Channels, Fall 2016

Page 152 Parson • Drawing Is Where the Joy Is the building and meets Ikki’s unsympathetic annoyance. By all appearances then, Ikki has absorbed, rather than defied, the elements of consumer culture that Ishii associates with the monstrous. However, Ikki also encounters moments of tension between his own judgement and the accepted values of culture. It would be difficult to tell whether his desire for control or his sense of responsibility leads him to reveal his assistant’s affair to her husband, but, in this case, his vision of the appropriate or right cuts directly across the grain of contemporary cultural tolerance. When the assistant asks Ikki not to call her house on her day off “like last time,” because her husband believes she will be “working here with you all night,” her request might fool a child, but she is clearly not attempting to hide the truth from her adult employer. She clearly trusts in a cultural taboo against noticing or revealing adultery with which Ikki chooses not to comply. This single decision to deviate from his society’s normal mindset abruptly brings Ikki into contact with the most tangible category of the monstrous fantastic in the film, that of modern reality grown surreal and sinister through Ishii’s direction. While the assistant’s desire for immediate, physical revenge is understandable in completely naturalistic terms, her unexpected strength and surprising brutality toward Ikki, as well as her abrupt return to the studio before she could possibly have discovered his conversation with her husband, make her into a fantastic figure. Despite her fragile build, unstable stance, and the hindrance of a pencil skirt and high heels, she has the strength to lift Ikki from his seat and the agility and force to beat him to the ground repeatedly with sharp, aerial kicks. Her revenge is also surprisingly bloodthirsty. She continues to beat Ikki for nearly a minute on screen, and the film cuts the scene short before she has actually finished inflicting pain on the helpless and whimpering artist. The sudden transformation of the assistant from a fashionably delicate woman to a surreal, vengeful figure draws its precedent from some of the most ancient traditional Japanese monsters, the yōkai . Michael Dylan Foster explains that in its most inclusive definitions, “yōkai” can be a general term for anything inexplicable in folklore studies, including anything that would otherwise be defined as a “monster, spirit, goblin, demon, phantom, specter [sic], fantastic being, lower-order deity, or unexplainable occurrence” (19). Historically, however, the term yōkai was most closely associated with the edo-period category of bakemono , which Foster translates as “’changing thing’ or ‘thing that changes,’” and which consists primarily of changelings and shape-shifters. According to Foster, the stereotype of the changeling woman begins to appear in Buddhist texts around 1222 A.D and continues to develop in Edo-period (1603-1868) stories like the fourteenth-century manuscript of The Tale of Heike and in later Noh plays. In such stories, a woman’s unrestrained anger or jealousy transforms her into a monster. “Her internal state of mind, one of anger and resentment, causes her body to change—often through purposeful and sustained effort—into the body of a demon” (123-124). The theme appears in different forms, but it retains a surprising amount of consistency. In The Tale of Genji , the neglected female antagonist becomes an incorporeal demon in her sleep; in an eleventh-century Buddhist scroll, the jealous lover’s body permanently shrivels and bends as she resolves to murder a man who scorned her; and in Ishii’s contemporary film, a frail, Japanese career woman suddenly acquires entirely unexpected physical strength by enacting her revenge on her employer. Unlike yōkai stories, the monstrous aspect of the scene represents a