres, rarely take them beyond the confines of their cities’ underground shopping centres and train systems. For these urban consumers of cultural commodities, travel has the potential to be a liberating technique from the sense of alienating entrapment within an isolated and vaguely defined individual identity. In short, it becomes a means by which the self may be reclaimed as a subjectivity, by which an individual may come to reclaim his or her sense of autonomy and self-identity in the face of an otherwise potentially disturbing urban world. A case in point is Hiroki Ryuichi’s film Vibrator (2003), in which the female protagonist, Hayakawa Rei (played by Terajima Shinobu) embarks on a whimsical late-night journey with a truck driver, Takatoshi (Ohmori Nao), whom she has just met. As the film progresses, Rei and Takatoshi travel from the south-central region of Japan to the north, becoming increasingly intimate along the way, revealing more about their pasts and their interior realities, until Rei achieves a breakthrough of self-understanding instigated by a crisis in her relationship with her travelling companion. As Graburn writes, travel “is a special form of play involving travel, . . . affording relaxation from tensions, and for some, the opportunity to temporarily become a nonentity . . . there is a symbolic link

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between staying: working and traveling: playing . . .” (Graburn, 1989: 22). This is very true for Rei, for whom the opportunity of the road trip becomes an escape from the confining insecurities of her daily life. Yamaguchi Masao has defined travel as a “release from the time of daily life” (Yamaguchi, 1989: 16), and has suggested that, in that both operate to remove us from the spatial and temporal constrictions of our lives, “festivals and travel resemble each other in their fundamental aspects” (Yamaguchi, 1989: 16). Festivals—matsuri—Yamaguchi proposes, analogously to the carnival for Bakhtin, are necessities for social beings because they permit a release from the “burden” of “living within a group” (Yamaguchi, 1989: 16), but Yamaguchi also draws a parallel between even a simple journey to a nearby destination with the journey a deity might make—a journey of only ten or twenty paces—during the course of a matsuri (Yamaguchi, 1989: 16). Thus Yamaguchi proposes the recuperative qualities of spatial and temporal relocation as fundamentally spiritual, but more importantly, as essential for social beings. This has implications for our first encounter with Vibrator’s protagonist, Rei, whom we meet within one of those inescapable symbols of Japan’s urbanity, an all-night convenience store—this location situates Rei very much within her daily life as a social being nonetheless alienated from her fellow members of society. This is made very clear by the repeated and explicit references to ‘White Day’, that day in March on which Japanese men give chocolates and other small gifts to the women in their lives (Valentine’s Day being reserved for women to give chocolates and so on to men)—Rei has no one from whom she will receive anything. Her monologue, delivered in voice-over, is very much self-directed, and she seems in several respects fearful of the other shoppers around her. This social being who lives within a group but who is separated from that group by her alienated interiority is very much haunted by the isolation of her daily life, as is quickly apparent when we listen to what it is that she says to herself, and see where it is she is: in this convenience store, surrounded by strangers, Rei tells herself in her interior monologue (that occasionally escapes through her lips) that she wants to touch someone (hito ni sawaritai ) and that she’s afraid of people whom she can’t touch (sawarenai hito kowai ). When she catches herself speaking out loud, she tells herself to be quiet, berating herself and wondering what the people around her must think of her. Isolated, lonely, needing contact, but fearing the prying eyes of strangers, Rei tells herself that when she feels threatened she becomes threatening (kōgeki saresōde dakara

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kōgeki shisoude) and that her instinct for self-preservation is so strong she worries she may kill someone (hito koroshiteshimawanai ka to). It is very significant that we first meet Rei shopping for white wine, the “delicious Madonna,” that will help her tolerate her empty nights at home—it helps her sleep and the troublesome voices, hers and others, become quiet (arukōru wa yoku nemureru; jibun no naka no mono o kangaeru koe, watashi ga kiita dare ka no koe, sonna urusai koe ga nomu to kieru)—and so become at least temporarily free from her ‘normal identity’ the better to discover her ideality. For Rei, who seeks as she does a spiritual salvation from alienated, lonely, emptiness in the form of alcoholic anaesthetisation, the journey upon which the film sends her comes to involve a celebration of her corporeality, as well as a psychological release. It functions in many ways as a pilgrimage or extended, mobile matsuri: Vacations involving travel . . . are the modern equivalent for secular societies to the annual and lifelong sequences of festivals for more traditional . . . societies. Fundamental is the contrast between the ordinary/compulsory work state spent ‘at home’ and the nonordinary/voluntary ‘away from home’ sacred state. The stream of alternating contrasts provides the meaningful events that measure the passage of time (Graburn, 1989: 25).

The issue of matsuri which Graburn identifies, and to which Yamaguchi refers, is also quite important in this context. The social function of matsuri is two-fold; on the one hand it is to create within each individual member of society an awareness of his or her place within a supporting and necessary community; on the other, it is to release each individual from the daily strictures of social existence by providing an ex-static experience, an experience literally “out of place.” Urbanisation threatens matsuri by simultaneously increasing the ‘burden’ of daily, social existence, and by weakening the bonds of community, by diluting them to the point of disappearance. Despite Benedict Anderson’s insistence on the importance of the “imagined community” in contemporary life, the imagined is not as strong as the actual communities which exist in pre-modern societies, based as they are on the undeniable and visible bonds of kinship, on the one hand, and regional, linguistic, and spiritual proximity, on the other. What is lacking in the contemporary urban world is the simple knowledge that your neighbour will remain your neighbour throughout all of your life. For Rei, the lack of this knowledge creates within her a lack of her own place, a lack of her own situation—in short, a lack of her own self-knowledge, something she is able to regain, at least temporarily, through her travels with the truck driver, Takatoshi.

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The significance of the white wine Rei is about to buy at the beginning of the film is doubled by the name of the brand she seeks— “Madonna”—and its association in Catholicism with Mary. Despite the similarities in some respects between the figure of Mary as a guardian and protector of all and the Buddhist figure of Kannon (or Avalokitesvara in Sanskrit) as the Goddess of Mercy, Vibrator calls specific attention to this word, “Madonna,” together with the country from which the wine comes, “Germany,” and thus emphasises its ‘foreignness’, its ‘out-of-placeness’. Not only is Rei out of place in her own life, the wine she seeks as a temporary salvation is also out of place and so, for Rei, plays with a form of ‘travel’. But Rei’s repeated incantation of oishii Madonna, “delicious Madonna,” not only emphasises the spirituality of her unfolding journey. Calling attention to the name “Madonna” also resonates with the meanings possible in the sound of Rei’s own name. “Rei” is typically written with the character for ‘gratitude’ but the sound rei possesses several interpretations, ranging from ‘habit, custom’ to ‘zero, nought’. Both of these are interpretively rich for this particular character who exists as a woman trapped within a ‘habit’ and who values herself as a ‘nought’, but I feel the most important of these possible meanings is ‘soul, spirit’, as in the word yūrei, or ‘ghost’. The journey upon which Rei embarks, a loop which returns her to her starting point now calmer, wiser, and more self-assured, is the journey of a soul’s progress through life’s stages, returning the soul to the originary point, but more experienced, more worldly, and more complete. Reading Rei’s name as a comment on the ‘spiritual’ progression of the ‘habitual’ brings with it its own associative resonance, for as Heyd remarks, enacting a role similar to the shaman’s, the traveler fulfills an important function (aside from the bringing or sending back of practical goods or information) in the cultural life of the community. The traveler provides perspective on the here and now (the ephemeral everyday) by reporting on the reality of other, distant places throughout the spread of space. One may say that a place here and now only properly becomes apprehensible as such by receiving a horizon in space (Heyd, 2003: 294).

The spiritual contextualisation of the habitual is a similar process, as is the psychological identification of the self, something made possible by an encounter with the Other, the not-self—this is the process through which Rei travels here, to arrive at her starting point, the habitual, but with a more mature, psychological self-identity reaffirmed by her experiences away, with the Other. For Rei, this encountered Other has

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two forms, one external, the other internal, but both are different from Rei’s ‘normal’, daily self. One of these “Others” is the truck driver, corporeally separate from Rei but tender to her, respectful, sexual—a tangible human being with whom Rei is able to connect in a vital, physical, and reassuring way. The other “Other” is Rei herself but Rei-away-from-home, Rei-the-Other. This Rei is able to connect with another person, is able to be intimate sexually but more importantly psychologically and emotionally—with both the truck driver and with herself, as well. Graburn discusses the renewal of the self through travel in a way which is pertinent for Rei, who becomes changed through this process of leaving her daily life to return to it resituated and rejuvenated: “We step back into our former roles . . . often with a sense of culture shock. We inherit our past selves like an heir to the estate of a deceased person who has to pick up the threads for we are not ourselves. We are a new person who has gone through re-creation and, if we do not feel renewed, the whole point of tourism has been missed” (Graburn, 1989: 27). In Vibrator, Rei does emerge with a renewed sense of self—for her, her ‘spiritual tourism’ has had its hoped-for effect. Here it is productive to recall Bashō and once again to think of travel as a type of art, a performance which, like all art forms, contains a goal transcendent of the merely functional aspects of its components. Writing in 1989 on this subject, Judith Adler contends that: Travel undertaken and executed with a primary concern for the meanings discovered, created, and communicated as persons move through geographical space in stylistically specified ways can be distinguished from travel in which geographical movement is merely incidental to the accomplishment of other goals. . . . [ T ]he traveler whose activity lends itself to conceptual treatment as art is one whose movements serves as a medium for bestowing meaning on the self and the social, natural, or metaphysical realities through which it moves. Performed as an art, travel becomes one means of ‘worldmaking’ . . . and self-fashioning (Adler, 1989: 1368).

This movement in “stylistically specified ways” with especial concern for meanings discovered is precisely the movement through space which Rei carries out here, always remaining aware of the function of this journey to take her out of her ordinary setting, permit her an opportunity for self-exploration, and return her to her ‘normal’ state renewed and reformed. Travel here indeed is an art with a very specific, personally recuperative goal.

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Following this conception of travel as a formative process through which the self is configured within a simultaneously constructed world setting, it is logical to propose that all representations of travel are equally and directly concerned with the formation of the self within a conception of the world, a ‘reality’ proposed by the representation. This is the central concern of art which conceives of travel as an integral component of itself—i.e., art about travel—and creates the central metaphor of travelling/journeying as an experiential progression through life’s stages. We have this in Hiroki’s Vibrator, but also in other works which conflate or compress the notion of geographical distance and temporal or chronological growth. Kitano Takeshi’s touching and surprisingly restrained film Kikujirō no natsu (Kikujiro, 1999) is another such film in which spatial and temporal transition equate with the growth of personal understanding. This road trip movie operates almost ‘by the book’—that is, it follows the conventions of the genre with careful precision, highlighting as it does so the ways in which it adapts those conventions the better to reflect Japan’s urban landscape. The film introduces us to Kikujirō (Kitano Takeshi), a petty gangster whose wife (Kishimoto Kayoko) prevails upon him to accompany and safeguard her neighbour’s child, Masao (Sekiguchi Yusuke), as he travels in search of his mother. His mother had abandoned him—he’s never known her, but harbours a love for her and a conviction that she’s waiting for him. Reluctantly, Kikujirō agrees to accompany Masao, but as the two travel together, Kikujirō himself comes to identify with Masao’s innocent determination. Masao and Kikujirō do find Masao’s mother, only to discover that she has married and now has another child to whom she has dedicated herself and her affections. Masao and Kikujirō also find Kikujirō’s own mother, aged and abandoned within a nursing home. The two don’t approach, confront, or meet either of their mothers, but instead return home wiser, sadder, but more complete for the knowledge their journey has given them. Kikujirō no natsu’s journey takes its characters through the natural world but never places them firmly within that world. As in Vibrator, the natural world serves as only a backdrop against which the characters transport their urbanisation; even when we see Kikujirō and Masao camping out with two bikers, Fatso (Gidayu Great) and Baldy (Ide Rakkyo), whom they’ve met, this camping out highlights their discomfort with ‘nature’ and their inability truly to fit in with the greenery around them. In fact the film explicitly though subtly calls attention to these characters lack

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of ‘belonging’ in the countryside when it has them enact the arrival of a space alien in order to entertain Masao. Kikujirō virtually forces Baldy to jump out of the bushes, half-naked and in a highly stylised way, and to announce that he is an uchūjin, an “alien,” come to visit the Earth. But of course Kikujirō and Fatty get caught up in something else with Masao and forget about Baldy and their plan all together—even an ‘alien’ becomes ‘alienated’ in this episode, set beside a lake in the greens and browns of summer, the most nature-centric scene of the film. Nature here is not as it was for Japan’s pre-modern writers and travellers, a source of tradition and inspiration. Rather, it is an easilyoverlooked backdrop for an exaggerated parody of alienation. The knowledge which their journey imparts to both Masao and Kikujirō gives to them in turn a kind of innocence symbolised by the cloth angel wings attached to Masao’s knapsack, on which the camera’s gaze lingers as he runs off at the film’s close. And yet the film’s journey does not shy away from the less-than-innocent aspects of modern life: the violence of Kikujirō’s life and work, the ugliness of paedophilia and urban, sexual predators waiting to prey on young children, the loneliness of these two ‘motherless’ characters. That they are able to pass through the episodes of their journey and emerge with fuller and supporting understandings of who they are speaks to an underlying optimism that through self-discovery and self-acceptance, peace is possible even for the modern urbanite. Thus Kikujirō no natsu offers an existential solution to the problem of alienation and urban isolation from tradition, from one’s neighbours, and from one’s self. This solution accepts the ‘motherless’ condition of modern life—the isolation from tradition and from the natural world—and proposes that nonetheless the individual may still draw compassionate support from his or her friends (the fellow travellers along the way) and may still arrive at a destination both important and profound. As in Vibrator, Kikujirō’s characters emerge from their journeys at their starting points—spatially—but temporally and spiritually they emerge at vastly different places. They have grown, as characters in road movies must, but they have grown within the urban world around them. The growth which the road movie necessitates in its characters need not limit itself to the strictly personal—a political dimension is possible. As I discussed it in Chapter Three, Mizoguchi Kenji’s masterpiece, Sanshō dayū (Sanshō the Bailiff, 1954), is an example of this type of journey through both geographical space and chronological, experiential

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life development which conceives of travel as a metaphoric site of personal, social, and ultimately political growth. Of course travel as a metaphor in Mizoguchi’s work is not limited to Sanshō Dayū—his Ugetsu monogatari (Ugetsu, 1953) is also centrally structured around a journey which takes its protagonist, Genjuro (Mori Masayuki), and his brother, Tōbei (Ozawa Eitarō), away from their humble village lives as potters and farmers into the capitol during the Warring-States period (roughly mid-15th to mid-17th centuries), in order to teach them the values of their lives at home, the loves of their faithful wives, and the propriety of accepting their social standings in a narrative that brings in as much class considerations as humanist ones of fidelity, constancy, and gendered social roles. Nonetheless Mizoguchi’s use of the journey as a metaphor for selfdiscovery is a relatively simplistic presentation of this trope. A more sophisticated example of travel as a metaphor for self-discovery comes in Ichikawa Jun’s 2004 cinematic adaptation of Murakami Haruki’s short story, “Tony Takitani.” This film presents a simple story of loss and recovery in, visually, a very interesting way, and structures that visual narrative as a continuous flow of time and plot from the left of the screen to the right. The particular feature of this presentation is that the film is relatively free of ‘cuts’ to move from scene to scene; there are no fades, wipes, dissolves—only the movement of the camera laterally across the scene, typically passing through a segment of shadow or blackness to emerge into the next scene. This flow, the sense of continual and inevitable passage, echoes visually the linguistic trick of Bashō’s prose, itself an effective and compelling metaphor for the unstoppable flow of time and change. While Bashō’s opening phrases of Oku no hosomichi move with an inexorable momentum one into the next, in a sequence of nouns and verbs in the ren’youkei, the connective, fusing themselves into a continuous stream of travel and motion, here Ichikawa Jun’s camera flows from scene to scene, ever right from left, in a stream of time and space propelling the protagonist, Tony Takitani (Ogata Issei), from his childhood through the lonely years of his education, work, and marriage, towards the tragedy which sets the drama of the film in motion. This left-to-right camera movement as a chronological metaphor is not unique to Ichikawa Jun’s adaptation of Tony Takitani, certainly, and neither is it a particularly recent device. After all, Mizoguchi Kenji’s Gion no shimai (Sisters of the Gion, 1936) opens with a similar tracking shot to establish the bankruptcy of Furusawa (Shinagoya Benkei) and

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the inevitability of time’s relentless march—the two things which drive the plot forward (the one, narratively, the other, to enable the film’s metaphor of social change). Kurosawa’s Rashōmon (1950) consciously plays with this device, inverting the movement from right to left when the Woodcutter (Shimura Takashi) narrates his hike through the forest and discovery of the body of Takehiro (Mori Masayuki), and so, too, as we have seen, does Yamada Yōji in Otoko wa tsurai yo. Chronology is so coded with camera movement, though, that it is grammatical to assume that a lateral traversal of the screen from left to right means forward motion in time, and the reverse indicates a retrogression—even Tony Takitani follows this coding when, toward the film’s end, the protagonist on two occasions retreats into the memories of his dead wife (Miyazawa Rie) and expresses this return through a marked, definite movement from right to left. Tony Takitani is the most insistent of the films under consideration here in its conscious presentation of camera movement as a metaphor for chronological progression, mimicking its literary precedent. Its use of travel, specifically, travel through time, is thus a subtle and complex structural feature demonstrating the inevitability of chronological change. The camera’s movement creates a tension between the incessantly arriving ‘future’ and the regrettably retreating ‘past’ which remains unresolved—while Tony discovers his need for Hisako and the film implies, in its closing shot, that he will make every necessary effort to connect with her, the situation of Tony in relation to his memories is left unstable. Tony visually overlaps with his father (played by Ogata Issei, as well) and thus the film presents Tony as the inheritor of his father’s isolation and inability to adapt to his changing time, but this relationship with the past remains problematic, showing Tony to be equally trapped within a chronology always threatening to leave him behind. His frustrated attempts visually to return to the time of his nostalgia—the abortive movements from the right to the left of the screen—create an unbridgeable gap between the present and the past that remains troubling here, for the highlighting of the uneasy relationship between the present and the traditions upon which it is based. This gap is bridged, but not here: in Drive (2002) by Sabu. Drive blends a tremendous satirical attitude towards social propriety with a profound insight into the function of travel as a restorative, redemptive, and recuperative process able to bring together the present and the past in an empowering resolution—additionally, it is an extremely funny film, whose humour rests upon a series of incongruities

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of character, setting, and action. The plot is quite simple—a pharmaceutical supply salesman named Asakura Ken’ichi (Tsutsumi Shin’ichi) one day while absentmindedly gazing at a beautiful woman (Shibasaki Kou) is carjacked by three thieves fleeing from a robbery, in pursuit of their fourth partner who has betrayed them and absconded with the loot for himself. The film follows these characters as they try to track down their missing money, but along the way, each of the thieves discovers his “true calling” and splits off from the group—one, Arai Jyoun (Terajima Susumu), leaving to join a punk-rock band; another, Makoto (Ando Masanobu), being recruited by a professional baseball scout; and the third, Goro, (Osugi Ren) leaving to take his dying wife home from the hospital. The protagonist, Asakura, is a remarkably straightlaced man who, among other things, refuses to drive above the speed limit, and who, when stabbed by the carjackers, makes a careful note of the bandages he’s used to bind his wound, in order to reimburse his company, but he, too, along the way discovers depths of personal strength he had never imagined within himself. At the film’s close he meets once again the beautiful woman he had been watching when the thieves carjacked him, but now he has the courage to speak with her and set in motion their relationship. Within this simple plot, the film is able to weave together compelling visual and narrative elements to present a powerful meditation on the relationship between travel and self-discovery, the past and the present, tradition and memory, spirituality and responsibility both social and personal, and, with all of these, love. This is in many ways a representative example of Sabu’s directorial opus, combining elements of comedy, drama, thriller, yakuza film, and tales of personal redemption or growth. It grows out of a pattern which his first film, Dangan rannaa (Dangan Runner, lit., “Bullet Runner”) from 1996, established. This earlier offering set the tone for his later films, established him as a director with a distinctive visual flare, and brought together many of the ensemble performers with whom he would work on many of his successive features: Osugi Ren, Taguchi Tomorrowo, and Tsutsumi Shin’ichi. The plot of Dangan ranaa introduces many structural and thematic elements which would inform later works, too, most notably the construction of a series of episodic vignettes following the protagonist through a variety of situations, a concentration on ‘underworld’ or socially marginal characters, and, of course, the theme of constant motion as a metaphor for the life of the modern, urban individual. Here, we follow a hapless thief through a disastrously

