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Embracing the demon: the monstrous child in Japanese literature and cinema, 1946-2008

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Embracing the demon: the monstrous child in Japanese literature and cinema, 1946-2008

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Content EMBRACING THE DEMON:

THE MONSTROUS CHILD IN JAPANESE LITERATURE AND CINEMA, 1946-2008

by

Lindsay Nelson

________________________________________________________________________

A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(COMPARATIVE LITERATURE)

August 2012

Copyright 2012 Lindsay Nelson
ii
Table
of
C ont ent s
List of Figures iii

Abstract iv

Introduction Paradox, Rupture, and the Monstrous Child 1

Chapter 1 Salvation Through Monstrosity: 27
Children as Remnants of War and Violence in Yakeato no Iesu
and Ishi no raireki

Chapter 2 Etched Into Human Memory: 71
Ōe Kenzaburō and the Atomic Child

Chapter 3 Embracing the Monster: 100
Vengeful Child Spirits in Contemporary Japanese Horror Films

Chapter 4 “But I am a kid”: 137
Optimizing Childhood in Oshii Mamoru’s The Sky Crawlers

Conclusion Monsterizing the Non-Existent Child 170

References 182

iii
List
of
F igu r es
Figure 1 Yoshimi embracing the monstrous figure of Mitsuko, 3
Dark Water

Figure 2 Boy in military dress on the cover of Shashin shūhō 40

Figure 3 Children playing war in Shashin shūhō 41

Figure 4 Woman embracing the monster images in Dark Water, 129
Chakushin ari, Shibuya kaidan, and Ringu

Figure 5 Kildren drawn in an ageless, gender-ambiguous style 148

Figure 6 Hand-drawn human character and hyper-realistic mecha 157

iv
A bstract
This dissertation examines the depiction of monstrous children in modern Japanese
fiction and cinema from 1946 to 2008. My area of focus begins in Japan’s immediate
postwar, with an analysis of Ishikawa Jun’s feral boy / Christ figure in Yakeato no Iesu
(“The Jesus of the Ruins”) and an examination of Okuizumi Hikaru’s 1994 novel Ishi no
raireki (translated by James Westerhoven as The Stones Cry Out), a story of the ways in
which a former soldier’s violent past haunts him through the lives and deaths of his two
children. My second chapter deals with Ōe Kenzaburō’s depiction of an “idiot son” in
stories including Kojinteki na taiken (A Personal Matter) and Sora no kaibutsu Aghwee
(Aghwee the Sky Monster). Chapter three focuses on contemporary Japanese horror films,
in particular films such as Ringu that feature vengeful child spirit characters. I end my
dissertation with an analysis of Oshii Mamoru’s 2008 film The Sky Crawlers, which
imagines an alternate future in which child pilots fight staged aerial battles for the
entertainment of adults.
Depictions of violent, vengeful, physically mutated, and supernatural children
have existed in Japanese literature since the eighth-century Kojiki (The Chronicles of
Japan) described the birth of an armless, legless “leech child” to the gods Izanagi and
Izanami, the mythical progenitors of the Japanese race (and the islands themselves).
Scholarship on each of the two tropes under consideration, children and monsters, has
flourished in the fields of modern and early modern literary studies, folklore studies, and
cultural history. In examining each figure separately, scholars have historicized the idea
of childhood and linked the study of monsters to conflicted attitudes about modernity.
v
When brought together, however, the amalgam of these two figures reveals a broader
throughline in postwar literature—a series of representations of monstrous children
coinciding with periods of historical rupture. In examining how Japanese literature and
film dramatizes a character recognized by its grotesque physical appearance, its
supernatural state, and / or its violent nature as a “monstrous child,” I reveal the similar
ways that two seemingly disparate icons are embedded in their specific literary, cultural,
and social histories to represent something beyond themselves, often in contradictory
ways. In short, monstrous children in prose fiction, comic books, and film represent
transcendental qualities like hope, innocence, and an idealized vision of the past, while at
the same time representing a threat to those same transcendental qualities. It is in fact
this very contradiction that prose fiction explores and exploits.
As a marker of difference and a transitional figure, existing somewhere between
human and monster, child and adult, past and future, the paradoxical figure of the
monstrous child seeks to make sense of the symbolic order—of the laws and unwritten
agreements that govern the roles, identities, and taboos of human existence—even as it
defies that order. In the literature and cinema of certain periods of social, economic, and
ideological rupture in Japan, monstrous child characters embody contradiction and
confusion, making sense of the nonsensical in their refusal to adhere to boundaries and
norms. This dissertation thus seeks to re-define conceptions of monstrous children in
literature and cinema as the embodiment of distinct, polarizing forces and sense-making
mechanisms, and in doing so offer a re-reading of the cultural, literary, and historical
forces that have produced such characters throughout the twentieth century.
vi
Recent Japanese criticism on the subject of child characters has also focused on
violence, mutation, and an uncanny adult-ness in children of the Heisei era. Ruth
Goldberg argues that the children in Nakata Hideo’s Ringu trilogy are made monstrous
through the un-maternal actions of the mother character: “Her neglect, avoidance, and
sublimated anger manifest in her children, turning them into monsters through the
mechanism of projection.” Such depictions of children as a remnant of the violence of
adults can also be seen in the aforementioned Yakeato no Iesu, Okuizumi Hikaru’s 1993
novel Ishi no raireki, and Ōtomo Katsuhiro’s 1989 film Akira, based on the manga of the
same name. Akira, which depicts a post-apocalyptic Tokyo in which a weapon with
limitless capacity for destruction is trapped within the body of a child, presents its child
characters as both victims of atomic destruction and harbingers of death. Thomas
Lamarre writes that trapping the weapon in the body of a child means that “we do not
know whether to fear the bomb or to embrace it,” and that the child-bomb is “at once a
source of fear and of hope, his awakening a perverse situation in which quasi-nuclear
destruction raises questions for the advent of a new, potentially better era.” It is in this
moment of fear and hope, this crossroads between destruction and the possibility of a
new, potentially better (but also potentially worse) life, that the character of the
monstrous child is born. While recent scholarship has posited monstrous children (and
sometimes monstrous mothers) as a twentieth-century phenomenon, a product of the
modern / postmodern breakdown of stable identities, I offer a reading that, just as
contemporary Japanese horror films draw on a long history of onryō (vengeful spirit)
narratives, monstrous children in literature and cinema have existed across historical
vii
periods and literary genres. Additionally, their appearance challenges the idea of
historiographical growth and progress, illustrating instead that certain historical periods
are marked just as much by rupture as they are by forward movement. The paradoxical
character of the monstrous child thus stands in for the transitional, fragmented state of the
nation during such periods of crisis and rupture.

