Channels, Fall 2016

Page 142 Parson • Drawing Is Where the Joy Is cultural spirituality, one that is based on his own revision of the Japanese folk-religious tradition” (237). Most of Miyazaki’s work provides an optimistic sense of resolution for its monstrous elements, focusing on the moral solutions discovered by his characters. For other artists, however, the monstrous fantastic necessarily prevents satisfactory resolution of tension. Hyao Murakami illustrates this view through his fragmentary, unsettling juxtaposition of the fantastic with the mundane. According to Fuminobu Murakami, “the writer’s stories are full of the hero’s favorite things: foods, places, and consumer goods which are easily consumed and just as easily forgotten” (128). In the malaise, it becomes impossible to distinguish between the “real” world of the story and the alternate realities Hyao Murakami often places parallel to the “real” storyline. By switching the narrative between the uncompromising underworld of a sci-fi Tokyo and a tiny, magical outpost in Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World , Murakami creates an unsettling dichotomy in which elements of the same story cannot understand or communicate to each other. In Fuminobu Murakami’s words, Hyao Murakami’s multiple realities “shatter ‘syntax’ in advance, and not only the syntax with which we construct sentences but also the less apparent syntax which causes words and things…to ‘hold together’” (137). Murakami’s use of the fantastic, then, demonstrates the inevitable dissolution of society. The Monstrous in The Taste of Tea Like Miyazaki, Murakami, and other postmodern writers, Ishii obscures divisions between the past and the present, the real and the fantastic and confronts his characters with elements of the fantastic at every level of life. Unlike Murakami or Miyazaki, Ishii uses individual, often intensely personal encounters with the monstrous fantastic to highlight the contemporary challenge of coping with cultural unease in everyday life. In The Taste of Tea , he depicts the monstrous fantastic at four levels of the movie’s structure: his characters’ literal reality, their individual perceptions and imaginations of the real, their fictional artistic pursuits, and the overarching visual metaphor of the film itself. At the level of literal reality, monstrous people and things are most often marked by their tendency to destroy or disconnect things that come into contact with them. The yakuza or gangsters, who disrupt the serenity of life in the film with noisy and ostentatious motorcycle displays and who ultimately hunt down and attempt to murder one of their own companions, are the most complete expression of the monstrous in reality (indeed, Ishii’s earlier movie Shark Skin Man and Peach Hip Girl deals exclusively with yakuza as an expression of the monstrous in contemporary Japanese society). The brutality of Ikki’s assistant when he calls her husband to expose her adultery, the capacity of the commuter train to disconnect and alienate the people inside it, and even the macabre interest generated by the jungle- girl-turned-comedian that Hajime happens across on TV also demonstrate elements of the monstrous in the context of literal reality. In the case of such real-life monsters—those that represent a frightening perversion of the natural—it can be difficult to identify a component of the supernatural. Nevertheless, Ishii associates them with the supernatural through his use of exaggerated filming techniques, which create a dreamlike, surreal visual effect that bridges the gap between pure realism and magical realism. Napier suggests that an obscure division between the strictly literal and strictly fantastic is itself a uniquely Japanese trait, arguing that “perhaps Japanese writers are more comfortable with this