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failed bank robbery—it goes off the rails even before it begins, as he forgets his mask and so tries to shop-lift from a convenience store, only to have a confrontation with the clerk which leads to a shooting and chase through the twisting backstreets of Tokyo’s urban maze. Along the way the stories of the clerk, thief, and yakuza underling who had supplied the thief ’s pistol intertwine in the chase, literally a foot-race as a matter of life and death. While motion is a principal element of this film, so too is the urban reality of its setting. The cinematography highlights the almost claustrophobically narrow streets, the endless covered lanes of shopping stalls and convenience stores, and the rail lines that run as arteries throughout Japan’s cities. This is a ‘cityscape’ in the fullest sense of the word, and on this ground unfolds this event in the lives of the characters. Here, too, exist both arbitrary chance, and interconnected destiny—the characters meet by chance, even kill by chance, and yet there is a fundamental, prior connection which holds them together. Although none of the characters are named, they are all individual, and within this individuality they are unique—we learn enough of their histories to sympathise with them, as they race through the 80-minute run-time (pun indeed intended) toward the violent, finally self-destructive ending of this film. This sympathy, the identities of these characters, indeed even the very plausibility of the plot itself, presupposes urbanity as its necessary condition. Travel here, the race through the streets of Tokyo, must be urban, and in this travel the lives of the characters take on their fullest delineation. This film structurally bears much in common with a later work by Sabu, Kōfuku no kane (The Blessing Bell, 2002), which comes in the same year as Drive. In this film, an unnamed blue-collar labourer (Terajima Susumu) discovers, upon arriving at work, that his factory has been closed. Instead of joining the crowd of angry and disappointed coworkers, he walks away from the factory—literally walks away, and does not stop, walking throughout the film. Along the way, in near total silence, he encounters a motley assortment of characters, all of whom benefit in some way from their meeting with him. For example, he acquires a winning lottery ticket from an elderly couple who pass away—redeems the ticket for a large cash prize—but while sitting at a dock, loses the prize to a young woman whom he had met in the process of contemplating suicide. His journey brings him out to this particular point, from which—he returns to his small home, and to the family (wife and son) who await him. Only there, at home, enjoying the dinner

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his wife had prepared, does he speak, relating the events of the entire day in a voice filled with growing enthusiasm and life. This, however, is an event which the director holds back from us—even though we had accompanied this character throughout his long march, upon his return home, the camera remains out-of-doors. We have access only to the sound of the voices within the house as the camera slowly though deliberately withdraws, leaving this family alone to enjoy the retelling of the events of the day. Here too, as in Dangan rannaa, it is the urban landscape which shapes and dominates the story, providing the setting and indeed the people whom the protagonist encounters on his journey. Once again, it is travel through urban space that provides the opportunity for the protagonist to discover something about himself—here, the strength or patience to overcome the frustration of losing his employment. Drive, too, operates within an urban landscape to give, through travel, an opportunity for the protagonist the encounter his tradition and his history, both familial and national. The film opens with the shot of an X-ray of a human head, while a voice from off-screen explains the two basic types of migraine, functional or dispositional, from which someone can suffer. This X-ray is of the protagonist as he sits in his doctor’s office, complaining of stress-induced migraine, but the shot makes explicit the central focus of the film as interiority and psychological, rather than social, reality. As the doctor discusses the types of reactions to stress which animals undergo—for example, the reaction of turtles to danger, to pull their heads into their shells—we see a very young Asakura in flashback, holding a turtle while his father practices kendo, the Japanese martial art of the sword. Asakura’s mother looks on approvingly, wearing kimono, while the father, clothed in traditional Japanese attire and practicing in a small traditional garden behind his home, strikes at an invisible opponent. The father then settles to read the newspaper—an article headline tells us that he has been implicated in a business scandal, while the camera cuts to two traditional swords in their holders. As the camera pulls back we see that the father has hanged himself; the mother next follows him into death by plunging from a cliff, clutching against her breast a photograph of herself and her husband. This sequence, beginning with the X-ray and ending with Asakura practicing stress-reducing exercises in his company car, signals the presence of several layers within the film—the first is the inward nature of the journey about to be taken, but this journey also has a nostalgic

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dimension of memories revisited, as well. It is from this aspect that the film engages the issue of social change over time—while Tony Takitani approached the issue of Japan’s increasing Westernisation through the technique of left to right camera movement, Drive approaches the same discursive opportunity from the aspect of the protagonist’s uneasy relationship with the legacy of discipline left to him by his explicitly severe parents. This legacy is something to which one of the carjacking thieves, Arai Jyoun (Terajima Susumu), refers when he tells Asakura that a “spirit” is on him, an angry relative who has not passed over, who stays with Asakura because he wants him to fight in ways that the spirit itself had never been able to. Arai Jyoun (literally “Rough John”) knows this because he is the son of a Buddhist priest and so has access to the spirit world—in fact, this character, the first to leave the band of robbers, sees himself very much as a proselytiser, as someone whose mission it is in life to spread Buddha’s message of self-respect and social service—he goes on to do so by becoming the lead singer in the punk band and screaming at his audience to follow Buddha’s path by leading their lives having found the one thing they love to do, and doing it wholeheartedly. We have here in this early exchange between these two characters the explicitly overlapping layers of spiritual growth and personal reconciliation with memories of the past, made possible through travel—that the ‘travel’ in this case is forced upon Asakura is germane to the theme, for life, after all, is something which inevitability has thrust upon us all. Travel here restores Asakura, but it does so in a very complex way that signals the relationship between this urban “every-salaryman” with not only his personal, family history, but also with the history of Japan and with the natural world, as well. Throughout the film Asakura has been approaching his ‘breakthrough’, the moment at which he realises and accepts his self-identity confidently and completely, but the film consistently defers the arrival of this moment, preferring instead to grant the epiphanic instance first to the other ‘travellers’ who have accompanied Asakura. At the close, however, Asakura’s moment finally does arrive—the cell phone which one of the thieves has forgotten in Asakura’s car rings, with a call from the fourth, betraying thief, asking for help and giving his location. Asakura drives to the designated spot, but as he nears the place, his car enters into an odd fog through which, apparently, radio signals cannot penetrate—the car radio stops working, as Asakura slows, coming to a halt at a crossroad. Mysteriously, the car turn-signal flashes a right turn, which Asakura makes. He comes upon

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and parks behind the fourth thief ’s car, and then stumbles upon him in the dark field where he has been trapped, his arm stuck in a hole in the ground, for many hours. The thief insists, at gun point, that Asakura pull him out—Asakura does so, but the thief is beset by one final hallucination, and in terror he shoots of his own arm. After he has staggered away, Asakura sees emerging from the darkness the figure of a samurai (amusingly but semiotically importantly, also played by Tsutsumi Shin’ichi, the actor playing Asakura), clad completely in white, who earlier had appeared before the fourth thief, but who had committed ritual suicide in what ostensibly had been a terrifying hallucination. This samurai asks Asakura for a duel. Asakura, surrounded by other figures from the thief ’s hallucinations—samurai and soldiers—engages the white-clad spirit, finally defeating him. The ghostly figures vanish, leaving Asakura dumbfounded but released from his inhibitions—he shouts and screeches at the top of his lungs, slashing at the tall grasses growing in the abandoned field in which this episode had taken place, as the dawn slowly breaks, revealing the grey factories which surround the open space. The complexity of this scene arises from the explicit juxtaposition of memory, reality, hallucination, tradition, nature, and urbanity within the site of Asakura’s liberation from his restricted, conflicted, afflicted daily self—the culmination of the journey, manifestly urban, which he has just undergone. Here we have a character whose travels have taken him through the modern, urban space of his quotidian life to a place at which the personal memories of his severe parents, specifically his father’s strictness and early training in the traditional martial art of kendo, are able to fuse with the hallucinatory necessity to fight, to produce an allegorical encounter with a spirit capable of inspiring within Asakura the self-knowledge of his own martial character. That this encounter with the past is situated within what passes for nature within modern urbanity—an abandoned field ringed by factories—is of course significant for it locates the encounter of the self with its innermost identity in that place where, traditionally, the shaman/poets of the pre-modern world themselves discovered their transcendent, direct experiences of reality. This act of location, while potentially nostalgic for a time when nature was not subjugated to industrial considerations, is not sentimental—it accepts the possibility for transcendence within any space and so, even though falling short of celebrating the urban, accepts the validity of even the modern urban space as a workable location for self-discovery. Asakura’s journey, even

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though it ends in this field, has always been an inner-directed journey, a travel back into not only his past but Japan’s, as well, to reincorporate a traditional bushi (warrior) attitude—embodied in the white-clad samurai—of self-confidence, loyalty, and, most importantly, self-acceptance, into the modern, urban world. This reincorporation should not be construed as nationalistic—there is no reference to Japan’s global relations—but rather as redemptive and recuperative, on a level far more personal than national. In this way both Saigyō’s and Bashō’s own journeys, too, were not ‘nationalistic’ but were recuperative of the traditions and lineages which inspired them. In Drive we find a tacit acknowledgment of the ‘idea’ of Japan, an idea which, while rooted in the traditions and nature of the past, is flexible enough to perceive within the modern and the urban a continuation of itself, and through this continuation is able to inspire the modern, urban dweller through an ecstatic encounter with his or her innermost self—and certainly it is quite important that Asakura in fact wins the duel, driving his sword through the spirit who declares himself “satisfied” (manzoku da) with the result. Asakura returns to his normal life—he returns the stolen money to the bank, having claimed for himself only the small expenses for the bandages he’d used to bind his wound—but now he is not himself, he is not the same inhibited man whom he had been. He is made anew, as had been Hayakawa Rei, as had been Zushio, as had been Tony Takitani. Travel, the removal of the self from the ordinary in order to permit the self to discover its innermost truth, has here, too, proven its effectiveness as a source for liberation, redemption, and resituation. These characters have all emerged as resituated, as reconstituted within a world which, while superficially identical with their starting points, is substantively different. Travel, as Adler suggested earlier, is indeed the process of worldmaking and of refashioning ourselves to inhabit this new world, linked with the past, but anticipating the future.

CHAPTER SIX

THE HUMAN/POST-HUMAN IN JAPANESE ANIMATION As the cyborg police officer, Major Kusanagi (Tanaka Atsuko)—cyborg though perfectly life-like in every way—asks of her technologicallyenhanced colleague, Batō (Ōtsuka Akio), in Oshii Mamoru’s Kōkaku kidōtai (Ghost in the Shell, 1995), “The only thing that makes me feel human is the way I’m treated. What if a cyber-brain could generate its own ghost, create a soul all by itself ? And if it did, what would be the importance of being ‘human’?” This central question—what does it mean to be human, to have a ‘soul’—compels the plot of this intricate, visually stunning science-fiction animated film, but it also motivates much of contemporary science-fiction from Japan and the rest of the world. It is, of course, a central issue for all of us—what is the importance of being human, and how does this fact of our existence help to shape our lives? Naturally in many ways this is so basic a question that it is easily overlooked, but as technology advances to the point where many of our daily interactions are either mediated by machines or else involve only machines, the question begins to assume greater urgency. One of the favourite tropes of science fiction, and one of its more consistent sources of truly evil antagonists, is the human/ machine hybrid—the human brain encapsulated in the mechanical body, the human mind ‘transferred’ to the computer—and the ‘evil’ comes, of course, from this mechanised human having lost his or her capacity for human emotions. But in Oshii’s Kōkaku kidōtai, the cyborg police officer Kusanagi says that while she swims in the ocean (assisted by high-pressure flotation devices to counter the incredible weight of her constructed body!) she feels loneliness, fear, and cold—but also hope and a sense of transcendence. This character is fully aware of having been created—is fully aware of her existence as an organic-mechanical amalgam, and yet has aspirations, dreams, and memories that she says make her “uniquely” herself. In short, she possesses everything that makes an individual human being both individual and human—including doubts and questions about her purpose in life, her place in society, and the true nature of her identity. She exists not only as a human—both

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in physical shape and mental situation—but also as a posthuman: a machine/human hybrid capable of transcending the limitations of the biologically human form. Thus Oshii’s film functions as an extended meditation on the very essence of human existence—consciousness and its fundamentals—but also as an extended interrogation of the relationship between the human and the machine. As such, it anticipates and participates in what was soon after its production to emerge as an important trend in critical scholarship—posthumanism—but, as I will argue, it does so in a way influenced by traditional philosophical and spiritual aspects of the Japanese attitude toward both human and non-human forms of existence. This influence is especially apparent in the sequel to Kōkaku kidōtai which Oshii released in 2004, Inosensu: Kōkaku kidōtai (Ghost in the Shell: Innocence), and thus this pair will form the central discussion of this chapter, which will explore the ways in which these traditional aspects of Japanese philosophy and spirituality, growing out of Buddhism and Shinto and the attitudes towards the self, the community, and the natural and spirit worlds that they inspire, have influenced the popularity of science fiction animated films in Japan. This influence touches many aspects of cinema—science fiction and otherwise, live action and animated—but I will focus here specifically on issues of technology and its presentations, characters and their existential situations, and the types of human/non-human interactions that are common in animated films. I will also address the specific issue of animation itself to argue that this style of film production in Japan has received much legitimising influence from both Buddhism and Shinto. Reading through these two films and touching tangentially on others, this chapter will consider the ways in which Japanese science fiction—both animated and live action—intersects with the posthuman debate, to show ways in which Japanese philosophical and spiritual influences can contribute to this emerging, ‘western’ attitude toward technology. Many of my arguments here revolve around conceptions of community and the persistence of a traditional understanding of that word in contemporary Japan. At the very least, if that term is not strictly speaking still actually present, it is definitely remembered as an ideal. In this sense the discussion in this chapter anticipates that to come in Chapter Seven, in which I argue that the popularity of the films of Miyazaki Hayao owe much to their unashamed idealism. I will return to this in its proper place. The issue of the posthuman, with which I

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will deal here, however, is in many ways connected with both idealism on the one hand but also community, on the other. Posthumanism, as a way of situating the human in a mechanised, technologised, non-human world, has utility as more of our daily lives becomes touched by the domain of science fiction, and thus also has much to offer for an understanding of one of the key issues in this present study: the nature of human identity, personal, social, and global. The posthuman perspective seeks to situate the identity of the entire human species within a framework capable of encompassing all forms of conscious existence. It is a perspective deeply steeped in the vocabulary of science, and one which signals its stance as radical, theoretical, and liberating; it is centrally concerned with identity as a particular form of embodied consciousness. Using Japanese animated science fiction, this chapter will interrogate the theoretical perspective of posthumanism to demonstrate the presence of a fundamental oversight in its thinking, an oversight both critical and destabilising of posthumanism’s project to recast consciousness as existing beyond the limits of biologically immanent embodiment. As Neil Badmington has it, posthumanism aims for a “deconstruction of anthropocentric thought” (Badmington, 2003: 15), a common aim of many non-western religious philosophies, as well, and a typically central feature of many works of Japanese science fiction. For this reason alone, posthumanism can gain much from a consideration of the “built in” relativism of both Buddhism and Shinto and their representations in Japanese film, while at the same time considerations of the nature and substantive formations of human consciousness will contribute much to an understanding of the peculiarities of identity as these are handled in the contemporary Japanese cinema. The posthuman is the stuff of science fiction—it is a way of understanding human beings as always already more than their mere physical, organic bodies, a way of conceiving of consciousness as dependent upon the person and the prosthesis, the mechanical accoutrements of existence, the tools utilised by the human species in general to make their very existence possible. As such, the posthuman conceives of homo sapiens very much as homo faber, the maker and user of tools and technology. Technology, then, is not a separate category of thing divorced from a definition of ‘the human’, but rather an integral part of the human experience, and necessary for the production of human knowledge, culture, and society. Extending from this conception of humanity as not only dependent upon but merged with technology comes the

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corollary of the human actually fused with the machine, the human and the intelligent machine operating in tandem to generate a hybrid existence—a thinking, living, mechanical existence endowed with the qualities that traditional philosophical and scientific conceptions have reserved for the purely organic human form. There are many key proponents of this posthuman vision—perhaps surprisingly, however, few of them have an academic background in the sciences which they write about. As this chapter will show, it is unfortunate that few, too, have a background in Asian philosophy. Perhaps the principal scholar of the posthuman, and certainly one of the most eloquently persuasive, is N. Katherine Hayles, whose book How We Became Posthuman: Virtual bodies in cybernetics, literature, and informatics (University of Chicago Press, 1999) proposes in very concise language the working criteria of posthumanism. Because of Hayles’ position as the preeminent proponent of the posthuman view, I will spend some time engaging her on the principles which inform this attitude towards a technologised humanity—and “attitude” is indeed an appropriate word here. This is because Hayles herself writes about a posthuman “attitude” which “evokes the exhilarating prospect of getting out of some of the old boxes and opening up new ways of thinking about what being human means” (Hayles, 1999: 285). For Hayles, posthumanism starts with four main assumptions about the nature of human existence. The first assumption is that knowledge is a defining quality of consciousness, but that the receptacle, recipient, and manipulator of knowledge need not be confined to the human body. As Hayles phrases it, “the posthuman view privileges informational pattern over material instantiation, so that embodiment in a biological substrate is seen as an accident of history rather than an inevitability of life” (Hayles, 1999: 2). The body thus becomes simply a device for supporting a thinking entity, an entity which is not identified with its container. This implies posthumanism’s second and third assumptions, which are best stated in reverse order: what for Hayles is the third assumption I prefer as the second, that the body is “the original prosthesis we all learn to manipulate, so that extending or replacing the body with other prostheses becomes a continuation of a process that began before we were born” (Hayles, 1999: 3). The body is but a tool for the mind, which as a manipulator of information and knowledge, is itself extensible and not confined to the human consciousness it supports. Hayles’ statement of posthumanism’s second assumption addresses this in her contention

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that “the posthuman view considers consciousness, regarded as the seat of human identity in Western tradition . . ., as an epiphenomenon, as an evolutionary upstart trying to claim that it is the whole show when in actuality it is only a minor sideshow” (Hayles, 1999: 3). Consciousness for posthumanism is not the ‘seat of human identity’ in that human identity is formed through an amalgamation of the body-as-device and the mind-as-manipulator-of-information—and thus human identity emerges as something which can transcend not only human embodiment but also the human mind, as well, arriving at posthumanism’s fourth main assumption, that the human is configured “so that it can be seamlessly articulated with intelligent machines. In the posthuman, there are no essential differences or absolute demarcations between bodily existence and computer simulation, cybernetic mechanism and biological organism, robot teleology and human goals” (Hayles, 1999: 3). This, for Hayles, is the most important aspect of the posthuman approach to identity or existence: that consciousness as a “thing” is transportable and shared across a variety of devices, all of which are interdependent upon one another for their ability to function smoothly as gatherers, processors, and manipulators of information. The body is but one such device, while the mind is another—and both of these devices, throughout the course of human evolutionary development, have utilised technology to augment their innate abilities and overcome their inherent limitations. “Humans have used technology since they stood upright and began fashioning tools, an event contemporaneous with the evolution of Homo sapiens. Technology as a strategy of survival and evolutionary fitness cannot be alien to the human” (Hayles, 2003: 134), Hayles argues, but more than this: the human is not separate from technology. In that classical biology, for example, has seen in humanity’s use of tools a distinction between the human and the animal, technology therefore has always been an integral part in the definition of “the human”—for posthumanism, however, the distinction between ‘the human’, on the one hand, and ‘the technology’, on the other, is not only unnecessary, but false. This view affects other aspects of the sciences, as well, and comes to colour the very science of biology which had sought a definition of the human. Now, technology causes biology to question the very nature of life. As Colin Milburn argues, recent developments in nanotechnology work together with the posthuman attitude such that “life ceases to remain fixed in the domain defined by

