Horror Fiction in the Global South

Cultures, Narratives and Representations

Ritwick Bhattacharjee, Saikat Ghosh, Ritwick Bhattacharjee, Saikat Ghosh

• Publisher: Bloomsbury India
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9789390077281
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Gothic, Romance, & Horror Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Horror Fiction in the Global South: Cultures, Narratives, and Representations believes that the experiences of horror are not just individual but also/simultaneously cultural. Within this understanding, literary productions become rather potent sites for the relation of such experiences both on the individual and the cultural front. It's not coincidental, then, that either William Blatty's The Exorcist or Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude become archetypes of the re-presentations of the way horror affects individuals placed inside different cultures. Such an affectation, though, is but a beginning of the ways in which the supernatural interacts with the human and gives rise to horror. Considering that almost all aspects of what we now designate as the Global North, and its concomitant, the Global South – political, historical, social, economic, cultural, and so on – function as different paradigms, the experiences of horror and their telling in stories become functionally different as well. Added to this are the variations that one nation or culture of the east has from another.
The present anthology of essays, in such a scheme of things, seeks to examine and demonstrate these cultural differences embedded in the impact that figures of horror and specters of the night have on the narrative imagination of storytellers from the Global South. If horror has an everyday presence in the phenomenal reality that Southern cultures subscribe to, it demands alternative phenomenology. The anthology allows scholars and connoisseurs of Horror to explore theoretical possibilities that may help address precisely such a need.

1

EMBODYING HORROR: CORPOREAL AND AFFECTIVE DREAD IN JUNJI ITO’S TOMIE

Shweta Khilnani

Manga (Japanese comic books) are arguably the most resonant global icons of Japanese cultural production that have garnered a dedicated fan following across the world. The world was first introduced to manga during the last decade of the 20th century and ever since, it has become synonymous with Japanese culture itself. In contemporary times, manga are deeply integrated within global markets and this localisation has ‘blurred the boundary between autochthonous graphic traditions and manga as a Japanese product’ (Rosenbaum 2013). As manga travels to different parts of the world, it results in the dissemination of several Japanese cultural and ethnic ideas. This chapter will explore how horror is produced transnationally as a somatic and affective state or experience through a detailed examination of Junji Ito’s manga series, Tomie. More specifically, it will study the body as the site and source of horror and the processes through which a strong affective sensation of dread is evoked in a global audience.

Tomie is a Japanese horror manga series, written and illustrated by Junji Ito. It was first published in a manga magazine titled Monthly Halloween in 1987. Since then, the titular character, Tomie has become an iconic horror character and the series itself has been adapted in multiple formats. Tomie narrates the story of a beautiful, manipulative, adolescent girl who has the ability to multiply and produce clones of herself. It has multiple episodes, each of which features Tomie in a different set-up. In most of these episodes, she beguiles male or female characters who often become fixated with her and turn homicidal or suicidal. Several episodes also contain ghastly images of her regeneration, a process by which any part of Tomie can produce her entire self. The truly fascinating element of Tomie is the viscerality of the reading experience. In other words, the physical body comes alive in the form of a material presence and constitutes the very fabric of the manga. The formal mechanics of the comic form, more specifically the manga form, are used strategically to create this effect by adapting panel shapes and transitions in a peculiar manner. Before we conduct a comprehensive study of Tomie, it is important to contextualise the perception of the physical body within Japanese historical and socio-cultural tradition.

I. THE PHYSICAL BODY IN JAPANESE HISTORY AND CULTURE

The body has been a significant point of contention in religious, cultural and political philosophies throughout Japanese history. Since a comprehensive historical account of the discursive productions around the human body are outside the scope of this chapter, we will limit ourselves to the period after the Second World War (WWII), commonly known as the post-war period in Japan. The atomic violence of the war and the image of self-sacrificing kamikaze soldiers were just some of the factors which informed the Japanese society’s dominant notions of the human body in the decades following the war.

In the Japanese language, there is no single word which encompasses the many nuances of the English word ‘body’. In his book titled The Body in Postwar Japanese Fiction, Douglas Slaymaker explains the finer distinctions between the Japanese words, nikutai and shintai, often used as synonyms for the word ‘body’. Shintai refers to the material body and is commonly used in academic and philosophical discourse while nikutai signifies the expressly carnal and physical body (Slaymaker 2004). War time propaganda often established an opposition between nikutai, the individual body, and kotukai, the national body or the body as the nation. The desires of the individual body had to be sacrificed at the altar of the national polity and gradually, kotukai acquired characteristics of the Imperial realm, which was considered holy before the Meiji Restoration. Within this formidable, all-consuming interpretation of the state’s role and function, there was little space for expression of the individual self and body during the war.

