Channels, Fall 2016

Channels • 2016 • Volume 1 • Number 1 Page 143 playful attitude toward the real than Western writers who come from a tradition of Judeo- Christian absolutes…It is possible to suggest that the Japanese have a longer tradition of this sort of subversion of absolutes” (226). By contrast, instances like Ayano’s yakuza ghost and Sachiko’s gigantic double are easy to associate with the realm of the fantastic but perhaps less easy to associate with the monstrous. Both fall in the category of monsters of the personal imagination, so their existence and behavior in the film take shape through individual perception. This alone gives them a frightening inconsistency, because within the film, they appear and disappear without warning. When the narrator introduces Sachiko, the camera observes the schoolyard from Sachiko’s point of view and necessarily reveals her giant doppelgänger. The giant Sachiko remains until the film moves to a different point of view and then vanishes. Akira observes the real Sachiko from his window but does not see the giant apparition. This exclusivity of her perception suggests that even the omniscient narrator is telling the story the way Sachiko sees it. Reminiscing about his own experience with supernatural apparitions, Ayano shifts between views of his ghost as “really freaky” and as an ambivalent presence that he has “sort of gotten used to” ( The Taste of Tea ). However, it is Ayano’s own description that renders the ghost as a large, muscular, blood-soaked, and tattooed underworld figure, and these details associate his apparition with the monstrous. Monsters in artistic pursuit, like Yoshiko’s giant, animated ogre-baby and the garish superhero duo in the cosplayers’ fan art, are creations of the imagination as well, but unlike Sachiko’s double, they do not exist solely in the realm of individual perception. Rather, they blur the line between individual perception and social communication, because they exist to be shared with the viewer. As Yoshiko’s demo reel begins to play, one of the viewers exclaims, “This is Yoshiko’s world, full on!” and his excitement sparks a murmur of anticipation throughout the room ( The Taste of Tea ). The comment matters because it acknowledges the uniqueness of the artist’s vision while demonstrating that it has value as a piece of communication. Because of the artist’s capacity to build a shared notion of the fantastic, Ishii’s use of monsters as a focus of artistic creativity may be the most significant to his commentary on the monstrous in Japanese society. The last category, the overall visual metaphor of the film itself, is by far the most obvious and jarring. It is the element of the film that is primarily responsible for the impression of inscrutable weirdness. In the first scene, Hajime’s disappointment at the sudden departure of a girl he loved but never talked to takes the visible form of a miniature commuter train swelling and then bursting out of his forehead, carrying a tiny, waving figure of the girl off into the sky. Similarly, Ishii chooses to illustrate the disconnectedness of Ayano and his sound crew or the lack of meaning in the song being recorded by replacing the recording studio with a scene of mountains and sky in which both the sound crew and the performers float aimlessly, apparently in thin air. At the very end of the film, Sachiko’s successful backflip triggers the expansion of a magical sunflower that quickly swallows her, the abandoned lot, Japan, and finally the entire world. Of the three, two have negative or threatening connotations: the apparition of the train creates a grotesque if temporary hole in Hajime’s head, and the apparition of the mountains symbolizes Ayano’s belief that Ikki and his Birthday Song are actively persecuting him. This type of encounter with the