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prevailing conceptions of ‘biology’ ” (Milburn, 2005: 283), just as the human ceases to remain confined to the body and the mind of humanity. It is not my intention here, however, to argue for a new definition of life itself; rather, I want to show the limitations within this posthuman attitude which stem from its oversight of potentially quite useful philosophical developments that predate it, often by tens of centuries. The limitations of posthumanism do not necessarily detract from its legitimacy as a description of contemporary implementations of technology or as a shorthand for a perceptual shift in the relationship between the human and the nonhuman, but they do detract from its ability fully to realise its own potential as a means of situating ‘the human’ completely within ‘the natural’. This situation is necessary for the posthuman in order to permit it to overcome what I see as an insidious and residual anthropocentrism lurking just beneath the surface of its argument. As Neil Badmington writes, “anthropocentrism always already contains the conditions of its own transcendence,” (Badmington, 2003: 19), but so too does the posthuman always already contain an insistence on its fundamental anthropocentrism so long as it avoids a discussion of Asian philosophical and spiritual relativism. Oshii Mamoru’s groundbreaking Kōkaku kidōtai (Ghost in the Shell, 1995), based on the manga by Shirow Masamune, presents us with a clear and accessible vantage point from which to consider how posthumanism can gain from greater engagement with Japanese conceptions of the human/non-human merger. This work is futuristic, highly technological, and thoroughly philosophical. It is a visually thrilling film, richly layered and carefully realised. This depth of artistic accomplishment extends to the creation of the film’s characters, as well—they are psychologically full, intricate in ways that many characters in cinema are not, but more importantly, the characters serve as fascinating entryways into considerations of embodiment and the ability of the soul to transcend its organic vessel. As such, it is an almost textbook summation of many of the dimensions of the posthuman attitude toward biology and technology—but as I will show, it and its sequel, Inosensu: kōkaku kidōtai, as well as Metoroporisu (Metropolis, 2001) by Rintarō, are also films very much dependent upon a ‘traditional’ Japanese spirituality and worldview. The story of Kōkaku kidōtai is complex: in the near future, in an Asian city (most likely Hong Kong but not identified as such), a group of specially trained, specially enhanced police seek “The Puppetmaster”

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(Kayumi Iemasa), a terrorist hacker who has the ability to manipulate individuals for his own criminal ends. We follow three police officers on their hunt: Batō, Kusanagi, and Togusa (Yamadera Kōichi). Togusa is described as ‘mostly human’, but both Batō and Kusanagi are essentially ‘constructed’ human/machine hybrids. The search for the Puppetmaster leads the three to discover an intricate conspiracy involving different governmental and military sections, each working against the other, all under the control of the Puppetmaster who has ‘ghost-hacked’ into the subconscious minds of his pawns, utilising the international computer network by which the computer-enhanced citizenry of this future world communicate. Throughout, the characters debate the nature of reality, the meaning of personality and memory, and what might constitute the essential quality of individual existence in a time when, through manipulation of thoughts, a person can be given a complete set of false perceptions and memories. Also throughout we encounter the ‘reality’ of hybrid human-machines serving as enhanced police officers, secretaries, even sanitation engineers. This film in many ways provides an inspirational blueprint for thinking of the posthuman, and has influenced The Matrix Trilogy (Wachowski Brothers, 1999, 2003) as well as countless other works of science fiction both in Japan and throughout the world. The posthumanism of Kōkaku kidōtai is apparent from the very outset, presenting us as it does a view of Kusanagi communicating with her combat unit through computer implants in her brain as she readies herself to assassinate a foreign diplomat preparing to kidnap a securityclassified programmer. Immediately after this sequence—which highlights the extreme physicality of Kusanagi’s enhanced body as she accomplishes the assassination nude and suspended mid-air by an escape-rope—follows the film’s title sequence, another opportunity to emphasise the created physicality of Kusanagi, this time showing us the process of her design and construction in the government’s military laboratory. This construction shows us the perfect amalgamation of organic/ human components and machine/mechanical augmentation that has gone into Kusanagi’s corporeal body—everything from a human brain and spinal column to synthetic, voluptuous flesh. This enhancement of the human body is presented as not only necessary for the successful fulfillment of the functions of the police, but also natural—the body, as an ‘organic prosthesis’, has received inorganic prostheses that assist

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it in its normal life processes. The information-manipulating functions of the human brain have been augmented by extended computerinformational networks that greatly increase the amount and types of information to which the human mind has access—and this ‘mind’ has become capable of existing outside of the limitations of the organic vessel which had contained it in the ‘pre-posthuman’ age. The interactions of the cyborg-enhanced police units with their information-gathering and supplying support staffs highlights the nature of their ‘distributed cognition’ systems and further emphasises the affinity between this film and the posthumanist attitude. It is the support staff who, of course through a vast computer network, find and retrieve the information—technological, tactical, historical—which enables the cyborg police units to track down suspects or to plan their operations. This information-processing system of which the cyborg police are but one part becomes an entity in and of itself: an entity capable of conceiving of a plan of action, devising a method for its accomplishment, and carrying it out. These various components are perfectly integrated and capable of almost instantaneous communication through technological enhancements to the biological, human brain. These enhancements, while they transform their recipients beyond the traditional limitations of ‘the human’, do not fundamentally alter the individual’s perception of his/her role in society, functioning in the team, or even self-identity—and neither do they alter the individual’s understanding of him- or herself as a living, valuable, unique person. As I mentioned at the start of this chapter, even though Kusanagi is fully aware of having been created for a specific purpose in lawenforcement, she asserts her identity as a human being, saying that she has thoughts, feelings, and memories which make her uniquely herself. She feels herself possessed of a soul, of a ‘ghost’ that informs her and gives her existential substance. This character thus permits Kōkaku kidōtai to question the nature of human identity as limited to the human biological form, and to propose the necessary co-dependence of humans and enhanced technological systems to maintain one another. In fact this co-dependence forms a consistent visual component of the film, which repeatedly highlights the presence of the biological within the mechanical, and the mechanical within the biological—characters have obvious ‘information ports’ and mechanical enhancements, machine components which are replaceable and far more powerful than their organic counterparts could ever be.

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So, too, do characters have implanted, false memories which define them and compel them to act in ways cooperative to the antagonist, the Puppetmaster who is the target of the police hunt, and characters are able to communicate across an enhanced computer network which does not require their physical proximity to a terminal or other input device. These enhancements and mechanical prostheses, however, even in characters such as Kusanagi which are created and therefore almost wholly non-human from a ‘traditional’ standpoint, do not preclude them from expressing profoundly human thoughts, emotions, and self-doubts. The posthumanism of Kōkaku kidōtai emphasises the accessibility of communication between human and non-human characters by affirming the essentially similar natures of their existential situations, the better to explore the philosophy of humanism and human identity. In this process, the film’s reality as an animated work helps it considerably—its form and content work in concert to highlight the philosophical intention which motivates its story, the question at its core. To answer this question, of course, is to discover the nature of human existence and to chart its contours and boundaries—to find the human soul, the ‘ghost’ in the ‘shell’ of the body, either mechanical or organic. That this soul must be present is taken for granted by the film, for—from its philosophical influences—after all it must be present. This is taken for granted by the viewer, too, for—from the perceptual process which our psychology necessitates—even these animated images are alive. This feeling of ‘real life’ is equally present in Rintarō’s Metoroporisu, a beautifully-animated film which tells a complex tale of political ambition, betrayal, technological dependency, and love. Here, the quality of ‘reality’ comes from the emotional capacity of the non-human characters for each other and for their human counterparts. Where Kōkaku kidōtai emphasises the shared intellectual and existential qualities of humans and ‘enhanced’ or cyborg characters, thus implying the emotional depths of the constructed ‘non-humans’, Metoroporisu highlights emotion explicitly in the obsession of Tima (Imoto Yuka), a cyborg, for Ken’ichi (Kobayashi Kei), the young nephew of a private investigator sent to investigate the disappearance of a scientist, believed to be in hiding in Metropolis. Tima in effect falls in love with Ken’ichi—but their relationship is doomed to tragedy. The story, as I say, is complex though far less explicitly philosophical than that of Kōkaku kidōtai. Ken’ichi and his uncle Shunsaku Ban (Tomita Kōsei) have been sent from Japan to search for the missing

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scientist, Laughton (Takiguchi Junpei), on the eve of the completion of “Zigurnat,” an enormous tower-like structure of uncertain though decidedly powerful, elaborate function. As Duke Red (Ishida Tarō) says in announcing the completion of Zigurnat, it stands as the pinnacle of human science and achievement, and will illuminate the heavens with human ingenuity. Duke Red, of course, is involved in a political subterfuge with the military to usurp tremendous power for himself. He has coerced Laughton into creating Zigurnat and its controlling device, Tima, for his own ends. Through an industrial accident Tima escapes while Laughton and his laboratory are destroyed—Ken’ichi and Ban find and protect Tima from Rock (Okada Kōki), Duke Red’s adopted son and secret leader of the Maldukes, a revolutionary society. Throughout, the various robots whom human technology has created to work as menials begin an uprising of resistance, behaving in erratic, violent ways—the start of a human/robot war for rights. The film ends, after an extended series of escapes and near-captures, with Tima being installed into Zigurnat as an integral component of the weapon system; her circuitry has been damaged, however, and she becomes intent on pure destruction. Ken’ichi disengages her from the weapon but too late to halt the self-destruct sequence which Tima has activated—she fights him, before regaining memory of her love for him. Too late for a happy ending, however, for Tima’s memory returns only as she is about to fall to her doom from the heights of the Zigurnat tower, Ray Charles’ classic I Can’t Stop Loving You playing over the cascading explosions which ravage the building. Tima exists as a constructed entity, but her design is too perfect—she has the capacity for deep emotional attachment, self-directed learning, and independent decision-making, although she has little time to develop her abilities. She is also extremely ‘lifelike’ in appearance, seeming human in every way. In fact, she bears a striking resemblance to an animated Shirley Temple—something which makes her murderous rage at the film’s close all the more disturbing. It is her appearance, however, that makes her emotional capacity understandable, in that she looks so very human that anything less than a human ability to love would be incongruous. For this reason, Tima’s emotional depth is not the source of the interest in this film’s imagination of the posthuman, or of the relationship between the human and the non-human, in that she behaves in ways which we not only accept, but expect. No, the real interest here comes from the many other robotic characters

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whose appearance, programming, functions, and design mark them as clearly artificial, clearly ‘machines’. These robots are the true menials of Metoroporisu’s future world, having intelligence and understanding sufficient only to their most basic of duties. Nonetheless, it is these ‘characters’ who most consistently assist Ken’ichi and Tima, and who collect together the pieces which remain after Tima’s cataclysmic destruction. When they do this, however, in the film’s final scene, they do not merely gather together Tima’s debris as part of their jobs as custodians or janitors. Instead, they demonstrate great sentiment and delicacy in handling her parts—and give these to Ken’ichi with obvious and great emotion. It is in these characters that Rintarō has invested a truly moving, human quality, and to these characters that he extends membership in the ‘human community’ which infuses his film. In making this community accessible to characters and audience alike, the animation style of Metoroporisu, too, plays a part, as it had in Kōkaku kidōtai. The backgrounds are incredibly detailed, but the characters are given psychologically appealing faces—with exaggerated eyes and typically ‘benign’ features, an issue to which I will return later. Even the menial robots are drawn purposefully to be ‘cute’ and attractive, the better to facilitate a sympathetic connection between audience and character. This enhances the emotional registration of the characters as well, and serves to enhance the feeling of ‘real life’ in the film. On the other hand, further enhancing the feeling of ‘real life’ which permeates Kōkaku kidōtai and so too highlighting the presence of a traditional, Shinto-influenced weltenschaung (a point to which I will return) which runs throughout is the tremendous attention the animators have paid to capturing the lushness of nature—particularly evident in the skies and ocean scenes that punctuate the film and provide the backdrop for the foreground’s action sequences, but something conspicuously absent in Metoroporisu. The skies in Oshii’s film are pristine despite the contrasting shots of urban detritus and debris clogging waterways and streets. Unlike in Metoroporisu in which the plot unfolds in at times a claustrophobically urban space marked by layers upon sublayers of complex, constructed landscape, Nature exists in Kōkaku kidōtai as an overarching, sheltering presence, benevolent and warm, something always accessible to the characters regardless of their awareness of it. So, too, the numerous close-ups, point-of-view, and reverse point-of-view shots that create

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an empathetic relationship between characters and audience emphasise the state of community that exists between viewer and viewed, frustrating the realisation that these are ‘drawn characters’ and not human actors. The close-ups of the characters’ faces in particular, especially those centring on Kusanagi, operate on a deep psychological level to create a sense of acceptance of the character as a living entity. This acceptance comes from the natural human reaction of attraction to any face with large eyes—of course this is a convention of Japanese animation in general, that characters are drawn with exaggeratedly large eyes and diminished lower halves of their faces, as we see here and in Metoroporisu, but the convention has a tremendous power precisely because of its direct appeal to our underlying, psychological necessity to care for and protect infants, which, not coincidentally, have exaggeratedly enlarged eyes and diminished lower halves of their faces! The conventions of Japanese animation here operate to reinforce two things: the presence of nature within this recognisably urban setting; and the emotional accessibility of the drawn characters, an accessibility which further helps to overcome the viewer’s awareness of the characters’ artificiality. This emotional accessibility of the characters, enhanced by their exaggeratedly expressive faces, serves many purposes. As I have said, it helps the audience overcome the obvious artificiality of a ‘drawn’ character, but it also helps pull the audience away from an anthropocentric point of view which sees human beings as the pinnacle of the narrative’s intent. In the films we are considering, while the characters ‘look’ human (they are anthropomorphic), they are manifestly not human: not only are they not human on the diegetic level, being cyborgs or amalgams of organic and mechanical components—human/machine hybrids—but they are also not humans on the perceptual level, being obviously and insistently animated. The function of anthropomorphism is an issue to which I will return; here, it is an effective device for luring the audience into an affective relationship with the film’s diegetic space and the characters which fill it, but it also has deeper implications which become apparent in other examples of Japanese animation. Despite the characters’ human appearances, their mechanically- and computer-assisted bodies and brains highlight them as not human, on the physical level, but those same computer-assisted brains are capable of profound insight into the natures of their existences, and wax especially philosophical, in Kōkaku kidōtai in particular, about their existential

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circumstances. This profound insight in effect creates a ‘soul’, a site of individual uniqueness within these characters—both diegetically and perceptively. Here again, we have the medium of the film—animation—working with its philosophical substance—questioning the fundamental nature and meaning of ‘human’ existence—to produce a profound comment on that philosophical substance: ‘human’ existence and the things that constitute ‘the human’ are present in non-human agents. Thus Kōkaku kidōtai signals itself as resisting the anthropocentrism of much human thought, seeing instead consciousness and identity as diffuse things created and shared across multiple and diverse forms of existence. Even memory and DNA are things which can find expression and structure outside of the human body. As Batō quotes in the sequel, Inosensu: Kōkaku kidōtai, in describing the city to which he and his partner go to seek out the cyberhacker who has infiltrated his network-enhanced brain, “What the body creates is as much an expression of DNA as the body itself.” He continues, “If the essence of life is information carried in DNA, then civilisation and society are just colossal memory systems and a metropolis like this one just a sprawling external memory.” Memory, knowledge, information, identity, agency, and external, urban structure are all interrelated and reflective, but not definitive, of ‘the human’. Posthumanism, too, aims for this type of non-anthropocentric thought. This is clear in its conception of the relationship between the human and the machine, and to some extent the human and the natural. Recent developments in technology, in particular, “having provided both anticipation and means for matter to become self-capacitating, . . . may actually be in the process of demolishing the anthropocentric concept of control entirely” (Milburn, 2005: 288). Discussions about the human/mechanical relationship occur in considerations of the changing reality of human agency in a technologised world, and emerge as posthumanism’s response to liberal-humanist attitudes toward the self and responsibility. Posthumanism sees agency and control as having been previously and mistakenly assumed to comprise autonomy for the humanist individual. Kenneth Gergen speaks of the function of psychological essentialism in the creation of individuated identity as the belief in a reifiable, “specifically mental” (Gergen, 1996: 127) inner world which forms “the basis for the day-to-day processes we index as self-understanding and self-realisation—for the various ways we have of questioning, evaluating, and exploring the self . . .” (Gergen, 1996: 128). The conception of

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a solid, inner life “has long served as a pivotal feature of the Western cultural tradition” (Gergen, 1996: 127) which sees the self as an individually-formed subjectivity. This traditional Western understanding of the self grows out of the Judeo-Christian worldview and the philosophies of Aristotle, Plato, Aquinas, Descartes, and Hobbes, which postulate the individuated, human subject as the pinnacle of existence. Posthumanism challenges this view as inherently neglectful of the already diffuse sources of selfhood made inevitable by humanity’s (biologically, mentally, socially, and individually) necessary reliance on tools and technology. “In the posthuman view . . . conscious agency has never been ‘in control’. In fact, the very illusion of control bespeaks a fundamental ignorance about the nature of the emergent processes through which consciousness, the organism, and the environment are constituted” (Hayles, 1999: 288). Posthumanism thus aims to overcome the “anthropocentric thought” (Badmington, 2003: 15) of humanism and replace it with a relationalist thought that sees “resources for rethinking the articulation of humans with intelligent machines” (Hayles, 1999: 287). Instead of the either/or proposition of an organic body housing a consciousness which mistakes its place in existence as transcendentally important and separate from the informational systems around it, both natural and technological, as a master is separate from the servants whom s/he keeps, the posthuman seeks to place human consciousness precisely within those informational systems, and seeks to place the body precisely within that technology which supports and actualises it. “The distributed cognition of the emergent human subject correlates with . . . the distributed cognitive system as a whole, in which ‘thinking’ is done by both human and nonhuman actors” (Hayles, 1999: 290). This view of the world as “one system” coincides with that of modern physics, of course, which sees the material world as a system of particles and forces fundamentally similar to each other—the so-called Grand Unifying Theory for which physicists diligently strive aims at precisely this type of exposition of the physical laws of material reality as but one complexly-interwoven system. And yet this theory of the ultimate sameness of material reality is not something unique to modern Western science—it is a point of view at least 2,500 years old, as expressed in Buddhist and Taoist philosophy, from India and China, respectively. It is also a point of view which many Japanese philosophers, past and present, have held and expressed through their subtle, intricate elaborations on Buddhist doctrine in the many sects

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that arose in Japan. More importantly, however, it is a view which the popular imagination of Japan holds in its evocation of Buddhistic and Shintoistic conceptions of Nature as sustaining and communicative to the ‘human’ world, and which the popular cinema, both animated and live action, often expresses. Buddhism is both a religion and philosophy that entered Japan in approximately 550 CE as, together with a large number of statuary, sutras, and the Chinese writing system, through the three kingdoms of Koguryo, Paekche, and Silla which existed on the Korean Peninsula. By this time, it had already had a period of historical development nearly 1000 years long. As a philosophy from northern India originating from the realisations of one man, Gautama Siddhartha, it has swept over all of Asia, attracting followers from kings, courtiers, and common people alike. As both a religion and a philosophy with an intricate and complex tradition, it has, of course, nuances, subtleties, and an extensively developed way of conceiving reality, both material and spiritual. It has, as well, a subtle and nuanced way of considering the relationship between the human—both individually and collectively—and the nonhuman. It is far from my intention here to describe in detail the different aspects of the various Buddhist sects and traditions. Instead, I want to provide a simplified overview of the parallels between certain articulations of Buddhist philosophy and the posthuman attitude, with an aim to indicating what the latter loses by overlooking the former. From here I’ll move into a discussion of anthropomorphism in the native Japanese worldview, which will facilitate my discussion of Japanese science fiction and animated film. In essence Buddhism is a philosophy of anatman, or “non-self,” which seeks to liberate its followers from the sufferings in life caused by desire—and this desire is caused by the insistence of the individuated subject that it, in fact, exists precisely as an individuated subject. Buddhist philosophy proposes the fundamental interconnectedness of all things, material and immaterial, and the fundamental equation of all things with each other. As such, the belief that an individual is in some way different or separate from not only other people but all sentient beings creates within the individual a desire to hold on to him- or herself as a separated, individuated subject—this desire to grasp the transient and hold it as permanent creates suffering, from which greater desire arises, in a cycle that perpetuates itself, Buddhists believe, beyond this life and into the next, until such time as the individuated subject realises his or her basic non-distinction from all other forms of existence and

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so is able to release him or herself from this cycle, known as samsara, and arrive at enlightenment, known as nirvana. Of course the process of arriving at this realisation can be intricate and time consuming, but it can also be spontaneous and, indeed, instantaneous, depending upon one’s karma, or destiny, to reach nirvana either easily or with difficulty. But it is not this process which is of concern here; rather, it is the understanding of the relationship between the (non)self and the rest of existence, for in this relationship and the attitude which informs it are found the points of overlap and similarity between Buddhism and the posthuman view. Buddhism speaks in many ways about this relationship—never without metaphor!—but essentially describes the self and the rest of existence as permeating each other, always intertwined in a complex web of form and substance, undifferentiated except in the mind of the self as an illusion. This intertwining can be described as “simultaneous mutual self-identification . . . simultaneous mutual turninginto . . . self-identity of the acting and the being acted upon . . . [and] self-identity of the One and the Many” (Suzuki, 1968: 52). “Identity” here of course means “being equal to,” in a formula that emphasises the sameness of all things, and the fundamental lack of separation of things in reality, such separation coming only from discrimination of the human mind. This (admittedly simplistic) overview of the main tenets of Buddhist philosophy presents several points of comparison between Buddhism and my main object here, posthumanism. First of these is the understanding of the nature of reality as undifferentiated, and the implications this has for human subjectivity. In the Buddhist view, the idea of subjectivity as separate from the surrounding environment is false, because there is “no permanent soul emanating from a Universal Soul or created by God” (Baptist, 1988: i). Consciousness and identity are processes dependent upon interactions—“instead of such an unchanging ‘soul’ or permanent ‘entity’, there is a flux or . . . continuity . . . which is the result of every experience the individual has passed through, every influence felt, every impression received . . .” (Baptist, 1988: 42). This is similar to the posthuman attitude which holds that “the distributed cognition of the emergent human subject correlates with . . . the distributed cognitive system as a whole, in which ‘thinking’ is done by both human and nonhuman actors” (Hayles, 1999: 290). Posthumanism’s conception of consciousness and thought as arising from both the human mind and the information-handling technolo-

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gies which support them is sensitive to Buddhism’s realisation of the function of the environment in shaping the awareness of the ‘psyche’ (for convenience’s sake), but there is a problem here. Posthumanism does not stop at this relational consideration of consciousness which has the potential to transcend the limitations of a desire for human consciousness to be rooted in the human—rather, and frustratingly, the posthuman attitude often and almost surreptitiously clings to a view of the human that is exclusive, that is ‘human’: To conceptualise the human in these terms [as dependent upon the distributed cognitive system] is not to imperil human survival but is precisely to enhance it, for the more we understand the flexible, adaptive structures that coordinate our environment and the metaphors that we ourselves are, the better we can fashion images of ourselves that accurately reflect the complex interplays that ultimately make the entire world one system (Hayles, 1999: 290).