However, after the end of the war, the term nikutai gained currency and was employed to foreground a new form of individual identity which emphasised the carnal and physical dimensions of the body. The surrender of the Japanese forces along with the atomic bombings in Hiroshima and Nagasaki had left the country in a sorry state of affairs. There was a chronic shortage of food supplies and the state was forced to reduce the recommended caloric requirements of an average male from 2,400 to 1,793 calories per day in 1945 (Tsurumi 1986). The infrastructure of all major cities of Japan had been severely affected by the Allied bombings and it was commonplace for people to spend hours trying to procure daily food requirements. As the threat of starvation became a plausibility, people contended with the ‘sheer physicality of everyday life’ (Slaymaker 2004). At the same time, any discussion of the erotic or the carnal was forbidden during the war years and the body was deemed productive only when it was in the service of the kotukai or the national polity. The years following the war witnessed a revolt against such repressive ideals and the carnality of the body emerged as a central literary and cultural trope.

The sheer intensity of the violence experienced by Japan during the war also had a significant impact on the understanding of the human body. Besides leading to the death of close to 200,000 people, the atomic bombings at Hiroshima and Nagasaki also led to severe injuries, burns, amputations and long-term damage due to radioactive poisoning. The horrific images of survivors served as grim reminders of the vulnerability of human bodies. For a population that had witnessed such an unprecedented violence, the body became a source of abject horror and physical monstrosity. The survivors of the bombings, known as hibakusha, faced severe discrimination for decades due to lack of proper medical information. They were often treated as contaminated bodies and became objects of contagion fears and reproductive anxieties (Dumas 2018). This sense of unease about the corporeal body was further strengthened by reports of Unit 731 of the Imperial Japanese Army, where notorious human experiments were carried out on Chinese colonial subjects to develop weapons of biological warfare during the war. Thus, the conception of the body as a foreboding presence is deeply ingrained in Japan’s history and is palpable in its literary productions, including manga.

II. ASSEMBLAGE OF BODY AND EMOTION IN SHOJO MANGA

Junji Ito’s Tomie is classified as shojo manga, or comics meant primarily for female adolescents in Japan. Shojo manga features ‘distinctive decorative and expressive artwork, along with stories that emphasize the inner feelings of the characters’ (Shamoon 2015). The female characters in shojo manga typically have slender bodies, large eyes and are seen sporting latest fashion trends. The figure of the teenage girl or shojo has occupied an important symbolic position in Japanese contemporary culture.

In the decades following WWII, Japanese economy experienced rapid growth and development and soon became the world’s second largest economy after the United States of America. The economic climate of the country also had a significant influence on the conception of feminine adolescence. By the 1990s, the country had witnessed a shift from its production-oriented culture to one driven by the ethos of consumption, primarily of commodities that came from the rest of the world. The figure of the teenage girl or shojo, driven by an urge to possess all things cute or kawaii, is symbolic of this culture of consumption. Shinji Miyadai, a Japanese sociologist, argues that the last decade of the 20th century saw the emergence of a new kind of Japanese youth, kogyaru, which refers to a subcultural group of street-smart and media-savvy teenage girls, who define themselves in terms of their material possessions (1995). This demographic, usually associated with self-commodification, perverse pleasure and mindless consumption (Dumas 2018), is the target audience for shojo manga.

In keeping with the dominant thematic traditions of shojo, the female adolescent body is repeatedly fetishised and sexualised in Tomie. Tomie’s physiognomy bears all features usually associated with beauty and attractiveness in Japanese culture. At times, this phenomenon acquires a rather disturbing character as Tomie’s physical attractiveness is coupled with abject morbidity. Tomie begins with a re-telling of a gruesome episode where Tomie is hacked to pieces by her male teacher and classmates while they are on a school trip. During the funeral, Tomie makes a shocking reappearance, donning her signature long, black tresses. As she enters the school, a male character exclaims with a monstrous look on his face, ‘Zombie or not I wouldn’t mind a piece of that.’ This statement is just one example of the ironic treatment of the physical body in the text, as it evokes both desire and disgust. This tension between the two forces becomes a significant source of horror in the comic.