1
Int r o du ct io n

Parad ox,
Rupt ure,
and
t he
M onst rous
C hi ld
(After 1890)…the child became that originary point (mythic) that unifies all
Japanese as the same; it is simultaneously one’s own past, the present (through
contemporary children), and a hope and prescription for a better future.

—Stefan Tanaka, New Times in Modern Japan, p. 134

… [T]he Child has come to embody for us the telos of the social order and come
to be seen as the one for whom that order is held in perpetual trust…whatever
refuses this mandate by which our political institutions compel the collective
reproduction of the Child must appear as a threat not only to the organization of a
given social order but also, and far more ominously, to social order as such,
insofar as it threatens the logic of futurism on which meaning always depends.

—Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive, p. 11

I’m the monster’s father.
—Ōe Kenzaburō. Kojinteki na taiken

Ishikawa Jun’s 1946 short story Yakeato no Iesu (“The Jesus of the Ruins”) takes the
reader to the last days of Tokyo’s black markets, the ramshackle gatherings of sweaty,
fly-infested stalls where men and women scrabbled for the basic necessities that were so
hard to obtain in the weeks and months immediately following Japan’s surrender. It is
the kind of place that Ishikawa’s contemporary and friend Sakaguchi Ango might have
had in mind when he wrote Darakuron (“On Decadence”), the groundbreaking essay that
argued that Japan could only begin to rebuild itself after it had fallen as far into moral
decadence as possible. In this world there lives an animal-like boy, a filthy creature who
is barely recognizable as human. He is a monster who attacks the story’s other characters,
biting and growling with no seeming purpose other than to incite panic. But to the
2
story’s narrator the boy is a new breed of saint, the kind of saint that only a world utterly
destroyed and demoralized by violence can produce. He is “the lone survivor of a
generation of swine who, possessed by demons, had flung themselves over a cliff and
perished in the waters below” (Ishikawa, Yakeato no Iesu 59).
1
He is a reminder of the
monster that exists within all of his more “civilized” neighbors, a monster brought to
light by the horrors of war. And yet, ultimately, he is still a child, provoking sympathy in
the narrator and the reader despite his frightening appearance. To the narrator he is an
emblem of Japan’s future, while at the same time he represents an all-too-recent past that
most would like to forget. He is the embodiment of paradox: simultaneously past and
future, predator and victim, child and adult.
More than fifty years later, narrative tensions between motherhood, the perceived
breakdown of the family unit, and the simultaneously pitiful / terrifying figure of a
monstrous girl-child are embodied in the image of a woman embracing a girl in a yellow
raincoat. The woman is Yoshimi, the protagonist of Nakata Hideo’s Honogurai mizu no
soko kara (Dark Water, 2002), and the girl is Mitsuko, the ghost / corpse of a neglected
child who has drowned in her apartment water tank.

1
Unless otherwise indicated, all translations are my own.
3

Figure 1: Yoshimi embracing the monstrous figure of Mitsuko, Dark Water

From a distance, the above image could be mistaken for a mother cradling her child, but
only moments before the child in question tried to kill the mother by strangling her, and
the embrace comes only after Yoshimi has surrendered, telling Mitsuko “I’m your
mother” and leaving behind her own daughter, Ikuko. The mother makes the ultimate
sacrifice to save her own child from the ghost-child, but in doing so must abandon her.
Mitsuko is a terrifying figure, seemingly determined to kill not only Ikuko but anyone
who happens to cross her path. But her decayed, abject body is ultimately more of an
object of pity than of fear—she is a child, and even in her ghostly rage maintains the
trappings of childhood innocence and vulnerability.
4
Such depictions of violent, vengeful, physically mutated, and supernatural
children have existed in Japanese literature since the eighth-century Kojiki (The
Chronicles of Japan) described the birth of an armless, legless “leech child” (hiruko) to
the gods Izanagi and Izanami, the mythical progenitors of the Japanese race (and the
islands themselves). Over more than a thousand years of literary history monstrous
children have appeared in one form or another in folk tales, picture scrolls, short stories,
novels, comic books, and films. This dissertation examines the depiction of such
monstrous children in modern Japanese fiction and cinema from 1946 to 2008. The time
period I have chosen to focus on is bounded on one side by the end of the Pacific War, a
period which saw a dramatic shift in literary styles and subjects. The burai-ha
(libertines), a group of writers that included Sakaguchi Ango, Ishikawa Jun, Oda
Sakanosuke, and Dazai Osamu
2
, distanced themselves as much as possible from the self-
righteous nationalism and moralizing that had characterized the war years, writing stories
that focused on the physical and sensual pleasures denied during wartime. Sakaguchi
Ango’s Darakuron shocked Japanese readers with its blunt assessment of wartime
hypocrisy and its call to “plunge to the very depths of decadence,” arguing that to fall
(daraku) was human, and that only by falling could Japan begin to rise again. Along with
Tamura Taijiro, Ango wrote within a genre called nikutai bungaku (“carnal” or “flesh”
literature), portraying sex and physicality in ways unheard of during the war years.