It is precisely here that we find a recalcitrance on the part of posthumanism finally to release its hold on subjectivity and a persistent humanist focus—in fashioning images of “ourselves” posthumanists cling to an exclusionary view of our ‘selves’ as still ultimately and basically human. This is an unfortunate insistence because it undercuts the truly useful program of attempting to see the ‘entire world’ as one system. It is this point of a Buddhist understanding of reality to see the self as a (nondifferentiated) component of an entire (non-differentiating) system—thus overcoming the illusion of desire and individuation—which the posthumanist view requires fully to come to terms with its own premise. Despite the posthuman understanding of humans and machines being in many senses equal to one another, dependent upon each other, and in fact formative of each other, there is still the constant awareness that humans, ultimately, are not machines. And for posthumanists, so too are humans not dogs; not horses; not any other species of creature—humans remain elitist, separate from the animals who share existence. This attitude too runs counter to that of Buddhism. “We are consoled knowing that we are different from machines. Yet are we different from all other sentient beings? Buddhists teach that all sentient beings possess Buddha-nature . . . the Buddhist mirror involves all sentient creatures, not just humans” (Brannigan, 2002: 110). It also runs counter to Japan’s indigenous way of thinking, as exemplified by Shinto, the “Way of the Gods” which has been part of the

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Japanese world view for two thousand years. This is a world view that emphasises community—certainly the human community, but also that between humans and the spirits, and with nature. “Shinto is about connectedness, the intimate kind of relation in which each related item is part of the other” (Kasulis, 2004: 13). In the Shinto view, all things can communicate; all things can relate; all things can engage in a mutually necessary, harmonious sharing of the bounty of life. In this sense, Shinto has been able to coexist with Buddhism as one of the formative philosophies of Japan, and possesses a utility for a consideration of posthumanism’s moments of intersection with Japanese film. Shinto, unlike Buddhism or many other religions, “is neither a set of beliefs formalised into a creed nor an identifiable act of faith” (Kasulis, 2004: 1). It is a profoundly non-doctrinal religion, and has no founder, no complex scriptures, no monastic tradition, and no international heritage. Its philosophical component is rather simple. Shinto appreciates purity—purity of thought, purity of deed, purity of environment in the form of cleanliness. Shinto is a religion centred on harmony: between humans and spirits, between humans and nature, and also between humans themselves. “Through participating in the spirit of kannagara [that is, living according to a spontaneous awareness of the divine], human beings, earth, and heaven can achieve harmonious union” (Yamamoto, 2004: 318–9), and this union is Shinto’s goal. It is a religion of celebration: daily rituals, personal communion at a shrine with a local deity, frequent communal festivals. Because essentially Shinto is an animism, it is also a religion of anthropomorphism, which sees in its deities emotions and functions which are fundamentally understandable—because similar to human emotions and functions. Shinto deities, known as kami (which number in the millions), are responsible for watching over human communities, but they also require human assistance and support. Shinto postulates an easy accessibility to the spirit world—not necessarily an easy entrance, per se, but an easy communication, through prayer, offering, festival, or even direct speech. Accessibility stems from an understanding of the worlds of humans and spirits as fundamentally and necessarily joined. “Shinto maintains that human beings are internally related to kami and without this relation people would not be what they are. The other side is just as important: it is in the inherent nature of kami to be interdependent and intimately connected with the world, including human beings” (Kasulis, 2004: 17). From this interdependence grows the Shinto attitude of respect for

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nature and the desire for purity and cleanliness, in that Shinto does not view humans as the sole proprietors or masters of their world—stated simplistically, this world always has other occupants, others who share its spaces and its beauty, and it is for these others that humans should maintain as pristine as possible their portion of the world. Thus Shinto is decidedly not anthropocentric—it sees humanity as occupying but one part of a multi-parted reality composed of the natural and the spirit worlds, as well. While Shinto is not anthropocentric, however, it is anthropomorphic, seeing something comprehensible and recognisable within the non-human worlds, something which corresponds with human emotions, functions, and processes of existence. Through this anthropomorphism, humans are able to communicate with the non-human inhabitants of existence; through anthropomorphism, the human place in existence is conceived of as secure and welcoming. It is the anthropomorphic tendency of Shinto which gives it such enduring power, and which allows it to have such a lasting influence on the Japanese imagination of ‘community’ in the widest sense. This tendency permits Shinto adherents—which, to a very real extent, is virtually the entirety of Japan’s population—to perceive something recognisable in the world around them, and to perceive something accessible in the objects with which they daily interact, machines, for example, in some way endowed with at least the possibility of ‘consciousness’ or independent existence. The machine is not simply an inanimate servant; rather, it too in some way has access to a ‘soul’—“for Shinto . . . the material never exists without some relation to the spiritual” (Kasulis, 2004: 16), and this relation imbues the machine with something like awareness. Through this, the voice also reassures the hearer, and counters the potentially dehumanising aspect of using a machine to receive goods or services—the voice asserts the ‘humanity’ of the machine and creates an implied community between the hearer, the machine, and the company behind it. Moreover, this implied community extends beyond just those three participants, to include, in a diffuse way, the broader social network surrounding the momentary participants of hearer, machine, and company. This inclusive aspect is part of the Shinto notion of community which accepts that kami are ever-present in the lives of the Japanese, and that the kami are watching over the human world. I do not mean here that vending machines and elevators harbour their own kami who watch out for the customers or riders, but that the idea of kami as spirits

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inhabiting natural objects and endowing them with human traits of consciousness, community, and benevolence informs the increasingly automated daily interactions with machines in a highly-technologised Japan, and that these informing traits mitigate what could otherwise be an alienating experience. That there still is alienation in Japan, and a considerable amount, comes, as I have shown in our previous chapters, from social conditions which in many ways work against this understanding of community as operating across the human/spirit/natural worlds, emphasising instead the changing nature of the human community as exclusive of those other dimensions. The example of the ‘ghost in the machine’ is only one of the ways in which a Shintoistic, anthropomorphising attitude affects the presentation of technology within Japan—another is the popularity of ‘virtual pets’ such as the wildly popular tamagotchi from the early 1990s, or Sony’s ‘Aibō’ (the word means ‘partner’ or ‘buddy’ rather than ‘pet’), a robotic dog that plays and interacts with its owner. Although I have called this an ‘anthropomorphising’ attitude, it may be best to express it a different way. Anthropomorphism implies that humans in some way ‘come first’ and that, from our own emotions and behaviours, we assign meanings to the facial expressions, shapes, and actions of creatures or objects around us. This is natural, of course, for ‘we’ must naturally present things to ourselves in ways that we can understand. Another approach however would be to see ourselves as growing out of the world around us, such that what we see as “anthro” in the world is really nothing other than the world in us. This is an idea which is very clear in Buddhism with its conception of anatman or ‘non-self ’—the ‘self ’ is nothing more than a portion of material existence which mistakenly focuses on its individuality. This idea exists in Shinto as well, however, through its conception of kami as being ever-present in all materiality. “[ T ]he world is kami-filled because the world and kami are so interdependent as to be incomplete without the other . . . As important as it is to say there would be no world without kami, it is equally important to mention that given the nature of kami, the material world had to be. The material world consists of bits of kami. Matter was not created by an immaterial god. The world as we know it is not separate from the inherent nature of kami” (Kasulis, 2004: 17–8). The interconnectedness of humans and kami thus rather than being an anthropomorphic principle which sees kami as in some way possessing human emotions and intelligence has the possibility of highlighting kami nature within the human, and of demonstrating the presence of kami

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in all forms of existence. This attitude is what creates the community between humans, spirits, and the natural world, for here, too, as in Buddhist understanding (or even particle physics), all things are formed of the same material, all are imbued with the same substances. That humans have kami-nature (or Buddha-nature in Buddhist terminology), means that humans after all are fundamentally of the essence of the world around them—and so of course communication is possible between the human, natural, and spirit worlds. Of course humans and machines can interact—of course humans and kami can interact. It is this attitude informed by a Shintoistic/Buddhistic understanding of the mutual identity of diverse things that permits the technological innovations of computer animation to seem almost ‘more real’ than real life. It is this attitude which can accept a demonstration of spirituality in animated film that is moving, persuasive, and profound. In Chapter Seven we will consider ways in which this spirituality exists in the films of Miyazaki Hayao, as an entryway into ideality, an ‘ideal space’ capable of inspiring and nurturing an ‘ideal identity’. Here, however, I would like to consider the presence of spirituality in Oshii Mamoru’s sequel to Kōkaku kidōtai, Inosensu: Kōkaku kidōtai (Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence, 2004). This work, even more visually striking than its predecessor, follows the same characters as they seek the cause of a series of homicidal/ suicidal cyborg attacks. As with Kōkaku kidōtai, the dialogue is unashamedly philosophical, at times densely so. As with Kōkaku kidōtai, the story, too, is dense and complex, its narrative structure marked by twists, convolutions, elipses, and lacunae. After Kusanagi’s joining with the Puppetmaster and subsequent disappearance at the close of the first film, Batō continues to search for her while serving in Section 9. Cyborgs created by a company known as “Locus Solus” to gratify the sexual desires of their owners begin to murder them, instead, and then destroy themselves. These cyborgs are phenomenally lifelike, having been built with especial organs and abilities in excess of the usual ‘gynoids’ created for physical pleasure. Batō and his partner, Togusa, reach the manufacturing plant operated by Locus Solus and discover the source of the gynoids’ lifelike appeal—‘real’, human girls have been kidnapped by a yakuza gang, and their souls ‘dubbed’ into the cyborg bodies, trapping them within dolls programmed to obey. Freeing the kidnapped girls and destroying the manufactory, Batō and Togusa release these human kidnap victims from becoming dolls—but equally, release the dolls from becoming human. In seeking out the cause of the gynoids’

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aberrant behaviour, Batō and Togusa encounter Kim (Takenaka Naoto), a high-level hacker inhabiting a mechanical doll’s body, who tells them that perfection is only possible “for those without consciousness, or perhaps endowed with infinite consciousness. In other words, for dolls and for gods.” Kim muses that “Shelley’s skylarks are infused with a profound, instinctive joy—a joy we humans, driven by self-consciousness, can never know. For those of us who lust after knowledge, it is a condition more elusive than godhead.” This is the philosophical core of Inosensu—that the human drive to know, rather than to be, prevents the achievement or enjoyment of both, and that this drive comes precisely from the doubt, as Kim tells Togusa during a hallucinatory experience, as to “whether a creature that certainly appears to be alive really is. Alternatively, the doubt that a lifeless object might actually live.” In other words, the drive comes from the fear which dolls inspire in us of “being reduced to simple mechanisms and matter,” of having our unique human consciousness usurped by what we have considered exclusively inanimate, of having to realise that humans “belong to the void.” Instead, this film in particular, but its earlier prequel also, insists that it is better to embrace this reality and accept that human consciousness is not exclusive—and that consciousness need not, indeed must not, be forced into a model derived from the human. This is the meaning of the discovery at the film’s close of the kidnapped girls, the one survivor of whom tells Batō that she did not want to become a doll—to which the reply is that the dolls, too, did not want to become human. Rather, each has their own appropriate form of existence which is equally valid and equally capable of interacting in a community—a mutually accessible, mutually constructed community. It is from this philosophical conundrum of the relationship between the human and the mechanical, the ‘doll’, that Inosensu’s spirituality comes, for this question is fundamental to an understanding of ‘the human’ and its place in the universe. As Kim tells Batō and Togusa, the problem of human knowledge comes from its desire to transcend that which makes it possible—but this is in essence the very source of religious or spiritual yearning: the desire to know ‘god’, the ultimate source of knowledge and reality. Of course the film does not provide an answer to this yearning, but it does highlight the quest. The film makes this spiritual conundrum, the yearning for transcendent knowledge, explicit through its dialogue, but also utilises its visual quality to emphasise its thematic content, as well. Exquisitely detailed, computer-generated scenes defy ‘conventional’ categorisation as mere

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animation, much as the visuality of Kōkaku kidōtai, too, had highlighted animation itself as a source of semiotic meaning. Here, however, the impressive overlapping, recurring references to the world’s religions foregrounds the essentially spiritual quest which Batō and Togusa are embarked upon. Moreover, characters quote the Psalms, Zen parables, and even Milton’s “Paradise Lost” as they seek out the cause behind the cyborgs’ becoming both self-aware and suicidal, seemingly spontaneously. Visual references to Christian church architecture abound—the headquarters of Locus Solus, the cyborg manufactory, bears an obvious similarity to European Gothic cathedrals such as Paris’s Nôtre Dame, complete with elaborate flying butresses and statuary resembling cloaked monks. During the ‘parade sequence’, a flashback which shows the former prosperity of the Locus Solus headquarter city and its present abandonment, figures obviously inspired by Indian Hinduism drift past the onlookers while music reminiscent of gagaku, Japanese court music from the Nara Era (710–794) reserved for religious ceremonies, plays. Other figures are of Chinese Daoist deities, Confucian sages—and even mendicant monks among the onlookers. The film uses these explicitly religious images to appeal to the inherent sense of self-wonderment within the audience as a fundamental aspect of the human condition, but also to appeal to the possibility of accepting as part of a community things which manifestly are not ‘alive’ despite their psychologically persuasive appearance of being so. From this spiritual attitude springs an acceptance of animation as an artform capable of inspiring a powerfully sympathetic reaction in its audience. This reaction comes from the ability of the human mind to perceive animation as not only moving—as mobile and fluid as not only live-action film but in fact ‘reality’ itself—but also as presenting real, organic creatures endowed with identity, life, ‘soul’. In analysing Miyazaki Hayao’s Tonari no Totoro (My Neighbour Totoro, 1988), for example, Shimizu Masashi speaks of the mise en scène as being exactly like the fields, young shoots, sky, and clouds visible in any countryside town in May even now—the drawing is so exact that while first watching the film he felt certain Miyazaki had modeled the setting on a precise place (Shimizu, 2001: 217). This lifelike quality and animation’s ability to present ‘reality’ extend beyond simply the setting and background drawings, of course, to capture the living essence of the characters themselves—human and animal alike. Sergei Eisenstein addresses this when he writes of the ‘animistic tendency’ in the animation of Walt Disney—“The peacock and the parrot, the wolf and the horse, the night stand and dancing flame of

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Disney are actually simultaneously and identically both an animal (or object, or bird) and a human!” (Eisenstein, 1988: 53). Eisenstein sees something of ativistic, primitive thought in animation, as indicated by the double-entendre of the word ‘animation’ itself, meaning both a ‘moving drawing’ but also ‘possessed of life’ (Eisenstein, 1988: 54). The psychology of animation stems from “the idea: if it moves, then it’s alive; ie., moved by an innate, independent, volitional impulse” (Eisenstein, 1988: 54). Regardless of our conscious knowledge of the artificiality of the animated image, perceptually, they affect us in the same way as a ‘real’ person or animal will, in film or in real life. We know that they are . . . drawings, and not living things. We know that they are . . . projections of drawings on a screen. We know that they are . . . ‘miracles’ and tricks of technology, that such beings don’t really exist. But at the same time: We sense them as alive. We sense them as moving, as active. We sense them as existing and even thinking! (Eisenstein, 1988: 55)

Regardless of the ‘known’ artificiality of the animated images, perceptually we accept them as real—this is a function of our anthropomorphising psychology, but we can consider it as a function of a world view that seeks out meaningful interactions with all dimensions of existence, as well. What makes this possible is the psychological construction of the human brain that seeks out intelligible patterns and assigns to them identifiable meanings, meanings which the brain interprets according to the dictates and expectations of the mind. The mind expects shapes recognisable as living human beings to behave in ways fundamentally comprehensible to it—in animation, this is what it finds. Perceptually, the animated image acts upon our consciousness in the same way as a “real” image, or a photographic one—that is, animated or not, we respond to the image and its contents as if they were a depiction of “reality.” In this way the visual forms of Inosensu and Kōkaku kidōtai, as well as of other animated films, present an immediate example of their underlying, informing attitudes toward the posthuman: regardless of the method of construction of the character/persona/person, the human mind/consciousness responds to each character as if it were ‘real’. Thus we have a level of clarity in the correspondence between the form/content of the animated work that would be difficult to achieve in a live-action film. This is a confirmation/affirmation of the ways in which the posthuman serves to bolster, support, and reaffirm the

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essential nature of the human—cyborgs, robots, animated characters of humans, nonhuman, even deities and spirits, are all infused with a human quality—are all created in ‘our’ image, and thus all serve to highlight what is essential in humanity’s understanding of itself. Personification/anthropomorphism emerge as the defining features of the posthuman, but within this, they serve to reassert the validity of a humanist stance—one which, despite its relativisation of the human situation within the natural world, still privileges humanity within its own condition. But this is also what it finds in anthropomorphic interpretations of non-human animals or objects. That is, it is this expectation of interpretability that motivates Shinto to perceive kami in natural objects such as trees, mountains, and waterfalls, and that motivates Japanese product designers to build voices into their vending machines. The posthuman yearns for this perception, as well, and so conceives of ‘the human’ as already being merged with ‘the mechanical’ and the non-human or the computer. In perceiving of the human as but one component of a distributed system of cognition, posthumanism approaches an understanding of the world already held by Shinto and Buddhism, but the posthuman approach overlooks that pre-existing point of view to its detriment. Overcoming this detrimental limitation is one of the possibilities offered, as I’ve been arguing, by Japanese animated films which themselves are aware of the limits of the human and often present characters and situations which go beyond traditional ‘Western’ conceptions of humanity. These films offer examples of human/machine interdependence, but also human/kami interaction and interdependence, as well, and so produce work capable of overcoming the lingering anthropocentrism of posthumanism by highlighting the simultaneous and mutual ‘co-penetration’ of the organic, the mechanical, the human, and the non-human within work the form of which captures its essence. Animation serves to highlight the ‘human’ within the manifestly non-human, the ‘organic’ within the manifestly mechanical, in ways persuasive and compelling. That this type of film production benefits from a spiritual awareness, as well, is simply an additional component of its function as a successful argument for an expanded definition of ‘the human’ capable of accommodating the machine/human hybrid. Posthumanism’s utility in opening definitions of the ‘human’ to include the technological accompaniments of daily life as always necessary, always vital to a complete understanding of the human condition

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is not in and of itself complete until it can take from Asian philosophy a sensitivity to the type of ‘mutual co-penetration’ I’ve described here. This attitude of seeing kami-nature in all things, for example, or seeing the undifferentiated substance of reality as permeating all things, including the human, and thus conceiving of the human as also formed of kami-nature or the undifferentiated substance of reality is particularly useful for giving credibility to posthumanism’s postulation of the human and the mechanical as being, ultimately, mutually supporting. Oshii’s characters in Kōkaku kidōtai are themselves aware of their ‘humanity’ even as they’re aware of their mechanical, constructed natures, of their existences as components within much larger, complexly-distributed systems. It is these points of intersection between posthumanism, Asian philosophy, and this science-fiction animated film that highlight the underlying nature of human identity as formed of the experience of being an embodied consciousness—but this consciousness and the body which contains it, as I’ve shown, for both the posthuman and the traditionally philosophical understanding of reality, need not be limited to the strictly, biologically, ‘human’. For both posthumanism and the Shinto/Buddhist conceptions of reality, consciousness is but a result, an outcome, of a combination of components, all of which are composed of essentially the same types of things. That posthumanism and Shinto/Buddhism use different terminology to describe this category of “things” is not surprising, after all—but that this terminology can be translated into equally meaningful conceptions of the fundamental unity of different types of thing, consciousness, or existence, is something which posthumanism has overlooked.

