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Apocalypse and Transcendence
Akin to the deluge of post-war daikaiju eiga (giant monster films) in their depiction of contemporary civilisation under assault or in ruins, Sono Shion's Suicide Circle (Jisatsu saakuru, 20021), Higuchinsky's Uzumaki (1997), and Kurosawa Kiyoshi's Pulse Kairo, 1997) engage a complex history of annihilation and reconstruction. At the same time, these ominous yet captivating cinematic visions contribute, both nationally and internationally, to a recurrent correlation of the Japanese social body with, in Joshua La Bare' s words, 'not only apocalypse, but the fact of its transcendence: the finite and, through it, the infinite' (La Bare 2000: 43). Consequently, the events that bring about the 'end of the world as we know it' can be secular (ushered in largely through biological or technological means), or religious (informed by any, or a combination, of the multiple faiths practiced in Japan), or both. Following a brief survey of the representation of catastrophic imagery in post-war Japanese horror film, this chapter examines the genre's continued application of apocalyptic conceits as a variable response to a transforming Japanese political and cultural landscape at the dawn of a new millennium.
In Suicide Circle, for example, Sono Shion offers viewers a grisly and, at times, darkly humorous depiction of a contemporary Japan plagued by a series of spectacular yet baffling mass suicides. Punctuated by clips of music videos by a pre-pubescent pop group called Desert, an all-girl bubblegum 'band' partially responsible for the epidemic of selfslaughter, Suicide Circle presents a biting critique of a culture informed by rampant consumerism, social alienation ironically enhanced by the ubiquity of communications technologies, and gender politics complicated by the simultaneously pervasive and perpetually transitory culture of 'cuteness', or kawaisa.2 Thus, like the film's schizophrenic colusión of cinematic tropes and popular culture iconography, Suicide Circle's underlying social commentary far exceeds the parameters of a reductionist logic founded upon simplistic notions of one-to-one causality. Rather, Sono understands Japanese social and national identity as imperilled by a plethora of cultural logics that, 'like leaves which soon... grow into a thick forest of darkness' (Crawford 2003: 307), saturate the country's mass culture (minshu bunko). As Sono suggests in a recent interview, an ultimately isolating and fundamentally ahistorical conceptualisation of one's national culture is, in itself, a...