2
Donald Keene writes of the burai-ha that they were “less a group linked by common backgrounds or aims
than a number of independent writers who happened to possess similar tastes, and who were regarded by
the rest of the literary world as being somehow related.” The figures most often associated with the burai-
ha were Ango, Sakunosuke, and Dazai, but Ishikawa Jun, It ō Sei, and Takami Jun were often included in
the group as well.
5
Douglas Slaymaker writes that during the immediate postwar years “the body became an
obsessive object of focus.” Reasons for this included:
…the sheer physicality of everyday life—the demands of bodily needs—which,
for urban populations in particular, was given over to securing food and finding
shelter…For a second reason, the body offered antidotes to the bankruptcy of the
traditional and military values which characterized the previous fifteen years of
war…Such physicality was a response to the failure of political ideology in the
imagination of society, and was especially resonant given the postwar shortage of
goods…Third, this obsession with the body was also, in part, a response to the
wartime censorship that made it extremely difficult to write of the erotic, of the
political, and of wartime deprivations…Many writers responded to this postwar
situation with imagery that was heavily focused on the physical/carnal aspects of
existence. (Slaymaker 1-2)

With this focus on the body and the carnal naturally came a focus on the grotesque and
the deformed, seen in the feral child of Ishikawa’s Yakeato no Iesu and the potentially
monstrous unborn child in Hirabayashi Taiko’s Kishi mojin (“Demon Goddess”).
Monstrous bodies, sometimes in child form, would continue play a role in Japanese
fiction in the decade following the end of the war, seen in the mix of sadomasochistic sex
and sexualized young boys of Kōno Taiko’s Yōjigari (“Toddler-Hunting”) and the violent,
demoralized child characters of Ōe Kenzaburo’s Memushiri kouchi (Nip the Buds, Shoot
the Kids).
I end my period of focus in 2008, the year that Oshii Mamoru’s The Sky Crawlers
was released. It was from the late 1990s to the mid-2000s that Japanese horror films—
many of which featured vengeful child characters—became a celebrated genre both
domestically and internationally. The 1990s also saw periods of social instability and a
lack of confidence in government brought on by a disorganized response to the Great
Hanshin Earthquake and the shocking sarin gas attack by a doomsday cult on the Tokyo
6
subway system. Though the early 2000s were economically and socially stable in
comparison to the late 1980s and 1990s, the film and literature of this period frequently
reflected the unease and disillusionment that had characterized the bubble and immediate
post-bubble years. Such unease can be seen in the films of Nakata Hideo, whose child
characters exist in an environment of potential neglect and abandonment, in the children
of Okuizumi Hikaru’s Ishi no raireki (The Stones Cry Out), who carry the remnants of
their father’s violent past and his inability to exist in the present, and in The Sky Crawlers,
whose characters are forced to live out an eternal childhood as they fight staged aerial
battles that result in real deaths.
Scholarship on each of the two tropes under consideration, children and monsters,
has flourished in the fields of modern and early modern literary studies, folklore studies,
and cultural history. In examining each figure separately, scholars have historicized the
idea of childhood and linked the study of monsters to conflicted attitudes about
modernity. When brought together, however, the amalgam of these two figures reveals a
broader throughline in postwar literature—a series of representations of monstrous
children coinciding with periods of historical rupture. In examining how Japanese
literature and film dramatizes a character recognized by its grotesque physical appearance,
its supernatural state, and / or its violent nature as a “monstrous child,” I reveal the
similar ways that two seemingly disparate icons are embedded in their specific literary,
cultural, and social histories to represent something beyond themselves, often in
contradictory ways. In short, monstrous children in prose fiction, comic books, and film
represent transcendental qualities like hope, innocence, and an idealized vision of the past,
7
while at the same time representing a threat to those same transcendental qualities. It is
in fact this very contradiction that prose fiction explores and exploits.
Monsters and children are defined by their outcast status—both are barred from
the world of human adults, though in the case of children the exclusion is temporary and
full of potential the monster may not be privy to. The two figures are also defined, in a
sense, by their opposition to each other—within a Lacanian symbolic order defined by
the rules and dictates of society, a child cannot be considered monstrous, while the
monster cannot be considered innocent or an object of affection. When monstrosity
merges with the child, as it does in literary depictions of monstrous child figures
throughout Japanese literature, the effect is one of dramatic rupture and violation, an
uncanny presence that attracts and repels. Takahara Eiri might describe this quality as
ningai (roughly translated as “outcast” and composed of the characters for “person” and
“outside”), a state of having human characteristics but remaining an outsider to the
human world.
3
For Marina Warner, the seeming loss of “childlikeness” in children
provoked an unprecedented level of horror in the 1990s, stemming in part from
sensational crimes like the torture and murder of two-year-old James Bulger by two ten-
year-old boys in 1993. At the murder trial, Warner writes, there was “a brutal absence of
pity for (the murderers) as children. It was conducted as if they were adults not because
they had behaved with adult consciousness, but because they had betrayed an abstract
myth about children’s proper childlikeness” (Warner 45). Warner argues that