CHAPTER SEVEN

ANIMATION AND IDENTITY: DRAWING A LINE BETWEEN THE REAL AND THE IDEAL As we have seen in the previous chapter, there is a relationship between animation—that is, between the acceptance of animation—and Japan’s traditional spiritualities, which help form the understanding of a community comprised of both human and non-human members. This community, as I have argued, is supportive, inclusive, and conducive to reconceptualisations of what constitutes ‘the human’. From this, it is not difficult to imagine that it may equally be conducive to reconceptualisations of this term ‘identity’ with which we are engaged. And indeed as I will argue in this chapter, animated film seems to be the site of a sincere optimism about identity. This is a broad generalisation and therefore fraught with counterexamples and inconsistency, but as I will show through a discussion of animation centred around the work of Studio Ghibli, Japanese animation serves in many ways as a source of reassurance that ‘ideal’ identity is possible, within the ‘ideal’ spaces of film, firstly, but also in the imaginations of the audience. This sense of ideality, I will show, is innocent and accepting. It is capable of allowing the problem of gender to disappear, and of proposing a solid, stable family. It understands travel to be challenging, exciting, recuperative, and redemptive, while permitting an individual to feel—to know—him- or herself to be integrated into a larger community with rich, meaningful, and continuing historical traditions. Most importantly, however, it is capable of providing a foundation for the future on the ground of the present. In this chapter we will discuss the issue of ideality and suggest that animated film provides a greater opportunity than live-action film for an entry into the ‘ideal’, in that animated film is a medium which the artist more easily, and more thoroughly, controls. Building on the conclusions of the previous chapter, we will consider how the conception of community operates as a support for the individual, who receives from it encouragement and occasion to imagine—and create—him- or herself as ‘ideal’, in turn working to reinforce the community of which s/he is a part. We will do this through an examination of the films

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of Miyazaki Hayao, one of Japan’s best-known and internationally recognised animators, but we will also read his works in a context of recent animation which establishes a model for a relationship between film and optimistic conceptions of identity as positive, possible, and profound. Some of the other animators whom we will consider here are Yuasa Masaaki, whose debut film, Mind Game (2004), offers a boisterous naïveté and a powerfully encouraging view of the process of self formation, and Kon Satoshi, whose work we have considered in Chapters Four and Six. Through the work of these directors we will begin our consideration of the conception of an ideal identity with a discussion of an ideal space. From here, we will move into the relationship between space and self, to propose that the self will flourish in a space carefully prepared to support it. I will argue that identity requires a space, a location—and that location will influence the nature of the identity existing within it in fundamental ways. That this ideal world exists within animated film is not coincidental—given that every aspect of an animated film, even representations of natural phenomena, are created, manipulated, and plotted to function within a narrative framework, animated film in general is far more obviously the product of the human mind than its live-action counterpart. It is this process of creating these aspects of the film that allow them to be ‘ideal’: they are the products of a human ‘idea’ of what they should be, and so correspond to their animator’s best imagination of the world s/he is creating. The precise shape of a cloud, the precise shade of the sky, the precise look of a character’s eye, are all under the control of the animator—something which cannot be said of live action films, even in this age of digital augmentation. Thus animated films have the ability to present a world apparently more complete, ‘better’, or richer than the ‘real’ one their audience inhabits; this becomes a key component of anime’s success, for this animated world has the potential to permit a correspondingly more overwhelming entertainment, a more escapist fantasy. Within this ‘more complete’ site of fantasy, and because of the apparently richer, fuller world it is able to depict, animation—more so than live-action film—has tremendous potential to present ideal spaces highly conducive to the nourishment of the human imagination. More importantly, the ideal spaces it creates themselves have tremendous potential to support the nurturing of ideal human identities, however tenuous these may seem in comparison with the ‘real’ world upon which they are modelled. Miyazaki himself had experience of

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the ‘inspirational’ capacity of animation when, as a young man, he saw Yabushita Taiji’s Hakujaden (The White Snake Enchantress, lit., Legend of White Snake, 1958). He has said that watching that film made him realise how “earnestly” he himself “yearned for a pure world. [He] could no longer deny how [he] longed to affirm the world” (Miyazaki, 1988: 147). Miyazaki, pragmatically though perhaps altruistically, believes that “no matter how times change, children are still themselves looking for the same impulse [he] received” from watching that animated film in his youth (Miyazaki, 1988: 156). As I will argue, animated film, by virtue of its very ideality, maintains a capacity to encourage an active questioning of the postmodern pessimist imperative, while equally foregrounding the need for an altruistic sensitivity to ‘perfection’ or at least its possibility. This questioning comes precisely from the presentation, as I will argue, in the unashamedly innocent world of Studio Ghibli’s productions—from precisely the presentation of ideal spaces and the ‘ideal’ selves Ghibli creates as characters to populate those spaces. From this innocence, too, I believe, comes in no small part the popularity of Miyazaki’s films both inside, and perhaps surprisingly, outside of Japan. Paul Wells has argued that animated film, like live-action works but in some ways more self-consciously, has reacted against trends in internationalisation and globalisation specifically to “resist the influence of political agendas and censorship imposed on the creative context by authoritarian or totalitarian regimes, and . . . produce work which denies the ideological and aesthetic influence of Disney animation” (Wells, 1998: 220). This is because: in order to become distinctive, animation studios have had to look back and reclaim their own graphic and performance traditions and reinvent old myths and folk-tales from their own countries for new audiences. This has led to a number of countries creating work which is for, and about, their own history, culture, and socio-political identity, and serves to constitute a national animated cinema dedicated to the particular and specific orientations of its people, and their creative heritage (Wells, 1998: 220).

This is certainly true in the case of Japan, which has produced a highly recognisable set of conventions in animation technique, which in turn generate distinct ‘patterns’ for movement, emotion, and other narrative issues. It is also true in the case of Miyazaki, specifically, who has drawn extensively on Japan’s history and spirituality to produce contemporarily important and culturally meaningful films (and who not coincidentally has stated that he hates Disney films (Miyazaki, 1988:

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148)). The ‘surprise’ comes from the fact that despite being so ‘Japanese’ in their style and subject matter, his films are internationally successful. As I will argue, it is the ideality and sincerity with which he informs his characters, plots, and—most importantly—the spaces of his films which permit international audiences access to the correspondingly culturally-transcendent aspects of his work. Of course to speak about the creation of ideal spaces in art requires a consideration of the ways in which the sense of “space” is created and the ways in which it can be represented as “ideal.” First, however, we require a definition of “ideal.” I do not here intend to approach a discussion of the validity or lack thereof of German Idealism, British Idealism, or any form of “consciousness only” philosophy which sees the world as a thing existing only within perceptions of it; nor do I intend to offer a discussion of universality of norms or values. Rather, I want to suggest that the ‘ideal’ is indeed a variable thing, but a thing which is suggestive of a particular relationship between object and desire. In common understanding “ideal” refers to something perfect, a model by which reality is measured, by which even the satisfaction of one’s desire may be judged. The “ideal” is understood as potentially better than the “real,” not because the “real” is necessarily inadequate, but because the ideal has greater potential to fulfill a particular set of usually personal requirements. In other words, the ideal is something which corresponds to a particular imagination—it corresponds to the human imagination of desire. There are several aspects to this notion of ‘ideal’: how desire is formulated to the imagination which creates it; how the imagination is able to construct an image of itself; how this image can be presented to another. Without exploring this issue in too great detail, this is the notion of the ideal with which I will work: the ideal is the creative imagination of a desired object presented through artistic means in order to inspire in another person an awareness of a corresponding desire—Miyazaki’s “yearning” for a “pure world,” for example, of which he became aware through his encounter with animated film. Thus many things can be ideal, not only the ameliorating or uplifting—the imagination of desire creates for itself a definition of the ideal that changes to reflect changes in the nature of the desire which motivates the creative act. In this way the notion of the ‘ideal’ is flexible and multi-faceted. There are thus many ways of approaching a work’s presentation of what is ‘ideal’ in its imagination, but one which carries especial interpre-

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tive force is the explicit thematic content of the work. It is this content which affects the viewer or reader consciously and ideologically; it is this content which can inspire or encourage the viewer. However, the content of the work is accessible only in so far as the form makes it so, and for art, the form of the package—created by the techniques, materials, and skills of the artist—is the thing which truly moves the viewer or reader. This brings the issue of “space” to the fore, as it is the created ‘space’ of the work which is its form. As art which presents an image of the world and within this image presents its material, anime must of course make use of ‘space’ to sustain its project on the one hand and its idealism on the other. Space is thus of primary importance in anime, for it is here that the viewer encounters the notion of the ideal. The packaging of this space in the animated films of Miyazaki Hayao is accomplished with great skill, and Miyazaki’s great skill at guiding the creation of technically superb works of art permits the representation of an ideal space. I will add, also, that in many of Miyazaki’s films, the ideal has with it a profound sense of altruism, of benevolence and a belief in the fundamental goodness of the human community. This, then, is the object of my attention here, the altruistic, ideal worlds which Studio Ghibli presents, composed of pristine nature and much beauty, in which the viewer can imagine his or her own personal growth and completion. Miyazaki and his team of animators create these representations of ideal spaces as modern fairy tales, as fantasies which aspire to a universal accessibility. Fairy tales and fantasies, however, are not inherently innocent. Fantasy provides a powerful mechanism for self-identification, which is not without social implications, as well, in proposing alternative configurations of human-constructed realities. This mechanism by its nature is imaginative of difference, and so by its nature is deconstructive of the status quo, yet it can be put to use to “reconstruct” the object of its imaginings in conservative or normative ways. As Lynette Hunter argues, “The stance of fantasy is end-directed and can achieve substantial short-term effectiveness. In terms of the practicality of how we live our lives within individual and state politics, the stance is enormously useful. However, the long-term effect is that no radical change can ever take place because the ideological and epistemological basis for action is never questioned” (Hunter, 1989: 2). That is to say, fantasy runs the risk of being nothing more than a catharsis that obviates the need for real action. “The fantasy stance becomes a series of covert manipulations engaged in competition toward success or failure: with

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all the opportunities for exploitation, aggression, and domination that are attendant” (Hunter, 1989: 2). The question of “success or failure” here incorporates a transformative imagining of reality, an acceptance of the personal potential for growth and change inherent within all members of a society as well as within society itself. A “successful” fantasy, I suggest, is one which supports this potential for growth and facilitates its imaginings within the viewer or reader, while a “failure” is normative and restrictive of human potential beyond the purely utilitarian. In this regard I can agree with Susan Napier’s assertion that Miyazaki’s work is able to present “insistent offering[s] of alternative visions of Japanese identity” (Napier, 2001: 477), which in part account for their tremendous popularity and critical success. These alternative visions are consistently supportive of the individual as both necessary to and productive of the best aspects of community, and as such they negotiate the spaces between the national and extranational ideals of individuality within the Japanese context. Some of the issues with which Miyazaki concerns himself are the functions of gender in his characters’ relations with the community; the problem of youth against an established social hierarchy; and the acceptance of world culture within the still often insular attitude of Japan toward the rest of the world. Miyazaki’s films thus offer subtle and complex constructions of identity, and so are able to engage their audiences with visionings of a social reality which in many ways challenge the status quo, not to disrupt it but to encourage within the audience an imagination of alterity. This engagement is what makes the fantastic visions of the films “successful,” conducive to instilling within their audience the concepts of personal, altruistic growth. While we may question whether, in fine, fantasy is capable of transforming the ‘real’, Miyazaki’s works of fantasy do indeed question the basis upon which the ‘real’ stands. They do so precisely through the presentation of characters able to act in ways both psychologically realistic and also mythically informed. These characters, as we shall see, act in ways which are consistent with the ideality of the spaces in which their actions take place, and so question the ‘lack of ideality of reality’ in order to problematise that lack and suggest an alternative to it. As we have seen, contemporary Japanese film conceives of identity in many different ways but primarily centres this conception within an urban space—as Chapter Five has shown, for example, the process of

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travel, as a means of reconstituting the self and so creating a sense of ‘comfortable’ identity, operates on the assumption that unlike in premodern times, modern Japan situates itself in an urban world. But behind this situation—however pragmatic or realistic it may be—lingers the nostalgia for a space if not exactly wild then at least rural, at least closer to Nature. As we saw in Chapter 6, Japan’s indigenous religion, Shinto, postulates a strong community between the human, spirit, and natural worlds. This understanding of community influences the understanding of space, as well, with certain locations considered sacred. Even within Japan’s urban metropoli, the notion of sacred space designates shrine and temple grounds as the shared domain of deities, humans, and Nature. Even within Japan’s urban world, space still exists that partakes more of the spiritual, of the ideal, than of the ‘real’. It is in these ‘ideal’ spaces that an ‘ideal’ identity is able to thrive—an identity both contemporary and technological, as well as traditional and natural. This identity draws strength, however, from that community around it—that ‘ideal’ community capable of encompassing all of its members and accepting, overlooking, or even forgiving their inadequacies, while extending to them the supportive opportunity to overcome their failings, or outgrow their shortfalls. Through this word ‘community’, even the urban world can partake of a redemptive ‘purification’ possible through animation, and becomes capable of providing a supportive space for characters who themselves can experience a redemption. A case in point comes from Kon Satoshi’s Tokyo Godfathers (2003). As we saw in Chapter Four, Kon’s work is often directly concerned with a struggle for identity—there, we spoke at length about his debut film, Perfect Blue (1998), and its disturbing process of violent reclamation of self-identity for a young actress. That work was a decidedly urban one, its final confrontation between protagonist and antagonist being enacted as a running battle through Tokyo’s back streets and alleyways. Tokyo Godfathers too is essentially urban, telling as it does the story of three homeless people who, through a selfless act, find a type of salvation for themselves and reconstitution of their own families. This film, set on Christmas Eve, is replete with religious symbolism—images of angels abound, as do explicit (though often subtle) references to December 25. The story is simple though moving. Three homeless people, Gin (Emori Toru), an alcoholic former bike-shop owner, Miyuki (Okamoto Aya), a teenage runaway who in a fit of anger had stabbed her father, and Hana (Umegaki Yoshiaki), a former transvestite entertainer, find an abandoned baby, and embark on a quest

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to return her to her mother. Following the clues of a photograph and the name of a nightclub left in a bag of belongings, ultimately, the three do indeed discover the mother—on the point of suicide—but in a dramatic twist they discover that she had in fact stolen the child from a maternity ward in grief over her own miscarried pregnancy. Along the way, the three discover much about their own lives, and find ways out of their own desperate situations—Gin meets the daughter he had abandoned years earlier and reestablishes connections with his family; Hana reconnects with the nightclub at which he had been working, itself a tight-knit community of both patrons and performers who seem truly to care for one another; and Miyuki overcomes her guilt and fear, to return to her forgiving and loving family. The three also discover the great affection—even love—which they share for each other, and realise it is this love which had sustained them throughout not only the search for the child’s family, but their time together in Tokyo’s blue-tent, homeless camps. The film’s religious symbolism points to the abandoned baby as the ‘miracle’ which had brought about the restoration of the hopes of these three—in fact Hana repeatedly refers to Kiyoko (the name which the three have given her means “Pure Child”) as “God’s messenger,” and to themselves as her “servants.” Kiyoko herself indeed seems responsible in some way for several ‘miracles’, each of which saves the lives of the three main characters—having them move from a convenience store just moments before an ambulance crashes through the window, or causing a ‘divine wind’ to blow with sufficient strength to rescue Hana and her when, at the film’s climax, the two have fallen from a building. This symbolism is a direct reference to the conception of an overseeing, everpresent spiritual force capable of protecting, guiding, and redeeming those who live under its purview. That it draws explicitly on Christian symbolism is in many ways irrelevant to the nature of the spiritual force to which the film appeals, however, in that it is the acceptance, affection, and support of each other demonstrated by the three main characters which is ultimately ‘responsible’ for their restoration to their former social/familial situations. Kon, while drawing on Christian symbolism, does not craft here a “Christian” film; rather, Tokyo Godfathers is theistic, but utilises a spiritual awareness to comment directly on the value and necessity of community in the lives of individuals who, on their own, are wont to ‘go astray’. It is this community—which the three themselves have formed and into which the three themselves invest their energy, affection, and, ultimately, faith—which provides for them the strength to

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overcome their debilitations. The reward which the plot gives to them, of restoration of their families and their positions in the wider, social community, comes not exclusively from divine intervention, but from themselves acting on the impetus which Kiyoko’s discovery provides for them. This is truly a case of “God helping those who help themselves,” but here, that ‘help’ serves the purpose of demonstrating the function and possibility of community, conceived of as an ideal, even within the spaces of Japan’s contemporary urbanity. We find a similar appeal to community—encompassing both humans and non-humans or spirits/kami—in Miyazaki’s Majo no takkyūbin (Kiki’s Delivery Service, 1989), a film, too, which is especially urban in its setting. This is one of his works most explicitly focused on the issue of identity and the search for a personally-constructed individuality. Set as it is in a vaguely nostalgic, apparently European country, it partakes of an innocent idealism that serves well to highlight the relationship between ideal space and ideal selfhood which is a central feature of Miyazaki’s films. This particular film follows a young witch, Kiki (Takayama Minami), as she prepares for an independent life away from her family for one year—“majo ni naru ko wa jūsansai ni nattara uchi wo deru to iu (when a girl who is to be a witch turns 13, she leaves home)” says Kiki’s mother (Nobusawa Mieko), feeling nostalgic and protective of her child. Choosing an appropriately moon-lit night for her departure, Kiki sets out to find the city that calls to her and the adventures that await her there. This is not a typical ‘road movie’, however, in that Kiki will not return home at the film’s close—rather, she builds for herself a new life and livelihood through her own determination and perseverance, assisted by kindly strangers whom she grows to love. It is through this process of discovering her life and livelihood that Kiki discovers her identity, of course, but the space in which she does so—while resolutely urban in its construction—is also resolutely ideal and idealistic. Unlike the architecture and setting of Miyazaki’s earlier and later masterpieces, Tonari no Totoro (My Neighbour Totoro, 1988) and Sen to Chihiro no kamikakushi (Spirited Away, 2001), to which I will turn presently, Majo no takkyūbin is set in a world infused with European ‘charm’ and fantasy. In fact it is possible to say that this coming of age story has been displaced from Japan to a site of obviously idealised fantasy the better to highlight its creation of a ‘perfect space’ in which its characters will grow and develop. The relationship between this perfect space and identity formation is a continuing factor in Miyazaki’s works— here, it functions as an informing principle in not only the process of

