A Tale of Two Horror Movies

Much like (from what I hear) the English speaking world, Japan is having a bit of a horror “moment.” In print and on the screen, what has always been a pretty solid side-branch of the entertainment mix has begun to blossom into something bigger and more mainstream. We can point to new authors like Uketsu or Nashi, and older ones bringing out new work like Koji Suzuki’s new novel Ubiquitous, as signifiers in the publishing world. On screens, though, I think the most interesting examples are to be found in shorts, like the YouTube creepfest My house walk-through or (hands down my favorite horror shorts) Fake Documentary Q.

I am not a scholar of the cinema or Japanese horror or anything, but I do keep my eyes open, and I stumbled on a collection of horror shorts on Amazon that were apparently all entrants in a biennial competition sponsored by Kadokawa, the Japan Horror Film Competition. I watched, and there were some real bangers in there, including one called みなに幸あれ/Best Wishes to All. Lo and behold, I later saw a full feature length version with the same name—Ah! I realized. The winner of that competition got their short made into a full-length feature film!

And it was well worth doing. Best Wishes to All—which apparently now has an English release—was a creepy, surreal, original, and ambitious movie. Excellent acting, excellent screenplay, the whole shebang. It also presented an approach to horror that stood outside the usual ghosts and curses of “J-horror” with the kind of social edge that makes good horror great.

The story, essentially, is about a young nurse in Tokyo going home to visit her grandparents in the countryside and discovering a dark secret–one that redefines her entire understanding of life and the world. It also touches on how Japan’s young people are almost seen as fodder for older generations’ expanding lifespans, and the sacrifices of some that society demands for happiness for others. And also, it has old people acting like pigs. Pretty wild.

And when I saw that the second contest collection was out, *and* that the winner movie was also coming, I was hopeful indeed! Shorts were clearly fertile ground for original horror, and Kadokawa et al. were throwing money at it, so I was eager for more. The winner of that round, and the film that came from it, was ミッシング・チャイルド・ヴィデオテープ/Missing Child Videotape.

I think I’m not alone in the eagerness I felt for this one. It seemed to combine some of the same ambition and originality that BWtA had with beloved tropes of cursed videos, haunted mountainsides, and family trauma. The short was a quiet, brooding story with a hefty dose of chilling menace.

The feature film, though… Well, that was something else. I should say here that, while I’m not planning to out-and-out spoil the story, I will be looking at elements that might end up ruining the movie for you. So, if you are hoping to watch Missing Child Videotape—or Best Wishes to All, for that matter—save this to read for later. And watch the latter IMMEDIATELY.

So. Just like the short, Missing Child Videotape is about two young friends, Keita (Kyosuke in the shot) and Tsukasa (Hiromu in the short). Keita gets a package from home which includes a VCR tape. It is one he made as a child, when out playing with his younger brother. The two boys stumble on some vaguely industrial looking abandoned building and play hide-and-seek. The younger brother goes to hide, despite his fear, and is never seen again. The child is, well, missing.

Tsukasa is apparently a “spiritual sensitive” and can see ghosts. He reacts strongly to the tape… Oh! It must be cursed.

Soon after, the film truly diverges from the short. They both deal with the emotional trauma of a lost child and brother, but while the short is all about suggestion and menace and dread, the film veers toward folk horror and weird mountain towns and a reporter running from ghosts… With a dose of time loops and places that don’t exist… Well. Lots of stuff. It never goes wacky with it. It always maintains its slow, heavy, almost emotionless tone. But honestly, from a purely plot-based perspective, it shares more with Shiraishi’s Senritsu Kaiki File Kowasugi! series than with its spiritual companion, Best Wishes to All.

Let’s just say, I have problems with the movie version of MCV. It tries to be too many things and fails at most of them. It takes the “unexplained” much too far, such that it becomes almost nonsensical. Individual elements are fascinating and worth exploring, but they are left behind to fade into background noise, and rather than leaving the fear of the unknown, they left me with the dissatisfaction of the seemingly unconnected. I mean, there was this whole story about how the mountain was a garbage heap for kami that basically went unmentioned for the rest of the movie?! Come on! And the reporter was running from some kind of ghost. Why? Who is she, actually? What is she muttering under her breath when she’s scared? Why is she essentially set dressing most of the time?

I can only assume that the demands of turning a twenty-minute short into a 100-minute feature put too much pressure on the story, and the production team struggled to find effective filler. So, the end result feels like they just started throwing things at it to see what stuck.

Meanwhile, Best Wishes to All seems to avoid that pitfall by taking some of the surreality of the short and leaning into it. Even as it sometimes borders on the absurd, it’s an absurdity that remains rooted in the qualities that made the short work so well, creating a kind of incomprehensible view of reality that is as confounding for the protagonist as for the audience. In expanding the short, the filmmakers preserved its essential nature, just writ large.