3
For more on Takahara’s concept of ningai, see Goshikku haato (Gothic Heart), Tokyo: Kodansha, 2004.
8
the Child has never been seen as such a menacing enemy as today. Never before
have children been so saturated with all the power of projected monstrousness to
excite repulsion—and even terror…public grief focuses obsessively on the loss of
an ideal of children, of their playfulness, their innocence, their tenderness, their
beauty… (56)

The monstrous child is thus truly horrifying because it defies the myth of what it means
to be a child. When the public expresses repulsion and outrage at the figure of the
monstrous child, fictional or real
4
, they are expressing disillusionment and grief over the
breakdown of a vital myth.
As an archetype, the monstrous child exists in a constant state of tension between
opposing forces, one a marker of innocence and possibility, the other a marker of
otherness. Michel Foucault, writing on the underlying conditions of truth that have
defined scientific discourse throughout history, compares the monster to the fossil,
arguing that both serve as markers of difference and identity:
The fossil is what permits resemblances to subsist throughout all the deviations
traversed by nature; it functions as a distant and approximative form of identity; it
marks a quasi-character in the shift of time. And this is because the monster and
the fossil are merely the backward projection of those differences and those
identities that provide taxinomia first with structure, then with character.
Between table and continuum they form a shady, mobile, wavering region in
which what analysis is to define as identity is still only mute analogy; and what it
will define as assignable and constant difference is still only free and random
variation…Thus, against the background of the continuum, the monster provides
an account, as though in caricature, of the genesis of differences, and the fossil
recalls, in the uncertainty of its resemblances, the first buddings of identity.
(Foucault 156-157)

As a marker of difference and a transitional figure, existing somewhere between human
and monster, child and adult, past and future, the paradoxical figure of the monstrous

4
While children like the two young boys who killed James Bulger are indeed real, I would argue that the
trials and media representations of children who commit violent crimes create a fictionalized version of
those children, one that feeds on the horror and outrage inspired by children who commit violent crimes.
9
child seeks to make sense of the symbolic order—of the laws and unwritten agreements
that govern the roles, identities, and taboos of human existence--even as it defies that
order. In the literature and cinema of certain periods of social, economic, and ideological
rupture in Japan, monstrous child characters embody contradiction and confusion,
making sense of the nonsensical in their refusal to adhere to boundaries and norms. This
dissertation thus seeks to re-define conceptions of monstrous children in literature and
cinema as the embodiment of distinct, polarizing forces and sense-making mechanisms,
and in doing so offer a re-reading of the cultural, literary, and historical forces that have
produced such characters throughout the twentieth century.
As in Europe and the United States, the concept of childhood as a period of
existence separate from adulthood did not come into being in Japan until the late
eighteenth century, when schools for the children of wealthy commoners proliferated.
Philippe Aries has argued that removing children from the world of adults forced adults
to focus on their particular needs, creating a culture in which children were suddenly
viewed as different from adults—in particular, more vulnerable and in need of guidance
and protection. At the same time, Yanagita Kunio, Kathleen Uno, and Karatani K ōjin
have pointed out that until the Meiji period children were not segregated from adults in
prisons (or punished differently), schools for children were all privately funded, and there
was an absence of child-focused entertainment and play in village society.
5
Karatani
would go on to argue that the literary concept of childhood, like the concepts of
landscape and interiority, was “discovered” and constituted during the Meiji period:

5
Platt, Brian. “Japanese Childhood, Modern Childhood: The Nation-State, the School, and 19
th
-Century
Globalization.” Journal of Social History 38 (2005): 965-985.
10
Although the objective existence of children seems self-evident, the ‘child’ as we
see today was discovered and constituted only recently. Landscapes, too, which
seem to exist before our very eyes were only discovered as ‘landscapes’ in the
third decade of the Meiji period by writers whose ‘interiority’ rejected what up
until then had been the external world. Since this time, landscape has been
perceived as what exists objectively, while realism has been seen, either as the
tracing of that objective existence or as the capturing of a landscape which is even
more ‘real.’ Yet there was a time when ‘landscape’ did not exist, and its
discovery was predicated on an inversion. / As with ‘landscape,’ so with ‘the
child.’ (115)

As childhood was being “discovered” and differentiated children and youths
became the target of reforms aimed at “modernizing” the country. David R. Ambras
writes that in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century dealing with the problems of
street children, child thieves, and child prostitutes was closely associated with Japan’s
modernization:
Since 1868, the Meiji state had promoted a series of far-reaching reforms aimed at
constructing a modern nation that could thrive in an international capitalist
economy and an imperialist diplomatic structure…(the war with China) and its
aftermath stimulated a heightened perception among urban middle-class
intellectuals that society required them to act upon the problems they confronted.
(Ambras 33)