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self-discovery through which Kiki goes, but in the other characters, as well, all of whom serve as beneficent guides and colleagues along the way. Thus Majo no takkyūbin offers a view of self-discovery and identity formation as things aided by and predicated upon communal interaction, but nonetheless the onus is on the individual to accept the assistance of his/her community, and to accept responsibility for the steady development of his/her personality. That this film is urban emphasises the human process of growth and the human aspects of community. Not all of Miyazaki’s films are so emphatically human-centric, however. His best and most successful films permit an understanding of community which encompasses far more than merely the human. One film which presents most persuasively the viability of a notion of community as something encompassing, nurturing, and protected by the natural/spirit world nexus is Tonari no Totoro, a simple film, infused with obvious overtones from Japan’s indigenous religion, Shinto. Set as it is in an idealised ‘remembrance’ of a pure, rural space, Totoro offers a contrasting though also reinforcing view of the community we have encountered in both Majo and Tokyo Godfathers’ urbanity. Here, as in both of those films, the setting is important only insofar as it provides a location for the film’s consideration of the word ‘community’ and a demonstration of the viability and functioning of communal relationships in the growth of the individual. Totoro, like Tokyo Godfathers, also partakes of religious symbolism to emphasise its understanding of the nature of the community which contains and sustains humanity, and like Tokyo Godfathers, it, too, emphasises the ultimate responsibility of the individual for his or her own situation—kami or God exist to help, not to control, and therefore respond to appeals while permitting personal choice. The story is of two young sisters, Mei (Sakamoto Chika) and Satsuki (Hidaka Noriko), who, after moving to a new home in the country, meet a magical creature, Totoro (Takagi Hitoshi), who watches over them as a kami, a Shinto deity. The younger sister, Mei, first meets Totoro while playing in her yard and following two smaller deities into the surrounding forest. The deities are in no way threatening, and appear so benign that within minutes of meeting Totoro, a creature large enough to swallow her whole, Mei is curled up fast asleep on top of his enormous, furry belly. Many scenes in Tonari no Totoro present an almost stunningly life-like image, and do so while seeming to serve little purpose in the film. These

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scenes, brief, often devoid of human presence, serve the important purpose of reinforcing the mood of the film, and so reinforcing the informing attitude that a secure, supportive, and welcoming community exists both inside and outside of the shot’s frame—both inside and outside of the very film itself. One of the most beautiful (and I do realise this is a subjective assertion) of these brief, apparently “irrelevant” scenes is a very short one which comes immediately after Mei and Totoro drift off to sleep in the heat and laziness of early afternoon. In this shot, a snail leisurely climbs a flower stalk, against a deep, blue sky. The composition here is classically proportioned, richly detailed, and gorgeously coloured—the snail and flower stalk occupy the foreground at roughly the left one-third of the frame, the midground is composed of a rice paddy, drawn in lush greens, with the perfect sky occupying the background, an enormous, white cloud creating a sense of tremendous depth and serenity. The lack of human presence in the shot does nothing to diminish the feeling of peaceful security which hangs over it, for signs of human presence abound in the midground. Yet it is precisely the absence of visible human figures which reinforces the air of watchful, supportive community which informs this film: even though the people of this village community may not be visible, they are never too far away to lend a hand or come to the assistance of a fellow member. And so too the absence of human presence here permits the viewer a moment of repose, quite like the one just witnessed between Mei and Totoro, to consider the wider three-part community around him or her, composed of humans, nature, and kami, Shinto deities, the inhabitants of the spirit world. In this shot, human presence is not necessary to reinforce the solidity of the human community, nor to reinforce the sense of security the viewer has, knowing that Mei is perfectly safe, even though she is ‘alone’ in the forest with only Totoro to watch over her, for it is Totoro’s presence, the presence of the kami here envisioned in absolutely benign form, which is necessary. In this way, the ‘empty’ scenes in Tonari no Totoro serve to invite the viewer more fully into the ideal world the film creates, thus “containing” (Figlio and Richards, 2003: 408) the otherwise alienating process inherent within ‘watching’ a story unfold, without actually actively participating in it. As Figlio and Richards argue, “the material fabric of a society, and . . . the institutional and collective processes of which that fabric is a product and an expression, can play a part in the containment

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of anxieties” (Figlio and Richards, 2003: 411) even when the inhabitants and members of that society are not immediately, visually present to one another. Tonari no Totoro presents visual reassurance that the social fabric around Mei and Satsuki—and around the viewer, through the process of identification with the characters, as well—is sound, is formed of not only human participants, but spiritual ones, as well. The ‘empty’ scenes retain the unseen presence of the human community, of human society, which remains “a container of primitive—and, particularly, depressive—anxieties” (Figlio and Richards, 2003: 408), a container able to alleviate the fears of the audience through acknowledging the enduring, watchful presence of not only other members of the human society, but also members of the spiritual and natural worlds which surround, sustain, and—in Miyazaki’s films—welcome the humans who remain open to their existence. This process of containment, of limiting the ‘primitive, depressive’ anxieties, presumes an individual to have experienced the human world very early on as fundamentally benevolent. Figlio and Richards, writing about the ways in which the visible traces of a society can act upon an individual to reassure him or her of that society’s supportive presence, on the one hand, or performative obligations on the individual, on the other, propose that from a very young age, social organisation influences the development of society’s members. The way the social infrastructure is experienced during early development will influence intellectual or ideological attitudes towards one’s own society in later life. Those who, as adults, feel radically disaffiliated from their society are reproducing an infantile or childhood relationship to a world that was not then experienced as being good; by contrast, if . . . the holding environment was experienced as a benign and supportive presence, this will integrate one into the larger social fabric (Figlio and Richards, 2003: 411).

The child protagonists of Miyazaki’s works who inhabit ideal spaces are precisely the types of people who experience the world around them as positive, and who in turn permit their audiences to imagine the potential for ideality around themselves, as well. Through the intensely sympathetic identification of the audience with these characters, audience members who had not experienced the “holding environment” as good are able to re-situate themselves within an experiential moment at which that feeling of benevolent inclusion is once again possible—in this regard, the films of Studio Ghibli present positively reinforcing environments capable of encouraging a feeling of security within their audiences.

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Thus through the lushness of the brief scene of the snail climbing the stalk, included almost whimsically in the flow of the film, apparently without function in the movement of the plot, the visual presentation of Tonari no Totoro is able to capture the full implications of Mei’s safety with Totoro—she is truly never alone, and never at risk. This shot foreshadows what is to come when Mei is lost, but more intriguingly, it contains the essence of the ideal quality of the space in which the film takes place and so serves to reassure the audience of the strength of the social containment around them to protect them from their ‘primitive, depressive’ anxieties, and so return them to a point at which it becomes possible for them to re-vision the human community as welcoming, benevolent, and supportive. Of course other scenes present a more explicit commentary on the safety and security of these two sisters; an important and illustrative one comes very early on in the film, as the children encounter their new home in the countryside for the first time. As they run under the overhanging gables, Satsuki pushes a supporting post, causing the wooden structure to shake, and a large piece to fall. She hurriedly steadies the post, but Mei at once and gleefully grabs hold with both hands, shaking it deliberately and forcefully. More pieces of wood fall down around both sisters, who laugh and shriek in delight—not at having almost collapsed part of their home, not in delight at their blossoming destructive powers, but in delight at having the freedom to explore their home, their new environment, in safety and security. The impressive lack of fear in these girls’ personalities is obvious and powerful—before entering any new room in the house, however dark and forbidding it may appear (and even after encountering the makkuro-kurosuke, the “soot sprites,” potentially dark, threatening entities, for the first time), the girls announce their presence and the strength of their intentions by shouting loudly, even fiercely, with pride and determination. The girls chant that they’ll pull the soot sprites “out by their eyeballs” if they don’t appear voluntarily—now, this is surely an indication of the ease with which these young characters are able to face the new and potentially disturbing aspects of their lives. This is a theme of Miyazaki’s work, of course, that such fearless venturing-forth is not only possible but proper in not only the world his films create, but in the ones which they seek to portray, as well—the ‘real’ world beyond their frames. Thematically, Miyazaki’s films suggest the altruistic acceptance of an individual’s place in the wider, supportive community. They do so through the creation of these moments in which the characters

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are able to behave boldly, and see their confidence rewarded. These scenes of confidence and acceptance, however, are reinforced by the tremendous beauty with which the scenes are infused, the tremendous detail and care which highlight the “presence” of a guiding, supporting hand, almost implying a creative deity. However, while this care and this detail approach the spiritual, for after all one of the themes of Miyazaki’s work is the closeness of the spirit world to the human, it is through the richness of the animation that the human potential to create an ideal reality becomes fully imagined. Thus similarly to Kon Satoshi’s understanding of human responsibility in Tokyo Godfathers, Miyazaki’s vision, for all its spiritual, specifically Shinto, overtones, is fundamentally a humanist one. Within the threepart community of nature, kami, and humans, the individual, through his or her own agency, is able to actualise his or her own identity in a process which, while aided, guided, and watched over by the surrounding spirit and human communities, remains at root individual and truly personal. In this way Miyazaki has created an arena for human growth which is truly ideal, but also truly possible, and also truly social and truly public, through the venue of not only the theatre but the space of its presentation. Public life has to be maintained both consciously and unconsciously in an imaginative space. The scenario of citizens going about their business exemplifies such a mixture of [the] reflective and prereflective[,] holding together the idea of a society or a state. Depressive fantasies and anxiety have to be assimilated through a continuous exchange between each citizen’s internal world and the environment. The external world represents the sum total of individual fantasies of damage and repair, and it contains objects that can be introjected to shore up or undermine the multitude of internal worlds. Both the material and the semiotic environment take part in this continual interchange between individual internal worlds and a collectively maintained matrix of social life (Figlio and Richards, 2003: 420).

This matrix of social life is open to all, but not all are ready to partake of it, regardless of their chronological age. Miyazaki addresses this issue as well by populating his films with a range of characters, from children to adults to spirits of several sorts; only certain of these characters have ready and full access to the ideal spaces they inhabit. The characters fully able to appreciate the ideality of their world, and thus fully able to elicit the sympathies of their audience, are those possessed of a particular innocence, given to them either by their youth or by

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their purity. This is very apparent in Tonari no Totoro, of course, which privileges the two children who alone are able to see and interact with the makkuro-kurosuke and Totoro. While Mei and Satsuki are the only two characters in the film who, at the moment of its narration, are able to see and interact with Totoro, they are not the only two who have had the experience of communicating with the spirit world. The character of Granny (Kitabayashi Tanie) remembers and values the memory of her childhood interactions with the spirits, and so is able to appreciate the validity and importance of the ideality of the nature around her, despite having lost the ability to perceive it fully. Nonetheless, her appreciation of it permits her to be a source of reassurance and strength for the two children—especially for Satsuki, who in the film is most aware of and troubled by the potential for a split between an ideal world and the “real” one she feels encroaching on her (this from her fears for her mother’s health and her imagining of the consequences of losing her mother through death.) On the other hand, the character of the father (Itoi Shigesato), an anthropologist who lectures at a university, while academically aware of the human community and its situation within the natural/spirit world, is emotionally and experientially unable to enter into any of those worlds fully. What is necessary is not an intellectual understanding but rather a pure one, or a youthfully innocent one. The function of youth here, and of innocent purity, is to present a character at a starting point—a character with his or her potential still at maximum, for this is the type of character who will grow into someone capable of creating a new social order, provided s/he maintains within herself a fascination with the ideality of Nature around her. It is this type of character Miyazaki presents most consistently in his work because this is the type of person with most promise. It is this type of appreciation that Miyazaki’s films serve to spark in their audience, to reawaken in its adult members and to encourage and inspire in its younger members, precisely because this will call back to their minds their own potential to create, as much as possible, an ideal space around them. While Susan Napier speaks of Miyazaki’s cinema of deassurance, I propose that his films function in precisely the opposite way, as sources of a profound reassurance that the potential for an ideal creation still exists within their audiences—this assurance is valid for both young and old, and encourages its own acceptance through the technical and visual skill of its presentation. This assurance, however, asks of its recipients to imagine an alternative reality, one supported by

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the reassurance Miyazaki’s films provide. It asks the audience to carry away with them something of the mood, of the world of the films, into their daily lives and so partake of an alternative and ideal reality within the existing one. This alternative reality, attractive in its simplicity and persuasive in its confident belief in a sincere purity, partakes of the function of the fairy tale to reassure and soothe. This fairy tale aspect, in which the miraculous is not only possible but possible on a daily basis, can account for some of the popularity of Studio Ghibli’s films. Film and fairy tale go well together, for they both bind their audiences within an awed community (Zipes, 1996: 4). Within the history of the fairy tale film, however, it is possible to discern an urge towards a cultural norm which parallels that which Hunter above has identified in fantasy. As Jack Zipes argues, the mass-popularisation of film and in particular its use of fairy tales: silenced the personal and communal voice of the oral magic tales and obfuscated the personal voice of literary fairy-tale narratives. Through images and gradually through sound, all voices were leveled in the name of an administrative or industrialised voice that spoke in seemingly authentic tones. . . . The ‘new’ communal voice was standardised and bent on selling itself in the form of a commodified fairy tale. What pleasure and meaning audiences were to derive from the cinematic fairy tale was incidental to the purpose of the producers (Zipes, 1996: 6).

This of course introduces the issue of film as commodity within a capitalist economy, and speaks directly to the production of film as a means of amassing capital—success then becomes a recouping of the production costs and the realisation of a profit on investment, mooting the importance of political, narrative, or even ultimately artistic quality. While Zipes is correct to see the fairy tale film (and film in general) as functioning as potentially a commodity whose production is motivated by a desire for monetary profit, the issue is more complex in the latecapitalist stage. Consumers of film are not necessarily as artistically (or even economically) naïve as they were in the days of film’s birth. What is problematic now, I would argue, is not in fact the fairy tale film, as such, but rather the very issue of commodification itself. It is commodification which truly silences the ‘personal and communal voice’, something in contrast to which Miyazaki’s work stands. This contrast emerges from Miyazaki’s political contestation of gender roles, on the one hand, and his films’ consistent visual revisitation of the ideal, its insistence on setting itself within a nostalgic, golden age (either past,

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future, or even present) in which tradition, community, and voice—personal, idiosyncratic, noble, simple, and pure—are still possible. The ‘success’ of any given film now depends not only on its marketing as a consumer commodity, but more importantly on its artistic strengths—if this were not true, every film produced by Disney, with its enormous budget for marketing and product tie-ins, would be an unqualified blockbuster. Statistically, this is not so. The visual and narratological beauty of a film such as Tonari no Totoro is precisely what attracts audiences to it. This beauty stems in large part from the film’s presentation of a fairy tale accessible to a contemporary audience. The success of the fairy tale comes from the fact that here, the “beast” is not malevolent, as such, in fact does not even truly exist: the only danger to the protagonists comes from a potential separation from a truly compassionate community. Perhaps, given the barbarism of [much of the modern world], the need for fairy tales in the mass media has become greater, for it is through the fairy tale that hope for happy endings is kept alive and cultivated. The question we must ask, however, is whether it is a false hope. Do fairytale films project false utopias through amusement? Have fairy-tale films contributed to the destruction of community and the deception of the masses? (Zipes, 1996: 7)

Despite the insistence of this pessimistic doubt, it is apparent that Studio Ghibli’s films offer with veracity and validity an especially durable hope. By proposing a constructive, redemptive, and possible community within its films, and by informing that community with a sincere altruism, Studio Ghibli—while undeniably creating highly amusing, culturally specific entertainments within a capitalist industry, and while utilising the techniques of that industry with great acumen and skill—offers an alternative vision of the world, a vision capable of inspiration. As I will show, this inspiration, this constructive, redemptive, and possible community is open to the audience through the visual appeal of the artwork which creates these films, an artwork which presents a pristine world through care, attention to detail, and dazzling beauty. As I have argued, this presentation includes young or innocent characters who learn how to appreciate the ideal world of the films, and who do so through interaction with the spirits who dwell there. However, while only some characters are completely able to enter into the ideal spaces of these films, every character has the potential to benefit from them. This is an issue which is presented in two films from different stages of Miyazaki’s career: the early Kaze no tani no

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Naushikaa (Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind, 1984); and Mononoke hime (Princess Mononoke, 1997). These films share a theme of environmental reclamation through the sacrifices of young characters, and while they differ in their moral complexities and visual/technical styles, they are quite similar in their treatment of the location within Nature of something vital and redemptive, something to be found and safeguarded by innocent youth. The two films are similar in many other respects, as well, not only in terms of plot but also in their thematic presentations of the functions of technology as a force potentially destructive of the natural environmental balance; the aspect of human self-centredness in relation to the natural world; and the role of the dedicated individual in ‘saving’ the community from its errors. Naushikaa is the less ambiguous of the two, offering a confident view of fundamental human goodness and the human capacity for redemption, understanding within this view the regenerative potential of the natural world to heal itself of even man-made ills. The story of Naushikaa is fairly simple: in an age manifestly not contemporary, human communities live at the edges of an expanding wasteland (the product of a war fought by industrialised, technologised, rival civilisations), contaminated with toxic vapours and plants, and inhabited by hostile (and large!) insects. One young woman, Nausicaa (Shimamoto Sumi), has a unique relationship with the natural world; her patient, caring personality wins her the trust of the creatures she encounters. She is a highly respected member of her community, the daughter of the village leader, but also an extremely accepting, openhearted young woman. Others in the film, however, are not so kind, for the film tells of warring village groups, each of which plans on reviving a technologised, destructive force to vanquish the other, destroy the insects of the wasteland, and reclaim what safe land remains for themselves. Nausicaa prevents the planned war between the two groups, but in saving the life of a young, powerful insect, loses her own—she is resurrected by the powerful insects, however, and is revealed to be the fulfillment of an ancient prophecy that heralds the purification of the land and an enduring peace. “Naushikaa counterbalances its tropes of destruction and the wasteland with pastel-coloured visions of the pastoral Valley of the Wind and the triumphal final scene. In the end the heroine is reborn . . . offering a message of unification and hope to both the humans and giant insects who populate her thirtieth-century dystopia” (Napier, 2001: 487).