Anyway, what does all this signify? I think what I’m getting at is, the value of the horror short today is clearly difficult to translate to long form media, but not impossibly so. I just hope that the pressures of making bigger budget, larger-scale works don’t harm get in the way of the vibrance of the smaller scale scene.

I’m in the library

Figuratively as well as literally.

A tabletop display of The Devil's Flute Murders and the U. S. And U. K. Versions of Strange Pictures, along with a photocopy of a newspaper article about the translation of Strange Pictures. — My books on display.

When I got a whole bunch of comp copies of both editions of Strange Pictures, for more than I knew what to do with, the first place I went was to the library to see if I could donate some to put on their shelves.

Hikari Public Library is small and serves a relatively limited Japanese community, so there isn’t a lot of demand for English materials, but the staff not only accepted the books, they celebrated them. They were openly excited to get copies after seeing the local newspaper article about my Uketsu translations. I’m not sure I can explain how good that feels.

I’m one of those people for whom libraries are borderline sacred. I have been a ravenous reader since I was in first grade, and there were no bookstores in my small town. So, I practically lived in the library. The librarian, Mrs. Beard—who was almost laughably stereotypical librarian: little old lady in glasses on a chain—knew me by name and never tried too restrain my reading by age or “difficulty.” She just helped me find books to love.

That library was utterly foundational to who I am. It’s where I discovered Stephen King. Where I explored art and history and parts of the world that I never dreamed that I might actually one day get to see. It was where I started to see stories as more than just words on a page, but a way to live other people’s lives for a time.

I really could go on and on. The smell of all those old books, the quiet and cool spaces where you can just read and read as long as you want… You know, I’m sure, for yourself.

And now I’m right there on the shelves at the library. How lucky I am too live this life.

Book Review – 6 by Nashi

The cover of the book 6 by Nashi. It is in Japanese, and features a white base with many figures like mannequins falling through space.
In the background you can just glimpse the pink face of the video game character Kirby. — Kirby likes this book.

As I become more and more a “literary” translator, I find myself beginning to approach reading as a professional duty, even as I remain steadfastly fixated on choosing books that I think will actually be interesting. This book, a collection of horror stories by a single author, was solidly on both sides of that equation. Japan is in the middle of a bit of a horror story boom, due in no small part to Uketsu’s success, and given my own connection to Uketsu now, I’m kind of in a horror boom, too. With publishers on both sides of the Pacific now plumbing the genre for the Next Big Thing, I am trying to keep up myself to see if I can spot something interesting.

Nashi is an author often associated with Uketsu in the media, it seems, along with Sesuji. One reason might be that they all use pseudonyms with seemingly random meanings. Nashi uses the Japanese character for “pear,” 梨, although there is a stated nod to another character with the same pronunciation, 無し, which means “nothing.” Which would be suitably “horror-esque” on its own, but having read 6, I wonder if there isn’t some other meaning.

This anthology is, in its own way, utterly unique while also being part of a tradition of literature that goes back basically as far as literate goes. In short, it is religious allegory as entertainment fiction. Yes, this thin tome of horror stories follows in the footsteps of Milton and, um, C. S. Lewis? Anyway.

Let’s pull back a minute. 6 comprises six stories, of course. They appear, at first, unconnected, but much like other recent horror hits, there are threads that join them that only become clear as you read further. The story names are all in the Roman alphabet, and contain hints to both their individual content and to the larger meaning of the book. The stories are ROOFy, FIVE by five, FOURierists, THREE times three, TWOnk, and ONE [sic, sic, sic after sic]. Now, I would say the pattern is clear except for ROOFy, which I can’t for the life of me connect to “six.” Even in Japanese, it would be roku or ro. But hey, the world is a flexible place.

ROOFy is a nightmare fairy tale, a story in the first person about a young girl who visits a little amusement park on the rooftop of a department store. She wishes she could play there forever without all the other people in the way and, when she comes out of the bathroom, it seems her wish has come true. Her parents are gone, as are all the other children. She has the park to herself… But then it begins to change. It is filled with decay and corruption, and… Well, no spoilers.

FIVE by five presents the story of a magazine writer who disappears and leaves behind stories with odd changes, and the editor who is tracking the reporter’s steps to see what might have happened to him. His investigation takes him to a mountain town with odd stone towers bearing metal antennae along the road, and glimpses of an eerie truth.

As the other stories progress, we find more connections to this disappeared writer and the impact on the editor, but what comes even more clear is something… Other. Because these aren’t just horror stories skirting around the pseudo-documentary style that has grown so common now. They are clear, open Buddhist allegory. The six stories address the Six Realms of Samsara: the realm of gods, the realm of demigods (or asura), the realm of humans, the realm of animals, the realm of hungry ghosts, and the realm of hell. It is a trip through the realms, woven with a story about an impossible death (really. Not, like, in the mystery sense), and a break in the order of the universe. The stories themselves openly mention Samsara and the six realms, so the allegory is pretty on the nose, but for someone who grew up outside the Buddhist tradition, it’s fascinatingly unfamiliar ground.