The protection and nurturing of children, through both formal schooling and increased
police activity, was seen as an essential element of Japan’s modernization, where
modernization was defined as the banishing of superstition in favor of science, a push
toward industrialization, an opening up to the outside world after centuries of isolation,
an embrace of foreign culture, and a strengthening of military might.
It was during the Meiji, Taisho, and early Showa periods that children came to be
seen not only as non-adult entities in need of protection and guidance, but as nationalist
emblems of a prosperous Japanese future. Jennifer Robertson and Mark McLelland write
11
of national “best family” and “best child” contests (which promoted the idea of producing
eugenically “pure” children) and the “fertile womb battalions” of Japanese women who
were encouraged to contribute to the bounty of the nation by giving birth to healthy
babies.
6
The magazine Ie no hikari (Light of the Family), distributed predominantly in
agrarian communities, glamorized military life and frequently featured images of young
children (mostly boys) in military uniforms, with sections for children on how to “be like
a soldier.” While I would argue that depictions of monstrous children have existed in
Japanese literature since the eighth century (where such pre-modern children could be
distinguished as such by their size and age, though at the time they may not have been
considered as distinct from adults), their presence takes on added significance during the
Pacific War and the immediate postwar years. By this time, the concept of childhood and
children as separate from adults—a concept which had not truly begun to take shape until
the Edo period--was fully formed. Monstrosity in the form of destruction, physical
deformities, and distinctly adult-like behaviors (violence, aggression) took on new
meaning when attached to beings that had come to be seen as the embodiment of
innocence, images of Japan’s prosperous future, and the group whose protection justified
the violence and aggression of the war years. In other words, the character of the
monstrous child becomes all the more poignant—and meaningful—in a cultural-
historical context that recognizes its status as a child, as a being with needs and desires
separate from those of adults. It is the fictional depiction of such monstrous child figures

6
McLelland, Mark. Queer Japan from the Pacific War to the Internet Age. Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield
Publishers, 2005. Robertson, Jennifer. “Blood Talks: Eugenic Modernity and the Creation of New
Japanese.” History and Anthropology, Vol. 13, No. 3, pp. 191-216.
12
from the early twentieth century onward, a time when the concept of childhood was being
“discovered” and could thus be threatened by monstrosity, that will be the primary
subject of textual analysis in this dissertation.
Much postwar scholarship has assigned the rubric of humanism to children in
postwar fiction, anime, and film. Tetsuwan Atomu (Astro Boy), the robot child who
became a sensation in Japanese comics and television of the 1950’s, is described by Anne
Allison as a tortured soul, a child abandoned by his creator-father for failing to grow into
an adult. The character’s uncertainty mirrored the uncertainty of the nation:
Tetsuwan Atomu captured the tenor of the moment: the tentativeness of the times
laced with not only the pains of defeat and atomic injury but also the anticipation
of an unknown future . . . with a nonhuman as the lead character, the anxiety of
identity haunts each text. The question of how to define and treat this new being
is continually posed, mirroring the fragility of Japan’s own (and mutated) identity
on the world stage after the war. (56-57)