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This work contains powerful, allegorical references to contemporary industrialisation, through its depictions of its characters as predominantly ‘Western’ in appearance, having blond or red hair, blue eyes, and long bodies. These features are of course conventions in anime but here together with the depicted landscape function as critiques of Western industrial pollution and the type of mechanised warfare which marked the middle of the twentieth century. The ‘God soldier’ the two opposing groups seek is clearly a reference to the atomic weaponry which ended the Second World War at such enormous cost to Japan, and the armour of the villagers of the Valley of the Wind clearly situate them within a Europe-inspired mythology. This obvious critique of a Western industrialisation is balanced by Miyazaki’s later Mononoke hime (Princess Mononoke, 1997) and its explicit critique of Japan’s industrialisation—this latter work also contains a mythic, allegorical dimension of great power and depth. Naushikaa, though set in a time of great environmental distress, contains scenes of tremendous beauty, as well as scenes of ideal spaces, most importantly in Nausicaa’s secret, indoor garden where she has discovered the regenerative and purifying power of the plants which grow in the wasteland, but also in the hidden space beneath the wasteland itself, where Nausicaa discovers the large-scale process of rebirth already underway. It is within these spaces, hidden from view and inobvious, that Nausicaa’s faith in the power of nature is justified—these spaces here serve as the site of Nausicaa’s reconnection with the vitality of Nature, and through her, the human community becomes reconnected with a regenerative Nature, as well. The ideality of Kaze no tani no Naushikaa manifests itself in its message of environmental regeneration, but it also encourages an individual, personal regeneration, as well, through the redemption of the leaders of the opposing armies it presents. In this way it provides a model for Miyazaki’s later Mononoke hime, which too provides an opportunity for personal change for Lady Eboshi (Tanaka Yūko), the main female antagonist. Ideality in both films has the potential to operate on the consciousness of the audience effectively through their respective presentations of ideal space. Of course the efficacy of an ideal space is very much dependent upon the ability of the audience to enter into it and appreciate it as ideal. The narrator or story-teller facilitates this, of course, through constructing an entryway into the work. In the context of oral literature,

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This has important implications for the matter at hand: the texture and construction of cinema are particularly well suited to promoting the entry of the audience into the material landscape of the work of art, through the medium of the gaze—the point of view of the camera becomes that of the characters and of the audience with equal ease, thus reinforcing the identification of the audience with the characters on screen. What the characters perceive, we are able to perceive, but more importantly, we are still able to perceive what they cannot, and so become privileged spectators able to transcend the limitations of the mundane or the physical laws which bind our ‘normal’ viewpoints to the real. That is to say, we can perceive with the camera both the points of view of the characters but also themselves—we are simultaneously within and outside of the frame, and can move between both vantage points with tremendous facility, as the director chooses to present the work. Through the gaze, we are able to perceive the scene as it presents itself to the characters but also as they are incorporated into it, permitting a transcendence of our place ‘outside’ or separate from the space of the work. This is not possible in the same way in literature, music, painting, or drama, and it has implications for the suitability of film as a medium for the exposition of the ideal—it permits the ideal to become concrete to the imaginations of the audience, and therefore accessible. This is clear in for example Mononoke hime (Princess Mononoke, 1997), when San, the young female protagonist, takes Ashitaka (Matsuda Yōji), the young male protagonist, to the healing pond in the forest, the domain of the Shishigami, the Deer Deity. The camera presents us with a view of Ashitaka as he regains consciousness, but then shifts to present his point of view as his eyes take in the sparkling wonder and beauty of the scene—his fascination becomes our fascination; his situation within the purity and peaceful perfection of the forest’s greenery becomes our own situation; and his reverence for that place, for the kami who presides over it, becomes our own. In this way, Miyazaki’s camera becomes our guide into and our revelation of the ideal space his film presents as supportive of an idealistic human, personal identity—as

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Ashitaka finds himself healed in this forest pond, we too are given the possibility of redemptive, cleansing healing. The scenery is truly beautiful—subtle shades of green and gold, streaming light and crystal water, and a mood of perfect, peaceful serenity fill this frame, into which we have been brought by the gaze which shifts between that of the characters and that of the narrating camera. The camera angle is low, to capture Ashitaka’s perspective, but also to magnify the grandeur of the forest; the composition is deep and detailed, with layers of light providing a sense of timelessness and stability to the picture—a place of eternally golden, encompassing light, secure against the encroachments of the outside world. Here Ashitaka is safe; here, we too are safe to revel in the pure beauty of the natural world. In this space the camera reaffirms for Ashitaka the validity of his determination and his goal; and so too it affirms the validity of our potential to identify ourselves with Ashitaka. This is a key point, for Miyazaki’s films permit an easy identification of the audience with their protagonists, a highly sympathetic relationship between viewer and viewed which facilitates the audience’s own altruism. This is the goal of the thematic content of the films, after all, and is something which their visual style actualises. Miyazaki is not the only director whose work offers this easy sympathy between character and viewer, in order to foster the audience’s sense of altruism and optimism. An excellent example of the ways in which animation can address profound issues of both individual identity and community responsibility comes in Yuasa Masaaki’s 2004 production, Mind Game. Mind Game is a visually stunning film which tells a simple story in chronologically complex way. In its essence, the story follows a young manga-ka (comic book artist), Nishi (Imada Kōji), as he meets an old high school sweetheart, Myon (Maeda Sayaka) on her way home. The two have not seen each other in years. Taking the opportunity to renew their friendship, Myon invites Nishi to the restaurant-bar (izakaya) she operates with her sister, Yan (Takuma Seiko). While chatting over beer and yakitori, Myon’s new boyfriend (Yamaguchi Tomomitsu), Ryō, arrives, and Nishi’s spirits sink. Very soon after however two new arrivals come to the bar—two yakuza searching for the sisters’ father. The more aggressive of the yakuza, Atsu (Chujō Ken’ichi), threatens Myon. Nishi, although terrified, tries to protect her, but Atsu shoots him. Nishi, dead, meets God, whose physical appearance constantly changes—at times appearing young, old, human, animal, or simply absurd. God tells

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Nishi that his time is up, that He has created him for amusement, and that he should carry on down a long tunnel towards infinite darkness, never again to return. Nishi, appalled that there is neither afterlife nor rebirth, rejects God’s insistence that he simply fade away, and turns to flee. Reasoning that if in the direction of the tunnel lies extinction, the opposite direction must bring him back to life, Nishi races away, God (now in the guise of a leopard) racing beside him and shouting encouragement. Nishi succeeds in coming back to life, and thwarts the yakuza’s attempt to shoot him. Wresting away the pistol, Nishi and the sisters flee in the yakuza’s own car, Nishi now energised and invigorated from his ‘post-death’ experience, and filled with an unknown confidence and excitement. In evading the yakuza posse out to catch them, Nishi and the sisters swerve out of control while crossing a bridge—only to be swallowed by an enormous whale. Inside, Nishi tells the sisters they should not be afraid, that “fear takes the shape we’re willing to give it,” and that they should “light a candle in their hearts and make it gleam, and try to enjoy the moment.” The two think he has lost his mind. However, his obvious sincerity and enthusiasm for ‘enjoying the moment’ are infectious, and both Myon and Yan indeed begin to see their survival as a miracle. Inside the whale they meet an old man (Fujii Takashi), Jiisan, who has been trapped there for thirty years. He feeds them, entertains them, and encourages them when they discover there is no way out. Together, this ‘community’ support one another and accept each other’s processes of growth and self-discovery. Yan teaches herself experimental performance art; Nishi paints flights of fantasy as manga adventures; Myon rediscovers the thrill of competitive swimming she had forgotten since her school days; and Jiisan discovers self-forgiveness for the sins of his life as a drug dealer. The whale, however, is dying, and over time the group learn their days could very well be numbered. Together, they make a tremendous effort to escape—and succeed. Here, the film flashes both backward and forward in time to give pictures of the characters’ diverse though intertwined pasts, and the futures which their lives bring not only to them but to all of humankind. In showing the contributions—vital, necessary, unexpected—which each one can make to the world in general, the film stops, but does not ‘end’—indeed, the final ‘scene’ is composed of the words, “This Story has never Ended.” Mind Game is complex for its playfulness with narrative time, moving forward and backward in the lives of the characters, and at times ‘retelling’ the story almost from the beginning in order to highlight

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episodes or to give new information to permit a better understanding of why something has happened. Throughout a particular sentence recurs—on billboards or cellphone screens—to emphasise one of the film’s philosophical premises. This sentence, in English, is “Your life is the result of your own decisions,” and thus is an explicit comment on the film’s premise that life, one’s individual though socially situated existence, is something over which one has both control and responsibility. The film does not suggest that one can necessarily create one’s own fate—we can hardly argue that Nishi “chose” to be swallowed by a whale—but rather that the attitude with which one meets the events in one’s life is precisely responsible for creating the substance or quality of that life. Nishi, though his encounter with God, learned quite clearly that God felt interest in him only in so far as Nishi himself was willing to exert his own effort on his own behalf, rejecting, in fact angrily so, God’s authority over him. In this Nishi stands as a near textbook example of the Existentialist hero, who is capable of choosing his own path and actualising his selfimage. Nishi accepts that life can be tanoshii (fun) and in that acceptance, discovers that his attitude makes it so. In this he does not stand aloof from his fellows, however—Nishi evangelises his discovery, persuading and demonstrating to Yan and Myon precisely how to make life ‘fun’ through innocence and sincerity. In this Nishi demonstrates the reality of ideality—the way in which an ideal can be made real. The animation of Mind Game reinforces this reality of ideality in a very interesting way, as well. At moments of extreme emotional intensity—or even of surprise—the animation gives way, in a very controlled, very self-aware fashion—to live-action images. Photographs of the characters’ ‘true faces’ appear to ‘break through’ the animation at these moments, as if the characters are on the verge of becoming concrete, actual, ‘real’ people before our very eyes. This animation technique is thrilling—when it happens, the film simultaneously reasserts, revels in, and yet equally denies its status as animated and artificial. The film compels the viewer to accept it as real, as containing within it emotional, narratological, and even philosophical reality. In this way the film partakes of an acceptance of the ‘posthuman’ which we encountered in Chapter Six, but here does so to reinforce the emotional dimensions of life as that which gives life its most powerful and most necessary meaning. These ‘bursting’ images of the characters’ ‘real faces’ never occur when the characters are alone, but only when they are together or in conversation with others, and they only occur when the characters are

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realising something profound—and profoundly moving. The ‘real face’ in this animated world holds these characters together and provides a glimpse into what best can define them: their emotional commitments, made through conscious choice, to each other. That the individual exists in a community is apparent throughout the film, as is the fact that this community is created through the conscious participation of its individuals. This community gives an air of conscious protection to the film—that is, there is an awareness that these characters will care for one another, unobtrusively, selflessly, and always with each others’ best interests at heart. This is clear in one very short but very touching scene, which comes near the end of the film. Nishi, Jiisan, and the sisters are escaping from the dying whale. In incredible desperation, they are running, swimming, bounding up through cascading waves, trying to reach the mouth and thereby freedom. Nishi steps on floating pieces of board and scraps of wood, racing from foothold to foothold, till—in one heart-stopping frame—the film shows us in x-ray the bones of his ankle breaking. We now cut to a flashback of Nishi as a very young child pouring the milk his mother tells him to drink for good health down the drain . . . Fade out and in to the mother sighing and saying to herself, “Well, I’ll put it in his food, then,” as she pours milk into Nishi’s stew. Jump-cut back to Nishi’s ankle, still in x-ray, as the breaking bones smoothly and rapidly mend, ensuring Nishi’s escape from his predicament. This scene—so unexpected, so hilarious in the film—demonstrates what I mean by the air of conscious protection with pervades the sense of community here. The conscientious action of Nishi’s mother, years before this moment, bears credit for Nishi’s safety and successful escape from the whale. The director, Yuasa, thus demonstrates the responsibility of parents for their children and also the unanticipated ways in which a concerned home environment will provide benefits in a child’s future. Of course I am not being literal here to suggest that Yuasa expects every child to be swallowed by a whale—even though this is quite a striking metaphor for the types of overwhelming situations one may find oneself in as one grows into the person one tries to become. Rather, the postulation is that while the individual is embarked on the process of creating him- or herself, the material with which s/he works comes in very real ways from the surrounding community. In this, there is a clear social responsibility of each to safeguard all. Nishi accepts this responsibility—through it, Yan, Myon, and Jiisan in turn discover themselves, and create both their community and communal responsibility as well.

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In its awareness of communal responsibility of and for the individual, Mind Game has much in common with Miyazaki’s masterpiece, Sen to Chihiro no kamikakushi (Spirited Away, 2001), perhaps Studio Ghibli’s and Miyazaki’s greatest presentation of an ideal space. This film is also one of the most concentrated studies of the function and power of identity in Miyazaki’s opus, as well—and these two themes work intimately well here to reinforce an appreciation of each other within the audience. Identity and the quest for an understanding of its truth form the central theme of this film: identity of the self, identity of the other people around the protagonist, identity of the relationship between the self and the family, the self and society. This quest for identity takes place in an enchanted town, magical, more than mysterious, populated by deities and the creatures who serve them. The story here too is a simple one. Chihiro (Hiragi Rumi), the young, female protagonist, is moving with her family to a new town. Sulking, she sits in the back seat of the family car, clutching a bouquet of slowly wilting flowers. The father, trying to find a short cut, comes upon an odd archway that blocks the road. Leaving the car, the family—father (Naitō Takashi), mother (Sawaguchi Yasuko), and Chihiro—pass under the arch and across a field into a deserted shopping area, in search of dinner. Finding a restaurant with many trays of food laid out on the open counter, the father and mother eat, Chihiro refusing in an obvious state of nervousness. As night falls, shadows seem to populate the market area—mother and father are suddenly transformed into pigs. Unable to escape from this enchanted and disconcerting market, Chihiro becomes an attendant at the bath-house operated by Yūbaba (Natsuki Mari), a venal, rather mean-spirited sorceress. Chihiro works there for apparently quite a while, learning much about the spirit world and about herself, as well. Eventually she wins the freedom of her parents—finally returned to their human shape—and is released from her servitude in the bath-house, as well. The film ends with the family once more at their car, back on their way to their new home, Mother and Father unaware of what has happened, time apparently having returned them to the moment of their adventure’s commencement, but Chihiro now a much stronger, more self-assured young girl. Ideality here is a function of the setting of the story, of course, which brings us into the spirit world itself—a place reassuringly anthropomorphised yet destabilising in its presentation of Chihiro’s struggles to adapt to the demands placed upon her by her new responsibilities. The film inspires, as with other Ghibli productions, a sympathetic identification of the audience with the protagonist, and so Chihiro’s

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trials become ours, as well—her journey of self-discovery becomes our process of self-assurance. But the ideality of the setting is only a part of the overall creation of a total, ideal space. The most effective part of this creation here, too, comes from the beauty and rich detail of the film’s visual dimension, but as in other of Miyazaki’s films, this dimension is dedicated to providing the site in which the main character discovers, for herself, her own identity, and for her companions, their identity, as well. Identity is the central issue here, as highlighted by one of the most memorable though ambiguous characters, Kaonashi (“No Face”), the avaricious, enigmatic, black-clothed figure who wears a white mask in place of distinguishing features. Shimizu Masashi has described Kaonashi as a fitting symbol for contemporary people, in that “even though contemporary people all have faces, they have lost their original face. An existence which, having lost its original face, has lost its original language; an existence which, without knowing where it has come from, does not know where to go, and so has lost that original home to which it should return; is this not precisely the modern condition?” (Shimizu, 2001: 76). For Shimizu, this black-clothed, faceless figure does not hide within himself the traditional mu or ‘nothingness’ of, for example, Zen Buddhism. Rather, he contains, he is, the nothingness of nihilism (kyomu), from which comes a boundless rapacity, a bottomless greed for things with which to fill up the empty spaces of an identitiless existence (Shimizu, 2001: 76). And indeed this is precisely how Kaonashi behaves when, through a misinformed act of kindness, Chihiro gives him access to the (capitalistic, hedonistic) world of the bathhouse—he consumes all he can, food, things, people alike. Through this character Kaonashi, Miyazaki is able to make sharp critical comment on the consumerist nature of contemporary Japan—but it is a comment which is valid outside of Japan’s context, as well as outside of the limitations of a critique of consumerism. Kaonashi essentially tries to fill himself with things to overcome his fundamental ‘non-identity’. As Shimizu says, he has neither face nor even the ability to speak for himself (Shimizu, 2001: 75)—he has only the ability to crave. This craving is a compensation for lacking a solid, fundamental sense of self-identity, something which Chihiro herself is in danger of losing, but which through the process of the film she is able to construct. Kaonashi, through association with Chihiro, embarks on the process of constructing an identity as well, at Zeniba’s home at the film’s close, reinforcing the central role in Sen to Chihiro no kamikakushi of the realisation of identity’s importance.

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Identity emerges as the central issue in the film’s climax, too, when Chihiro realises and tells her companion, Kohaku (Irino Miyu), his true name, revealing him to be the spirit of the Kohaku River, who had rescued her from drowning years earlier. Even Chihiro’s own name had been lost to her throughout much of the film, for she had been given the new, shorter name ‘Sen’ by the owner of the bath-house. With the revelation of Sen’s and Kohaku’s true identities, however, Chihiro reaches the goal of her process of self-realisation; she is able to leave the bath-house, and is able also to restore her parents to their true forms as human beings, no longer animals indistinguishable from the others kept at Yūbaba’s bath-house. Through the creation of an ideal space—the world of the Shinto kami presented as a place of light and beauty—this character is able to discover her true identity and so redeem not only herself but the microcosmic community around her, her family, the metonymic representatives of the human. The issue of identity is a fluid one, as problematic as all definitions are, but perhaps the most important that any individual, group, or society can face. The site of identity is not only within the individual: the individual exists within a context both environmental, spiritual, and social, which serves to support and limit the concept of personal identity in intricate ways. Attitude is important here, but so too is representation, for it is empirical to say that we exist as much within the representations of the world around us as in the reality of that world itself—and from this we can see the importance of attitude within representation. Thus the type of presentation of a work of art becomes its primarily important issue. In this respect, the films of Studio Ghibli demonstrate a tremendous sensitivity to the issue of presentational attitude, a profound awareness of the function of attitude on a work’s reception and consequent influence upon its audience. The attitude which informs the cinematic products of this studio is one uniformly altruistic and positive; it is supportive of an optimistic view of community, and situates that community within a wider context of nature and the spirit world not in an effort to enforce a fundamentalist or narrowly cultural understanding of the human condition, but rather to encourage within the audience a visioning of an ideal human relationship between the individual and society, on the one hand, and society and the sustaining natural world, on the other. In this way, Miyazaki’s films function as invitations to return human understanding to an earlier time posited as more pure, more redemptive.

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In this way, Miyazaki’s films serve to offer a greater sense of ‘containment’, in the sense that Figlio and Richards use this term—containment of depressive, discouraging attitudes of the alienated self. “In [this] densely populated modern environment, the containing function of ritual is dispersed into an everyday life that seems far removed from symbolic associations” (Figlio and Richards, 2003: 411). Miyazaki’s films seek to reinstill in the audience an awareness of the power, presence, and purposes of ritual, the better to situate the audience within an imagination of the ideal, of the altruistic, and thus the better to encourage within the audience an appreciation of their own potentials to be ideal and altruistic themselves. Far from accepting an understanding of Japan as a ‘sub-empire’ of dystopic information capitalism, Miyazaki’s work highlights the universal necessity of an emotional understanding of the place of the human within the spiritual, and both within the natural. In this sense, his work functions through its presentation of ideal spaces as an inspirer of ideal identities—making him, for me, one of the most important artists in contemporary world cinema.