It is, in other words, heavy, heady stuff. It is also properly “horror” in the traditional sense, but the way this book haunts me is not in the scary stuff. No, it’s the way it presents an almost nihilistic (nihil meaning, of course, “nothing”, which is also one way of understanding liberation from worldly desires in Buddhism, or becoming “Nothing”—See?) view of the Buddhist cosmology. Because the core of Buddhist belief is freedom from the wheel of samsara, of escape from eternal rebirth in a cycle of suffering, but this story offers a counterpoint: a way of escape that breaks the wheel itself, upsetting the order and questioning the very possibility of liberation.

It deserves reading, in my opinion, and is worth it for both horror seekers and those interested in meatier, chewier problems like “What does living even mean if death is not just inevitable, it is inevitable an infinite number of times?”

I’m feeling like this isn’t so much a review as me just meandering about the book. But I am glad I read it, and I will read it again, and it was pretty creepy and chilling in parts, so I think it’s a recommendation for those who like reading that sort of thing. Maybe I’ll even try to see if someone wants to pay for it to be translated?

Tsurezure #9 – Crested Kingfisher

The next in my newspaper column series is about my finally successful search for a crested kingfisher, or ヤマセミ in Japanese. It’s an elusive bird that seems to be only active in the early morning, so it took a while to get a picture. But I did, and I was glad to do it. They’re lovely birds, big and smooth.

Here are some pictures.

やっと、ヤマセミ

以前、瀬戸内タイムスさんの記事で触れましたが僕は野鳥観察・撮影が好きです。日常な生活のついでに見たり撮ったりがほとんどです。鳥を探すためにわざわざ旅に出たりすることは滅多にないことですがヤマセミはちょっと違います。

以前、周防の森ロッジさんで野鳥観察イベントに参加しました。その周辺には「ヤマセミ」と言う珍しい鳥がいると聞いて興味が沸きました。

僕はよく島田川の河口辺りで散歩をします。その時一番楽しいのはカワセミがいる事です。カワセミが小さくあまり珍しくない鳥ですが非常に綺麗で面白いんです。色が鮮やかな青緑色と赤色で動きも早く、小さな魚を捕るときの目つきがかわいいです。すっかり「カワセミファン」になったのでヤマセミがカワセミの仲間なら是非見たいと思いました。

ですが見つけるのは思った以上に大変でした。周防の森ロッジさんの近く旭橋近くに１・２羽がいると聞きましたが、この近年では工事の為にずっと隠れているらしいです。それで出てくる時間帯が限られているし警戒心が強いので、すぐ逃げるらしいです。

それでも、ちょっと時間が出来た時に行ってみました。６か月の間に５回程いって朝・昼・夕方もチャレンジしました。そうすると朝方はよくほかの鳥ファンもいて「鳥情報」を聞くこともできてそれはそれで楽しかったです。でもなかなか目的は得られなかったです。

ところがつい先日、できました。見ました。１週間前は昼頃いってみたら近くの草刈り作業している地元の方がとても優しく話してくれました。「作業で撮影の邪魔をしてごめんね」と言って下さり（笑）「ヤマセミなら朝６時半頃じゃないとダメだよ」と教えてくれました。実はご本人がその日も見たそうです。

そこで確信しました。週末なら５時半に起きて、できるだけ早く旭橋で待機しようと。

金曜日の夜はカメラを準備して土曜日の朝、妻を起こさないようにそっとそっと起き上がりました。簡単な支度をして出発。６時過ぎに到着して椅子とカメラをセット。そして、待つ。早朝の澄んだ空気がおいしかったです。いろんな鳥の声を聴きながら、涼しい朝を満喫しました。

でも、待つ。

１時間も待ったところで「ま、今日もだめかな．．．」と思った時に何かがきた。

白っぽい、まあまあ大き目と体の鳥が水面近くに飛んできました。動きがカワセミに似たように見えましたが、もっと大きかったです。

いまだ！とおもって連写でカメラを向けました。

確かにヤマセミでした。下流方面からきて一瞬旭橋の上にとまって、それでまた下流方面に去っていきました。竹林で止まったら特徴の冠羽を見せました。

遠くて比較的に小さい鳥なので持っているレンズがちょっと足りませんでしたが８０連写の中で２・３枚も綺麗に撮れました。

本当に良かったです。オマケに帰りでいつもの島田川の河口周辺に寄り、カワセミのいい写真も撮れました。

やっと、ヤマセミを見られて本当に良かったです。野鳥観察って楽しいよ！

A few recent pictures

I took a few pictures that I like recently, so here you go.

A couple of the crops are unconventional, but these aren’t for printing, so who cares?