It is not only Tetsuwan Atomu’s status as a human-machine hybrid that makes his
identity uncertain, but his status as a child who will never grow up, an innocent
nonetheless marked by death (he is created to replace the dead son of a scientist): “His
powers as a posthuman techno-hero are thus tamed by a cuteness and innocence that
forever identify him as a kid” (Allison 57). Telling postwar stories of uncertainty and
identity confusion in the face of ultra-rapid technological developments—stories that
always seem to exist in the shadow of war—take on added significance when child
characters (who are often forced to take on the responsibilities of adults) are the
protagonists. Two of the most famous anime dramas concerning World War II, Barefoot
Gen (1983) and Grave of the Fireflies (1988) tell their stories through the eyes of
children. Susan Napier writes that a recurring image in Fireflies of bomber planes flying
13
over the heads of children “evokes a world that can never be safe—a world where
ultimate horror rains down from the innocent sky” (220). These same kinds of characters
and images would appear again in Oshii Mamoru’s 2008 film The Sky Crawlers, which
took the fighter planes, boy heroes, and dramatic aerial battles of war stories and placed
them in a world where reality, death, and childhood itself are nebulous concepts.
Arguably, it is the children who imbue these images and stories with a more potent
power—they are what is at stake in the conflict, the innocents for whom Japan’s future
must be preserved, what Lee Edelman calls the “telos of the social order…the one for
whom that order is held in perpetual trust” (Edelman 11).
Recent Japanese criticism on the subject of child characters has also focused on
violence, mutation, and an uncanny adult-ness in children of the Heisei era. Ruth
Goldberg argues that the children in Nakata Hideo’s Ringu trilogy are made monstrous
through the un-maternal actions of the mother character: “Her neglect, avoidance, and
sublimated anger manifest in her children, turning them into monsters through the
mechanism of projection” (Goldberg 377). Such depictions of children as a remnant of
the violence of adults can also be seen in the aforementioned Yakeato no Iesu, Okuizumi
Hikaru’s 1993 novel Ishi no raireki, and Ōtomo Katsuhiro’s 1989 film Akira, based on
the manga of the same name. Akira, which depicts a post-apocalyptic Tokyo in which a
weapon with limitless capacity for destruction is trapped within the body of a child,
presents its child characters as both victims of atomic destruction and harbingers of death.
Thomas Lamarre writes that trapping the weapon in the body of a child means that “we
do not know whether to fear the bomb or to embrace it,” and that the child-bomb is “at
14
once a source of fear and of hope, his awakening a perverse situation in which quasi-
nuclear destruction raises questions for the advent of a new, potentially better era” (136).
It is in this moment of fear and hope, this crossroads between destruction and the
possibility of a new, potentially better (but also potentially worse) life, that the character
of the monstrous child is born. While recent scholarship has posited monstrous children
(and sometimes monstrous mothers) as a twentieth-century phenomenon, a product of the
modern / postmodern breakdown of stable identities, my reading suggests that, just as
contemporary Japanese horror films draw on a long history of onryō (vengeful spirit)
narratives, monstrous children in literature and cinema have existed across historical
periods and literary genres. Additionally, their appearance challenges the idea of
historiographical growth and progress, illustrating instead that certain historical periods
are marked just as much by rupture as they are by forward movement. The paradoxical
character of the monstrous child thus stands in for the transitional, fragmented state of the
nation during such periods of crisis and rupture.
One such period of rupture was the Meiji period (1868-1912), a time in which
authors such as Tsubōchi Shōyō and Futabatei Shimei sought to bring the novel
(shōsetsu) to the forefront of the literary world. Futabatei’s Ukigumo, generally
considered Japan’s first modern novel, was the first work of its kind to experiment with
genbun itchi (a form of written language which held that the written word must strive to
imitate the spoken, in stark contrast to most Japanese writing of the time, which made
little or no attempt to resemble natural speech). Shimazaki Tōson and Tayama Katai
would emerge as major players in the Japanese naturalist (shizenshugi) movement, which
15
was undoubtedly influenced by European naturalists but concerned itself more with
confession—of every minute detail and failing of its narrators--as the lens through which
to depict the world. Sōseki Natsume, often considered Japan’s greatest modern novelist,
would reject naturalism and the confessional I-novel (watashi shōsetsu) in favor of
narratives that depicted the Japanese individual’s sense of alienation and loneliness in the
face of a disorienting push toward industrialization and dramatic changes in societal
values, a move that dispensed with hundreds of years of history but could not provide a
clear ideology to replace it with. In all of these movements between literary genres,
writing styles, structure, character, and an engagement with European literature, a
complicated relationship with time emerges. Instead of the orderly conceptions of time
and the cyclical nature of existence that had characterized pre-modern literature,
discontinuity, dislocation, and disorder became dominant themes. Japan’s first novels
directly influenced by European and Russian models depicted characters who existed in a
kind of confused limbo between past, present, and future, inert and uncertain which way
to move (if they were able to move at all). The Meiji period also sought to separate and
distinguish the real and the supernatural, realms that had long overlapped with one
another. Stefan Tanaka argues that before Meiji “the conceptual sphere of ghosts and
spirits contained a humanlike quality . . . Ghosts became humans, humans became ghosts.
The past coexisted with the present; indeed, there was no separation” (56). The literature
of the Meiji period reflected a society at a temporal crossroads, clinging to notions of a
fixed, unchanging past but being forced to move into an uncertain and temporally
disjointed future, one in which the “backward” merging of real and unreal, past and
16
future had no place. In this world the monster would emerge as an embodiment of such
contradictions and confusions.
In examining the Meiji period’s struggle to define itself, it is helpful to turn to a
discipline founded and promoted by Inoue Enryō in the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries: yōkaigaku, roughly translated as “monsterology,” though closer in
meaning to “superstition studies” or “psychical research.” As Gerald Figal’s exhaustive
study of the connection between the monstrous / supernatural and the intense
modernization of the Meiji period has revealed, yōkaigaku was promoted as a way to
“classify” monsters, to “bring apparently inexplicable objects into the purview of rational
explanation,” to turn monsters and other supernatural phenomena into “real and natural
objects that can fall into fields of rational meaning” (Figal 46). In the Meiji period, such
a science had a very practical purpose: to bring Japan out of a period ruled by superstition
and belief in the supernatural and into an age of bunmei kaika (civilization and
enlightenment). But for many rural Japanese, the real monster was the government itself:
“To many village folk, the new rulers of Meiji Japan, by associating with monsters
(foreigners) had themselves become monsters…at the same time the state was striving to
cast folk knowledge as a demon-enemy to be avoided, the folk was striving to cast state
knowledge as a demon-enemy to be expelled” (Figal 35). Monstrosity was a slippery
tool—in attempting to purge Japan of its dependence on the supernatural, the Meiji
government unwittingly became, in the eyes of many rural Japanese, the fearsome thing it
sought to vanquish.
17
Beyond the classification and “de-fanging” of monsters as a means of political
control, Figal cites a connection between certain crises and the appearance of monsters in
art. He describes the work of anthropologist Komatsu Kazuhiko, who suggests “a
fundamental link between ‘times of crisis’ and the prodigious appearance of monsters in
narrative, visual, and performative art,” and argues that “an inordinate appearance of the
weird seems to coincide with periods of crisis and transition in Japanese history” (Figal
22-34). Two major forces seem to be at work here: the appearance of monsters and “the
weird” in art as a form of protest against governmental authority, and the classification
and study of monsters by that governmental authority as a means to strip them of their
power. It becomes clear that monsters and the supernatural played a key role in Japan’s
modernization, whether as symbols of a past to be discarded or of a new kind of
“official” monstrosity that took the form of an oppressive and unfamiliar government
feared by the common people.
The monster thus took on a multi-layered significance during the Meiji period,
with the oni (demon) and the yōkai (monster) becoming symbols of backwardness and
superstition. At the same time, the Japanese people, particularly those living in rural
areas, resisted the new order being forced upon them by the Meiji government and began
to portray the government officials themselves as monsters. Maeda Ai’s essay “The
Spirits of Abandoned Gardens” beautifully illustrates this struggle through a reading of
Nagai Kafu’s short story ”The Fox” which tells the story of a Meiji-era family and their
struggle to eliminate a fox that has wandered into their elaborate garden. The garden
itself, Maeda argues, is untamed nature, the wild and unpredictable world of the
18
supernatural, a world associated with pre-Meiji Japan. In finally catching and killing the
fox, the family is able to “tame” the ghosts of the past and move forward into the modern
world.
7
In the same way, yōkai, oni, superstitions, and folk beliefs during the Meiji
period were seen as wild, unpredictable forces that needed to be named, categorized, and
ultimately de-fanged so that Japan could become a modern nation.
The Meiji period was also a turning point for Japanese conceptions of childhood.
Stefan Tanaka writes that “childhood in early Meiji Japan bore more similarity to
Wolfgang Edelstein’s description of the child in premodern rural Europe than to modern
Japan: ‘the bond of meaning and mutual responsibility [is] in a world of work that does
not know childhood as an age of play but, rather, an age of transient functional
imperfection’(Tanaka 59).” As in other parts of the world, children in Japan, once they
had been designated as individuals in need of guidance, nurturing, and protection, would
become emblems of all that must be protected and preserved to ensure a prosperous and
successful future for the nation. As Lee Edelman has argued in No Future: Queer Theory
and the Death Drive, “we are no more able to conceive of a politics without a fantasy of
the future than we are able to conceive of a future without the figure of the Child”
(Edelman 11). In Japan as well, the mythical / hypothetical Child is the center of this
“fantasy of the future,” the object upon which the need for a symbolic order is projected.
But at the same time, the figure of the Child, like the figure of the monster, is a figure
with strong ties to notions of a fixed, unchanging past, a concept of national identity
often associated with a mythic pastoral, a fantasy of kokyō (home) now constructed and