CONCLUSION

LOOKING FOR THE FACE IN THE FRAME There are fine ironies in exploring the theme of identity through the medium of film, an artform in which the performers one sees are not performing ‘themselves’ but are precisely acting out the parts of others, are precisely concealing their own identities behind a façade. This façade is calculated, of course, to conceal, but also, and also ironically, to reveal: to reveal an attitude, an idea, a ‘truth’ however subjective to the vision of the director, actor, producer, and scriptwriter. And of course it is ironic that these multiple people are all multiply necessary for the creation of the singular vision which is the cinema. This medium, like many of the creative arts that require production, collaboration, cooperation, is precisely a group product, the child of multiple parents. Like a child that must incorporate many influences into its developing persona, a film, too, often encounters conflicting pulls and forces seeking to manipulate its growth and its final appearance—its ‘identity’. The films I have discussed here have all in various ways successfully negotiated a path through their diverse influences to arrive, in various ways, at various conclusions, various propositions, about this word ‘identity’. The films I have discussed here have all in various ways projected their own attitudes towards the theme they all share, in varying degrees of critical consciousness. These attitudes, however, despite their disparities of expression, share an essence—a root and flower attached to wildly different stems and branches. This root, this flower, are the substantive subject of this book, and as I hope I have shown, they grow from the notion of crisis on a national scale across many different genres and in many different periods. Although I have concentrated on contemporary cinema, on films produced within roughly the last twenty years, the examples from pre- and immediate post-war films that I have included have provided a context in which to evaluate this growing sense of crisis in identity as it is presented through Japanese cinema. This crisis, as I have shown, is an influential part of many films in many genres—although I have limited my discussions to what really is only a small handful of examples, there are far more instances from

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which to draw convincing, supportive material for my arguments. The industry of Japanese cinema is prolific, inventive, and diverse—but of course this is not to say that every film will approach the theme I have discussed here. Japan produces quite its fair share of highly entertaining, highly commercial, and highly ‘low brow’ films. It also produces its fair share of nationalistic, traditionalistic, or even anachronistic films which in their own ways approach the issue of identity. Needless to say, my process of selecting films for discussion has both influenced and been influenced by my argument. And yet many diverse films that may radically disagree with the proposals of the films I have discussed and analysed will still agree with their fundamental premise: that identity as an issue is problematic, still, for Japan, and this because Japan is still coming to terms with its past, its present, and its future, nearly 150 years after first encountering a non-Asian approach to self, family, community, and nation. And of course several of the films I have discussed explicitly address this secondary issue of tradition and contemporary Japan’s relationship to its past. Films as different as Dogura magura (Matsumoto Toshio, 1988) and Drive (Sabu, 2002) both ‘read’ identity through the lens of a relationship to tradition, and both suggest that only through accepting the past can the present extricate itself from, on the one hand, the stress of insanity, and on the other, the stress of modernity. Thus the force of the past—the presence of the traditional within the modern—retains its charisma and its appeal in a Japan which continues to see itself as contemporary and perpetually poised on the verge of the future. And yet the past is not the only source of consternation, pressure, or crisis for a Japan that is also composed of individuals who must each singly and separately choose to create and re-create ‘Japan’ in everything they do. This at root is the real source of the crisis of identity which Japanese cinema reflects. As I have worked through the progressive chapters of this book, starting out from the contextualising first chapter with its discussion of the subject of identity, and moving through the related issues of gender, family, the self/other dichotomy as a source of horror, technology as both challenge to and support for individuated selfhood, travel as a process of individual discovery, and the creation of an ideal space for an ideal self, the primary focus has always remained the individual. This is because regardless of the degree to which any society is able to maintain communal focus, it must do so with the consent of its members—willing or not, conscious or otherwise. A society is its people, and those people are individual. However they may be

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socialised or taught, ultimately each one must choose to accept, reject, modify, or embody that socialisation. As I have shown, this process of accepting or rejecting the substance of socialisation in Japan is part of the ‘crisis’ of identity presented through cinema. This is why I have explored the various aspects of identity that I have. Each aspect is related to this process of individual socialisation—of individual ‘individuation’ and self-positioning within something encompassing. The family, the issue of gender, the technology one uses at work, at school, or at home, the neighbours one encounters, the strangers one must trust without any real basis on which to do so, the spaces in which one lives are all aspects directly influential to each individual, and are all formative of who that individual is. Of course there is a community around each person and a history—a personal, smaller, lived history and a social, larger, learned history—and these have found their places within this study as well. But it is within these areas of community and history that I have had to leave out much from this book. Issues of race and of class, for example, are equally important to a sense of identity, both personal and social, but these will have to wait for a separate work able to devote the attention which they deserve. So too will issues of sexuality and sexual politics, and of age and regionality—for in Japan the divide between the young and the old, the north and the south (which bring with them linguistic and other markers), are in many ways vast and unbridgeable. And of course while I have used the word ‘crisis’ consistently to characterise the attitude many of the films I have discussed have toward the issue of identity, even here it must be said that not every work conceives of identity as in a state of crisis. I have tried to balance what could otherwise be a relentless pessimism with examples of films that do see identity as potentially stable, positive, supported/supporting, and secure within a setting both urban and modern. My final chapter dealing with the ideality of Miyazaki’s vision aims at an alternative vision of identity formation as possible with innocence and self-reliance, informed by a security in both tradition and spirituality. This chapter should not be seen as undermining my argument that identity is in crisis in contemporary Japan—for offering a positive vision bespeaks the necessity of that vision, not its prevalence. That Miyazaki’s work is remarkably popular in Japan (and beyond) indicates the great need there is for a positive vision, for a sense of hope that however much in crisis modern Japan may be in terms of its

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place within its traditions, within its spirituality, and within the world, there is a resolution possible which can balance the conflicting pulls on its sense of selfhood. This resolution speaks to the nation, it’s true, but first and foremost to the individuals who make up the audience, young and old, male and female alike, who must, as individuals, come to their own resolutions and their own identities. Thus this study has moved through many different stages of identity—from the amnesiac, alienated, and destructive self cut off from its own past, in Dogura magura, to the self cut off from its neighbours and capable of ‘curing’ its dilemma only through hypnotic acts of violence in Kurosawa’s Kyua, to the gentle and determined self of Chihiro who has found her own identity and confidence in the land of the kami in Miyazaki’s Sen to Chihiro no kamikakushi. Each stage is a glimpse of development and a comment, allegorical and forceful, on a changing world. What the final stage will be is impossible to say, for Japan or for any of its people, and this chapter which itself seeks to be a final comment is also impossible. Japan continues to produce films which offer their own comments on identity, their own hopes for a resolution for the dilemma of the modern self that must make itself anew in its actions and choices and yet must carry with it that of its histories (private and national) that it will. The face that looks out from the frame of these films will always be different from the face that looks back, however familiar or recognisable—but this is inevitable and exciting. There will always be someone new to meet, especially when that ‘someone’ is oneself.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

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INDEX

Abe, Kōbō, 4–5, 11, 88, 139, 217 Adler, Judith, 147, 157, 217 Aikawa, Shō, 2 Akarui mirai, 16 Akutagawa, Ryūnosuke, 39 Anderson, Benedict, 145, 217 anime, 23 Anno, Hideaki, 1, 57, 74, 76 Arai, Andrea, 80, 120, 217 Aum Shinrikyō, 25, 111, 119, 219 Badmington, Neil, 161, 164, 172, 217 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 48, 144, 217 Baptist, Egerton, 174, 217 Bashō, 136, 138–139, 147, 150, 157, 219 Befu, Harumi, 42, 217 Bijita Q , 79, 88, 93, 99 Browning Tod, 109 Bubble Years, 22, 41, 50 Buddhism, 160–161, 173–176, 178, 183–184, 220 Burgess, Chris, 42, 217 Butler, Judith, 55, 65, 217 Cameron, Don, 47, 217 Carroll, Noël, 110–111, 121, 217 Dangan rannaa, 152, 154 Dansu, dansu, dansu, 139 Dare mo shiranai, 79, 88–99, 101, 103 Das Kabinett des Doktor Caligari, 31 Dasgupta, Romit, 86, 217 Davis, Darrell, 82–83, 217 Descartes, Rene, 38–39 Desser, David, 11, 21, 217 Disney, Walt, 181–182, 201, 217 Doane, Mary Ann, 54, 63–64, 70, 75, 217 Dogura magura, 23, 31, 35–38, 40–41, 46, 48–50 Doi, Takeo, 86, 217 Dopperugangaa, 10, 14, 17 Dracula, 109 Drive, 136, 151, 155, 157 Edogawa, Rampo, 39 Ehrat, Johannes, 10

Eisenstein, Sergei, 181–182, 217 enjo kōsai, 94 Feminism, 65, 219–220 Figlio, Karl, 195–196, 198, 212, 218 Flanagan, Mary, 68, 218 Frankenstein, 109, 117 Freeze Me, 58, 72–73 Fromm, Erich, 126, 218 Gardner, William, 20, 218 Genji monogatari, 37 Gergen, Kenneth, 171–172, 218 Gerow, Aaron, 89, 90–91, 218 Gion no shimai, 66, 150 Gojira, 109 Graburn, Nelson, 135, 137, 143–145, 147, 218 Grodin, Debra, 41, 218 Hako otoko, 139 Hakobune Sakura-maru, 139 Hakujaden, 187 Hand, Richard, 106 Hayles, N. Katherine, 162–163, 172, 174–175, 218 Heian Period, 85 Heyd, Thomas, 138–139, 146, 218 Hiroki, Ryuichi, 136, 143, 148 Hitsuji o meguru bōken, 139 Honda, Ishirō, 109 Hunter, Lynette, 189–190, 200, 218 Ichikawa, Jun, 136, 150 Iida Keisuke, 87 Iida Yumiko, 3, 119, 218 Ikeuchi, Hiromi, 87, 218 Ikiru, 83–84, 86 Iles, 218 Iles, Timothy, 85 Imamura Shōhei, 22 Inosensu, 160, 164, 171, 179–180, 182 Ishii, Takashi, 58, 72 Itami Jūzō, 31, 42 Itami, Jūzō, 23, 89 Iwai, Shunji, 76 Iwamoto, Kenji, 2, 218

222

index

Jameson, Frederic, 47–48, 218 Jisatsu saakuru, 107, 131–133 Johnson, Kenneth, 58–59, 218 Joyūrei, 125 Juon, 130 Kabuki, 62–63 Kairo, 107, 123–124, 130, 133 Kakushi toride no san-akunin, 140 Kanai Mieko, 88 Kaosu, 107, 125–126 Karatani, Kōjin, 29–30, 219 Kasulis, Thomas, 176–178, 219 Kawana, Sari, 31–32, 35, 219 Kawase, Naomi, 54–59, 61, 64, 67, 71, 77 Kawin, Bruce, 109–110, 119, 219 Kaze no tani no Naushikaa, 202–203 Kazoku geemu, 79, 88, 90, 94, 96, 99, 101 Kikujirō no natsu, 136, 148–149 Kinugasa, Teinosuke, 20, 30–31, 40, 218 Kitano Takeshi, 136, 148 Kōfuku no kane, 153 Kojiki, 36 Kōkaku kidōtai, 159–160, 164–166, 171, 182, 184 Kokoro, 88 Kokusaika, 30, 42 Kon Satoshi, 107, 112–113, 118, 133, 186, 191–192, 198 Koreeda Hirokazu, 79, 99, 101–103 Koshikei, 21 Kubrick, Stanley, 90 Kurahashi Yumiko, 88 Kuroi ie, 79, 88, 99, 101 Kurosawa Akira, 21, 81, 83, 139 Kurosawa, Kiyoshi, 2, 7, 10, 106–108, 121–123, 125, 130, 133, 219 Kurutta ippeiji, 20, 30–31, 40 Kyua, 107, 121 Lindlof, Thomas, 41, 218 Louie, Kam, 54 Love and Pop, 57, 74–75 Lyotard, Jean-Francois, 118, 219 Majo no takkyūbin, 193 Matsumoto, Toshio, 23, 31 McDonald, Keiko, 7, 80, 90–91, 96, 100, 219 Meiji Era, 18–20, 29–30, 39–40 Mes, Tom, 96, 98, 128, 219 Metoroporisu, 164, 167, 169–170

Metraux, Daniel, 120, 219 Miike, Takashi, 79, 88, 93, 96, 107, 127–128, 130, 218– 219 Mikkai, 139 Milburn, Colin, 163–164, 171, 219 Mind Game, 186, 205–207, 209 Mishima, Yukio, 88 Miyazaki, Hayao, 7, 160, 179, 181, 186–187, 189–190, 193–194, 196–201, 203–205, 209–212, 219 Mizoguchi, Kenji, 21, 66–67, 81, 84–86, 149–150, 218 Moetsukita chizu, 139 Mononoke hime, 202–204 Mori, Ōgai, 85 Morita, Yoshimitsu, 79, 88, 90, 94, 96, 99–101 Mulvey, Laura, 61–63, 67, 69–70, 76, 219 Murakami Haruki, 88, 139, 150 Murakami Ryû, 127 Murasaki, Shikibu, 37 Muromachi Period, 106 Nakano, Hiroyuki, 24, 68, 72 Nakashima Tetsuya, 4 Nakata, Hideo, 106–107, 118, 125–126, 130, 133, 220 Napier, Susan, 110, 190, 199, 202, 219 Natsume, Sōseki, 19, 88 Neon Genesis Evangelion, 74 Nihonjinron, 31, 42 Noh Theatre, 105–106 Noletti, Arthur, 82, 219 Nornes, A.M., 2 O’Leary, Brian, 142, 219 Ochiai, Emiko, 87, 219 Odishon, 107, 128 Ōdishon, 127, 128 Oe, Kenzaburo, 88 Offen, Karen, 65–67, 219 Ohnuki-Tierney, Emiko, 219 Ohnuki-Tierny, Emiko, 40 Okonogi, Keigo, 35, 219 Oku no hosomichi, 137, 150, 219 Onodera, Midi, 67, 219 Oshii, Mamoru, 23, 26, 159–160, 164, 169, 179, 184 Oshima Nagisa, 21–22 Osōshiki (The Funeral ), 31 Osōshiki, 23 Otoko wa tsurai yo, 136, 140, 142–143

index Ozu, Yasjirō, 21 Ozu, Yasujirō, 57, 81–82, 84, 140 Perfect Blue, 107, 112–115, 118–120, 191 Perry, Commodore Matthew, 18 Phillips, Alastair, 7 Posthumanism, 26, 160–166, 172–175, 182–184 Rashomon, 139 Richards, Barry, 195–196, 198, 212, 218 Richie, Donald, 2 Ringu, 106–107, 118, 125, 130, 220 Rintarō, 164, 167, 169 Rubin, Martin, 108, 220 Sabu, 136, 151–153 Saigyō, 157 Sano, Chie, 81–82, 220 Sanshō dayū, 84–86, 149–150 Sato, Kumiko, 39 Satō, Tadao, 2 Satō, Toshiki, 107, 115 Sen to Chihiro no kamikakushi, 193, 209 Serper, Zvika, 44, 220 Shall we Dansu, 4 Sharasojyu, 54, 56–57, 60–61, 67, 71, 77, 79 Shichinin no samurai, 140 Shikijitsu, 76–77 Shimizu, Masashi, 181, 210, 220 Shimizu, Takashi, 115, 130 Shimotsuma monogatari, 4 Shinto, 160–161, 169, 175–178, 183–184, 191, 194–195, 198, 211, 219–220 Shirow, Masamune, 164 Shōnen A, 25, 111, 119–120, 122 Shōwa Era, 20, 33 Sono, Shion, 131, 133 Sono, Sion, 107 Sora no daikaijū Radon, 109 Standish, Isolde, 2, 18–19, 62, 220 Stereo Future, 24, 68, 72, 77 Stringer, Julian, 7 Studio Ghibli, 27, 185, 187, 189, 196, 200–201, 209, 211 Suna no onna, 11 Suo Masayuki, 4 Suputonikku no koibito, 139 Suzuki, D.T., 174, 220 Suzuki, Kōji, 106

223

Taishō Era, 19, 23, 33, 39 Taiyō no hakaba, 21 Takakusu, Junjirō, 45–46, 79–80, 220 Takeda, Hiromi, 86–87, 220 Takemitsu, Toru, 11 Taketori monogatari, 136 Takeuchi, Yoshikazu, 107 Tampopo, 23, 44, 220 Tanaka, Eiji, 90, 93–94, 220 Tanin no kao, 10–12, 14–15, 17 Tanizaki, Jun’ichirō, 88 Terayama Shuji, 22 Teshigahara, Hiroshi, 10–11, 22 Testaferri, Ada, 77, 219–220 The Invisible Man, 109 The Matrix Trilogy, 165 Tobin, Joseph, 39–41, 220 Tokugawa Era, 18 Tokugawa, 19, 29 Tokyo Godfathers, 191–192, 194, 198 Tokyo monogatari, 82, 84, 140 Tomodachi, 139 Tonari no Totoro, 181, 193–195, 197, 199, 201 Tony Takitani, 136, 150–151, 155, 157 Tōpazu, 128 Tsurumi, Kazuko, 30, 220 Turner, Graeme, 7 Ugestsu monogatari, 150 Vibrator, 136, 143–144, 147–148 Wachowski Brothers, 165 Wataboizu, 4 Watanabe, Shouichi, 84 Whale, James, 109 White, Eric, 126 White, Mary Isaacs, 80, 220 Wiene, Robert, 31 Yabushita, Taiji, 187 Yaguchi Shinobu, 4 Yamada, Yōji, 136, 140 Yamaguchi, Masao, 144–145 Yamamoto, Yukitaka, 56, 176, 220 Yoda, Tomiko, 220 Yōjimbō, 140, 143 Yuasa, Masaaki, 186, 205 Yume nara samete, 107, 115, 118 Yumeno, Kyūsaku, 31–32, 35–36, 38 Zipes, Jack, 200–201, 204, 220

BRILL’S JAPANESE STUDIES LIBRARY ISSN 0925-6512 1. Plutschow, H.E., Chaos and Cosmos. Ritual in Early and Medieval Japanese Literature. 1990. ISBN 90 04 08628 5 2. Leims, Th.F. Die Entstehung des Kabuki. Transkulturation Europa-Japan im 16. und 17. Jahrhundert. 1990. ISBN 90 04 08988 8 3. Seeley, Chr. A History of Writing in Japan. 1991. ISBN 90 04 09081 9 4. Vovin, A. A Reconstruction of Proto-Ainu. 1993. ISBN 90 04 09905 0 5. Yoda, Y. The Foundations of Japan’s Modernization. A Comparison with China’s Path Towards Modernization. Transl. by K.W. Radtke. 1996. ISBN 90 04 09999 9 6. Hardacre, H. and A.L. Kern (eds.) New Directions in the Study of Meiji Japan. 1997. ISBN 90 04 10735 5 7. Tucker, J.A. Ito Jinsai’s Gomo- Jigi and the Philosophical Definition of Early Modern Japan. 1998. ISBN 90 04 10992 7 8. Hardacre, H. (ed.) The Postwar Development of Japanese Studies in the United States. 1998. ISBN 90 04 10981 1 9. Hanashiro, R.S. Thomas William Kinder and the Japanese Imperial Mint, 18681875. 1999. ISBN 90 04 11345 2 10. Teitler, G. and K.W. Radtke (eds.) A Dutch Spy in China. Reports on the First Phase of the Sino-Japanese War (1937 – 1939). 1999. ISBN 90 04 11487 4 11. Mortimer, M. Meeting the Sensei. The Role of the Master in Shirakaba Writers. 2000. ISBN 90 04 11655 9 12. Scholz-Cionca, S. and S.L. Leiter (eds.) Japanese Theatre and the International Stage. 2000. ISBN 90 04 12011 4 13. Saltzman-Li, K. Creating Kabuki Plays. Context for Kezairoku, “Valuable Notes on Playwriting”. 2003. ISBN 90 04 12115 3 14. Ozaki, M. Individuum, Society, Humankind. The Triadic Logic of Species According to Hajime Tanabe. 2001. ISBN 90 04 12118 8 15. Bentley, J.R. A Descriptive Grammar of Early Old Japanese Prose. 2001. ISBN 90 04 12308 3 16. Higashibaba, I. Christianity in Early Modern Japan. Kirishitan Belief and Practice. 2001. ISBN 90 04 12290 7 17. Schmidt, P. Capital Punishment in Japan. 2001. ISBN 90 04 12421 7 18. Foljanty-Jost, G. Juvenile Delinquency in Japan. Reconsidering the “Crisis”. 2003. ISBN 90 04 13253 8 19. Tomida, H. Hiratsuka RaichÙ and Early Japanese Feminism. 2004. ISBN 90 04 13298 8 20. Ueda, M. Dew on the Grass. The Life and Poetry of Kobayashi Issa. 2004. ISBN 90 04 13723 8 21. Beckwith, C.I. Koguryo: The Language of Japan’s Continental Relatives. 2004. ISBN 90 04 13949 4

22. Parker, H.S.E. Progressive Traditions. An Illustrated Study of Plot Repetition in Traditional Japanese Theatre. 2005. ISBN 90 04 14534 6 23. Eckersall, P. Theorizing the Angura Space. Avant-garde Performance and Politics in Japan, 1960-2000. 2006. ISBN-10 90 04 15199 0, ISBN-13 978 90 04 15199 4 24. Gramlich-Oka, B. Thinking Like a Man. Tadano Makuzu (1763-1825). 2006. ISBN-10 90 04 15208 3, ISBN-13 978 90 04 15208 3 25. Bentley, J.R. The Authenticity of Sendai Kuji Hongi. A New Examination of Texts, with a Translation and Commentary. 2006. ISBN-10 90 04 15225 3, ISBN-13 978 90 04 15225 0 26. Orbaugh, S. Japanese Fiction of the Allied Occupation. Vision, Embodiment, Identity. 2007. ISBN-10 90 04 15546 5, ISBN-13 978 90 04 15546 6 27. Crowley, C.A. Haikai Poet Yosa Buson and the BashÙ Revival. 2007. ISBN-10 90 04 15709 3, ISBN-13 978 90 04 15709 5 28. Mase-Hasegawa, E. Christ in Japanese Culture. Theological Themes in Shusaku Endo’s Literary Works. 2008. ISBN 978 90 04 16596 0 29. Van Goethem, E. Nagaoka. Japan’s Forgotten Capital. 2008. ISBN 978 90 04 16600 4 30. Iles, T. The Crisis of Identity in Contemporary Japanese Film. Personal, Cultural, National. 2008. ISBN 978 90 04 17138 1