Paper short abstract:

This paper examines director Miike Takashi's visual depiction of the home as a symbolic space rather than domestic architecture in his 2014 horror film Kuime (known in English as Over Your Dead Body), where the collapsing of structural boundaries reflects the dissolution of a woman's sense of self.

Paper long abstract:

The concept of distinct boundaries is central to the construction of the “monstrous” in horror, separating the human from the non-human and bringing about a conflict between the self and that which threatens its integrity. While horror often emerges with the collapsing of those boundaries within the physical human body itself, the same can be extended to the utilization of the home as a site for “horror,” where the very walls of the architectural space are made almost immaterial, extending beyond the limits of structural form. This paper examines the Miike Takashi’s 2014 film Kuime (“Eater Woman”), known in English by the title Over Your Dead Body, and its use of the home as more of a symbolic space for the dissolution of boundaries within a woman’s mind. As the characters within the film enter the rehearsal process for a stage production of the classic ghost story kabuki narrative Tōkaidō Yotsuya Kaidan (“Ghost Story of Yotsuya in Tōkaidō”), leading actress Miyuki prepares for her role as the vengeful female ghost Oiwa. Gradually, the boundaries of her very self begin to blend with that of the character she is meant to play, exacerbated by the actress’ own personal anxieties as a Japanese woman struggling with traditional values of motherhood and marriage. Visually this is reflected in her “home,” which is transformed into a surreal space with walls that blur with the living spaces of others, even the set of the Yotsuya Kaidan production itself. In the end, virtually all distinction dissolves as the boundaries collapse between Miyuki’s and Oiwa’s respective homes, the actor and the enacted, and between stage and reality.

Paper short abstract:

In this paper I examine the depiction of the home as an ambiguous space of both comfort and frustration in a series of short pieces written by published Japanese authors as part of the daily blog "Day to Day" the first Covid-19 State of Emergency in Tokyo in 2020.

Paper long abstract:

In the wake of revolving Covid-19 restrictions on movement, our affective relationships with the ‘home’ are being transformed. How do we experience and conceptualise the private space of the home when our movements are being restricted by public discourse and the forces of the state? The home has long been positioned within feminist geography as a contested and politicised space in which the public and private overlap. The massive rise in working from home and restriction on public leisure spaces, places the home as a concept and geographic location in the cross-hairs.

During the first State of Emergency in Tokyo during early 2020, Japanese publishing giant Kodansha launched through their online platform a daily blog called “Day to Day”. For 100 days starting on May 1, short pieces by Japanese authors about their daily life during the pandemic were published. This created a collection that is timely, but also remarkably focused as these creators responded to a shared prompt and a shared, evolving disaster.

This paper focuses on a sub-corpus of 13 pieces within the collection which focus on the home, familial relationships, and changing daily life practices. For some of these accounts what becomes apparent is that the home itself is experienced as a negotiated space, especially under the strain of relationships and individual lives that are increasingly overlapping. For others, the home itself is a source of discomfort and frustration, carrying with it isolation or fragmentation of self. Local neighborhoods and neighbors create an uneasy intimacy, with a desire for human contact coming into conflict with the Covid-19 era of “humans as risk”. Consequently, we can see that home is left an ambiguous space – for some “staying home” is a source of comfort and indulgence, for others a source of fear or melancholy. As we collectively reconceptualise our relationships with our homes, these works offer us an early glimpse into the questions and challenges that arise – is the home a space of solace, comfort, or unease?

Paper short abstract:

Building on Anthony Vidler’s theory of the architectural uncanny and social histories of the modern Japanese home, this hybrid video/paper presentation examines the motif of the “haunted house” in Japanese cinema, with a particular focus on the 2017 film Watashitachi no ie (Our House).

Paper long abstract:

Anthony Vidler (1992) writes that the uncanny has always been concerned with “doubling,” often manifesting in stories of an “uncanny other” who is “experienced as a replica of the self” (p. 3). The 2017 film Watashitachi no ie (Our House) imagines this uncanny doubling as a doppelgänger house, depicting a world in which two pairs of women are living parallel lives in the same home. Though the film provides few definite answers, we can infer that both pairs exist in the same time period and in the same universe—they just happen to be living out their existences separately, in slightly different versions of the same living space. As directed by Kiyohara Yui, a student of renowned J-horror filmmaker Kurosawa Kiyoshi, Our House is also an exploration of the space of “home” as inhabited by women at different stages of life. All of these women move through both versions of the house and its domestic routines, their own uncertainties about who they are mirrored in the uncertainty of where one house/universe ends and the other begins.

Building on Vidler’s theory of the architectural uncanny and social histories of the modern Japanese home, this hybrid video/paper presentation examines the motif of the “haunted house” in Japanese cinema, focusing on the world of Our House in particular as a place where the boundaries of domestic space are constantly shifting. Through a videographic analysis of ghostly domestic spaces in Our House and other Japanese films, I hope to reveal the ways in which familiar spaces can quickly turn uncanny, and how even ordinary-seeming homes are “haunted” by shifting borders.

Paper short abstract:

This videographic presentation illustrates how contemporary Japanese women directors depart from the physical stage of the house and compositions of “traditional” families to find a sense of “home” as a matter of repetitive habit expressed through visual and narrative motifs.

Paper long abstract:

Home is the heart of Japanese cinema. In over one-hundred years of cinema history, there are genres and sub-genres of domesticity in Japanese film, including haha mono (mother films), tsuma mono (wife films), homu dorama (home dramas), kateigeki (household dramas), and shōshimingeki (working-class films that feature home life). Movies about home and the family form the very pillars of Japan’s film history including the first full-sound film The Neighbor’s Wife and Mine (Madamu to nyōbō, Dir. Gosho Heinosuke, 1931) and the first color film Carmen Comes Home (Karumen kokyō ni kaeru, Dir. Kinoshita Keisuke, 1951), as well as the postwar works of acclaimed directors like Ozu Yasujirō, Mizoguchi Kenji, and Naruse Mikio through to the movement of J-Horror directors of the late 1990s who reimagined the Japanese home as decidedly uncanny. Given this legacy, perhaps it is unsurprising that within many of the works of contemporary Japanese women commercial filmmakers, we see an emphasis on home, home spaces, and the act of home making. However, these depictions diverge from previous generations’ cinematic depictions of the home.

In this videographic presentation, I argue that contemporary female directors tend to reject nation-state ideologies of the home and kinship to reshape family as community bonds and the home as an experience of familiarity. While “home” on screen has been shaped throughout Japanese cinema history by dominant gendered narratives that imagine family and the physical house itself as a ideological extension of the state, contemporary Japanese women directors reimagine home as not a physical structure or “traditional” family, but as a matter of repetitive habit expressed through visual and narrative motifs. This creates a sense of “at-homeness” in their films that resonates with how a contemporaneous generation of young people in Japan have also found new definitions of and feelings about home. Through the juxtaposition of image and sound, my video essay explores the depiction of home in two exemplary case studies—the works of directors Tanada Yuki and Ogigami Naoko—to show how members of this new generation find an expression of home through the formal craft of cinema itself.