The other most distinctive source of horror rests in the corporeality of the body itself. The visual representation of the body is manoeuvred in such a way as to expose its gruesome details and baseness. There are multiple visual portrayals of the human body being cut into pieces, dissected, operated and experimented on. For instance, when Tomie’s body is being hacked to pieces by her teacher and classmates, the size of the panels decreases, and each panel carries an image of a single body part being axed. Oftentimes, a panel has an extreme close-up of a body part abstracted from the rest of the body. The result is a collage of small panels that features the dismemberment of the physical body in all its goriness. This physicality of the body assumes the role of the abject as theorised by Julia Kristeva who defines it as the threat of breakdown of meaning caused by the loss of the distinction between the subject and the object. According to Kristeva, abject is something that disturbs identity, system, order and does not respect borders, positions and rules (Kristeva 1982). The reader is violently made to confront the abjection of the physical body in its crudest form, torn to pieces and reduced to its base anatomy.

The nature of transition between panels also produces horror as an affective state. The space between two panels, often known as the gutter, plays a crucial role in the production of meaning in the comic form. Scott McCloud, one of the foremost theorists of the comic form, argues that it is in the gutter that ‘human imagination takes two separate images and transforms them into a single idea’ (1993). Traditionally, the gutter is used to signify passage of time or an action taking place. However, one form of panel transition, known as aspect-to-aspect transition, provides different aspects of the same place, mood or idea even, and the motion of time is bypassed. McCloud asserts that such transitions have been an integral part of Japanese mainstream comics and they are often used to establish a mood or a sense of place (1993). One can notice a similar phenomenon at work in Tomie where aspect-to-aspect transition is used to establish an environment of dread and horror. In the episode titled ‘Mansion’, Tomie kidnaps a young girl Tsukiko and takes her to a mansion where an impostor who poses as her father is conducting experiments on human beings. When Tsukiko tries to escape, she confronts the other inmates who have been subjected to unspeakable torture and mutilation. Aspect-to-aspect transition is used to portray the different dimensions of this grotesque scene. Once again, the many images of physical distortion that create the sensation of dread and horror becomes an emotional or affective state.

Interestingly, emotional engagement between readers and characters is an identifying feature of shojo manga. It often features full body portraits of teenage protagonists inserted rather abruptly between panels, producing an irregular collage of sorts. Shamoon argues that such features were crucial since they allowed readers to engage emotionally with characters (2015). Enlarged eyes were used to convey emotions, full-body portraits allowed for corporeal identification and the collage like sequence of panels broke the narrative flow, making way for readers to experience emotions more deeply. Such disjointed sequences of panels are used in Tomie to produce horror as an affective state. While one can find traditional full body portraits of Tomie in the manga, the more striking panels are the ones that feature dismembered organs in a collage form. The body of the adolescent female, quite literally, becomes a source of horror.

In her critical reading of Junji Ito’s Tomie, Rachel Dumas studies the trope of monstrous female adolescence as a ‘metaphor for the ascendance of Japanese post modernity’ (2018). The prevalence of a robust culture of consumption along with the pervasive presence of technology has led scholars to posit Japanese culture and society as the posterchild of postmodernism. Hiroki Azuma has famously compared contemporary Japanese society to a ‘database’ in which, modernist hierarchies, like real/artificial, original/copy and whole/part, are subordinated to that which is fractured, fluid and fictitious (2009). The trope of mechanical reproduction is central to the plot of Tomie. At the end of the first episode, readers witness the first of many grotesque regenerations that Tomie’s body will undergo. The final panel shows how her heart, the only organ not found during the murder investigation, transformed into a demonic version of Tomie herself. The image is particularly macabre with a malformed body, empty eye sockets and dishevelled hair. A similar phenomenon takes place in the second part of this episode when Tomie’s kidney becomes available for a medical transplant. During the surgery, the kidney mutates and begins to grow into a human head in the recipient patient’s stomach. It is later revealed that Tomie begins to split on her own accord when she is faced with psychological trauma. The only way to stop this proliferation is if she lives long enough to see herself age.