7
Maeda, Ai. Toshi k ūkan no naka no bungaku. Chikuma sh ōb ō, 1992 (1982).
19
marketed to city dwellers in a phenomenon known as furusato-tzukuri (hometown-
making).
8
Past and future, modern and traditional, urban and rural—the child and the
monster exist at a crossroads between seemingly disparate realms, similar to the status of
“grotesque” figures described by Michelle Li in Ambiguous Bodies: Reading the
Grotesque in Japanese Setsuwa Tales:
Noses can grow and shrink; women can be maternal, then demons or demonic,
and then motherly again; animals can be humans or monsters and later animals.
The relationship of the grotesque body in setsuwa to the world is marked by a
blending of boundaries: men can eat women and vice versa; birds can be
murderers; foxes can be wives. There are gray areas between humans and
animals as well as between spirits and humans. (Li 43)

In their state of constant transformation between abjection and innocence, monstrous
children also exist in this “gray area,” inhabiting bodies that straddle both physical and
spiritual boundaries.
There is, of course, a great divide between the reforms and upheavals that
characterized the Meiji period and the world of Japanese literature and film from the late
1940s to the 2000s, and I do not mean to suggest a direct link between Meiji-era
conceptions of monsters and children and the portrayal of monstrous children in modern
Japanese literature and horror films. Rather, I use the examples of yōkaigaku and the
status of the child-figure in the Meiji period to provide an example of one way in which
both monsters and children have been manipulated by the state and the media in response
to perceived threats to the nation’s stability. The idea that delinquent youth and
neglected children represent a breakdown of traditional values is, of course, hardly