Dumas employs the concept of the simulacrum to understand the endless process of self-propagation. For Jean Baudrillard, simulacrum represents a stage when an image bears no relation to any reality and becomes its own pure simulacrum. In other words, in postmodernism, it has become impossible to make any distinction between nature and artifice, original and its copy. While philosophers like Baudrillard approach the simulacrum with pessimism and loss, Gilles Deleuze conceives of it as a site of endless possibilities. According to Dumas, Tomie embodies the uncertainties and pleasures of the simulacrum. Her lack of a stable identity alludes to an impossible mode of being. This has been often understood as the source of horror in manga, as readers are forced to confront the threatening knowledge of their own instability or lack of a composite self. Therefore, there is no denying the fact that the fear of technological reproduction or postmodern anxieties about the loss of the original are pervasive in Ito’s manga. However, it must be mentioned here that these fears are articulated primarily through the corporeality of the human body; it is a certain visual re-imagining of the body (the dismemberment of the body through a careful use of panels and transition being a perfect example) that produces an uncomfortable sense of terror.

III. MONSTROUS BODY IN JAPANESE HORROR

It must be noted that Japan is no stranger to spectacles of grotesque viscerality. There is an entire sub-genre of Japanese horror or J-Horror cinema constituted by movies which are suffused with graphic imagery of bodily torture. Several epithets, like torture porn, cinema of cruelty, Extreme Asia and gorn (a combination of gory and porn), have been used to refer to movies like the Guinea Pig series, including Satoru Ogura’s Devil’s Experiment (1985) and Hideshi Hino’s Flower of Flesh and Blood (1985). Movies belonging to this sub-genre usually ‘contain explicit scenes of torture and mutilation’ which are excessive and gratuitous (Edelstein 2006) for purposes of ‘audience admiration, provocation and sensory adventure’ (Lowenstein 2011). In such movies, the body becomes the site of trauma and is pushed to its extreme limits as its very humanity comes under threat. This unabashed depiction of viscerality also produces a strong range of affects and sensations within viewers.

Such movies have often been analysed using psychoanalytical concepts like the return of the repressed, Oedipal complex, narcissism, etc. For instance, Slavoj Žižek has used Freud’s and Lacan’s theories about the development of the self to study Alfred Hitchcock’s movies. However, instead of focusing on the realm of the symbolic (as is common in psychoanalytic theory), I wish to call attention to the corporeal and the affective dimensions of horror. In order ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Cultures
• 1. Embodying Horror: Corporeal and Affective Dread in Junji Ito’s Tomie : Shweta Khilnani
• 2. Monsters of the Caribbean: Haunting Histories and Haunted Bodies in The Rainmaker’s Mistake and Soucouyant : Jarrel De Matas
• 3. Feminine Sexuality and Sexual Trauma in Bengali Horror Fiction: The Emergence of the Goddess: Puja Sen Majumdar
• 4. Spirits and Possessions : Rajarshi Bhattacharjee
• 5. Oriental Vampires vs. British Imperialists: Looking into the Figure of the Vampire in Bram Stoker’s Dracula and Richard Burton’s Vikram and the Vampire : Meenakshi Sharma
• 6. Genres from the Orient: Instability in Shweta Taneja’s Cult of Chaos : Samarth Singhal
• 7. The Corporeality of Horror: Spectres of War Victims in the Post-2003 Gothic Narratives from Iraq : Sushrita Acharjee
• Narratives and Representations
• 8. The Spectral Witness in Contemporary Indian Horror Cinema : Anhiti Patnaik
• 9. Conjuring an Atmosphere: A Study of Tumbbad as Folk Horror : Sakshi Dogra
• 10. Mythopoeia and Horror in the Global South: Reading Upamanyu Chatterjee’s Fairy Tales at Fifty : Srinjoyee Dutta
• 11. The Horror of Heteronormativity: The Supernatural in Vijaydan Detha’s ‘A Double Life’ : Aina Singh
• 12. Historic Time and Mythical Monsters: Negotiation of Mortality in M.T. Vasudevan Nair’s ‘Little Earthquakes’ : Meenu B
• 13. Funny Ghosts, Friendly Ghosts: A Study of How Indian English Pre-Teen Horror Fiction Turns Fear on Its Head : Anurima Chanda
• 14. Horror at the Margins: Phobic Essence and the ‘Uncanny’ Home in Contemporary Asian Gothic Literatures : Soumyarup Bhattacharjee
• 15. Terror and Wartime Cosmologies in Liu Cixin : Krushna Dande
• About the Editors and Contributors
• Index