8
For more on furusato-tzukuri and the idea of home as myth, see Marilyn Ivy’s Discourses of the
Vanishing: Modernity, Phantasm, Japan (University of Chicago Press, 1995).
20
unique to Japan. What is unique is the way in which the control and protection of
delinquent youth and pre-adolescent children connects the political desire to both
preserve the fictional idea of a traditional, unchanging folk life and to promote
industrialization and the embrace of science over superstition. As with the child, so with
the monster, which has been both embraced as a form of resistance to state-sponsored
progress and condemned as a remnant of the superstitious and un-modern past.
Japanese literature of the 1940s and 1950s, the years immediately following the
end of the Pacific War, also exists within a period of rupture characterized by the
complete destruction of Japan’s major cities, the shocking reality of the atomic bomb,
and the psychological toll of surrender after fifteen years of nationalist rhetoric which had
promoted the message that death was preferable to surrender. This was the period in
which aforementioned burai-ha (libertines) distanced themselves as much as possible
from the self-righteous nationalism and moralizing that had characterized the war years.
In their focus on sex, physicality, and the body, they argued that in the wake of so much
destruction and death flesh was the only thing that could be trusted, the last vestige of
truth in a society full of illusions. Sakaguchi Ango’s previously mentioned Darakuron
(“On Decadence”) argued that monstrosity was no longer something to be feared or
shunned—it must be embraced in order for Japan to finally move forward. That which
had been deemed abnormal or perverse by the wartime government came to be seen as
almost holy—Ishikawa’s Yakeato no Iesu and Ōgon densetsu (“The Legend of Gold”)
depict prostitutes and feral children as a new kind of saint, Ango’s Hakuchi (“The Idiot”)
and Sakura no mori no mankai no shita (“In the Forest, Under Cherries in Full Bloom”)
21
depict animal-like characters whose only means of survival seems to be their bestial
nature, and Dazai Osamu’s Shayō (The Setting Sun) imagines the birth of an illegitimate
child to the daughter of a revered family as a “revolutionary” act. Both monsters and
children and their accompanying transcendental qualities (abjection, perversion,
innocence, prosperity) were again re-defined in literature that embraced the abject,
merging abjection with the figure of the child to form a paradoxical creature that
embodied the very threat to its own person.
As I have illustrated, literature depicting monstrous child characters has
frequently developed in the context of periods of historical, social, and ideological
rupture, periods during which both monster and child were re-examined and re-defined to
reflect changing perceptions of seemingly unchanging icons. Each of my dissertation
chapters focuses on the “after” of a point of historical rupture to examine how childhood
is continuously re-interpreted as monstrous within the context of the specific periods of
ideological change. My first chapter examines monstrous children as a remnant and
manifestation of violence, particularly in the context of war, in two works of postwar
fiction: the aforementioned Yakeato no Iesu and Okuizumi Hikaru’s Ishi no raireki (The
Stones Cry Out). While only Ishikawa’s short story was produced in the years
immediately following the Pacific War, I would argue that both of these stories use the
Pacific War—or various characters’ memories of it—as a backdrop against which to set
stories of violent, feral, or abused children. Yakeato no Iesu presents its monstrous child
as a product of the war years, arguing that the goodness, compassion, and innocence no
longer have any meaning—only the violent physicality and base emotions of the “Jesus
22
of the ruins” can now be the mark of a saint. The bulk of Ishi no raireki’s narrative takes
place many years after the Pacific War, but the violence visited upon (and enacted by) its
child characters is clearly linked to the protagonist’s wartime experiences. Drawing on
Andō Hajime, Suzuki Sadami, and William Tyler’s analyses of Ishikawa Jun’s life and
work, Yoshikuni Igarashi’s theories of war, trauma, and memory, and Jacques Derrida’s
concepts of spectrality and the trace, I attempt to show the ways in which children in
these works of literature exist as tangible remnants of the violence of adults, made into
outcasts not only through their own un-childlike behavior but by serving as a physical
reminder of wartime atrocities that the adult perpetrators would prefer to forget.
Chapter two examines the physically deformed child in the fiction and essays of
Ōe Kenzaburō, specifically Kojinteki na taiken (A Personal Matter) and Sora no kaibutsu
Aghwee (Aghwee the Sky Monster), with reference to the development of the “idiot son”
motif in Teach Us to Outgrow Our Madness, The Pinchrunner Memorandum, and Rouse
Up, O Young Men of the New Age! I also examine Ōe’s writings on Hiroshima, including
recent essays and work collected in Hiroshima Notes and Kaku no taika to “ningen” no
koe (The Nuclear Conflagration and the “Human” Voice). I illustrate the way that
various incarnations of the “idiot son” exist as the physical manifestations of adult /
parental fears and anxieties about both past atrocities and future uncertainties, and how,
in periods of history when many have been keen to forget the uglier and more violent
aspects of the past, these characters serve as a physical reminder of that past. For this
analysis I examine research on the historical events that surrounded Ōe’s writing (the
Anpo [Treaty of Mutual Cooperation and Security between the United States and Japan]
23
protests of the 1960s, the push to forget certain aspects of the Pacific War, and Ōe’s own
anti-nuclear activism). I draw on the atomic bomb literature writings of John Whittier
Treat, as well as Michiko N. Wilson, Yasuko Claremont, and Susan Napier’s writings on
Ōe, as well as Stefan Tanaka’s examination of the changing nature of childhood and
memory in the Meiji period.
In chapter three I move into a discussion of film in the context of the economic
crisis and instability of the 1990s with an examination of monstrous child characters in
four Japanese horror films: Nakata Hideo’s Honogurai mizu no soko kara (Dark Water)
and Ringu (The Ring), Horiai Kei’s Shibuya kaidan (Shibuya Ghost Story), and Miike
Takashi’s Chakushin ari (One Missed Call). I argue that the breakdown of the post-Meiji
ie (household) structure and the depiction of children as perpetrators (rather than victims)
of violence is a rupture and contradiction newly seen in the economic recession of the
1990s. Given that all of these films deal specifically with female children (unlike the
other titles under examination, which deal primarily with boys), as well as with
monstrous mothers, I also examine the significance of the monstrous girl-child and its
distinction from the more masculine monstrous child figures previously examined.
Toward this end I draw on Julia Kristeva’s concept of abjection as it relates to the female
body and the womb, as well as Barbara Creed’s writings on what she calls the monstrous-
feminine. I also look at the ways that technology (video cassettes, television, cell phones)
merge with ghosts and more traditional horror movie motifs to create a new kind of
monstrosity—in particular, the way that the notion of endless technological copying and
reproduction is tied to the idea of reproduction and birth that is so central to all of these
24
films. Finally, I attempt to show the ways in which the female children depicted in these
films exist in a space of temporal paradox—embodying hopes for a bright and prosperous
future while simultaneously being tied to notions of a fixed, unchanging past; existing as
abject figures of violence and death in the same moment that they embody the delicate,
physically unthreatening qualities of the girl child.
My fourth and final chapter focuses on a single work, Oshii Mamoru’s 2008
animated film The Sky Crawlers, which depicts an alternate world in which war has been
eradicated and child pilots known as kildren are used to fight elaborate aerial battles
staged for public entertainment (and, paradoxically, in the name of maintaining peace). In
examining The Sky Crawlers as a work of both science fiction and anime, I first draw on
writings on these subjects by Tom Lamarre, Otsuka Eiji, Susan Napier, Steven T. Brown,
and Sharalyn Orbaugh. I expand on these authors’ theories to examine the figure of the
child soldier / genetically engineered child pilot-for-spectacle in the context of the anime
medium, looking at the ways in which the specific visual style and imagery of The Sky
Crawlers is especially well-suited to depictions of monstrous children, and to conveying
their symbolic status as creatures existing in a temporal and societal limbo. Beyond an
analysis of the film’s imagery, I also examine the more general theme of war as spectacle
and the child’s role in that spectacle, with reference to the work of Paul Virilio, Jean
Baudrillard, and Frank Capra’s Why We Fight film series.
My conclusion looks at a recent development in the monsterizing of children: bill
156, the Tokyo Metropolitan Government’s so-called “non-existent youth” bill, which
seeks to regulate the depiction of children in sexually explicit manga (Japanese comic
25
books). I look at the language and the ideas that surrounded the drafting of this bill,
which essentially sought to protect one hypothetical child (“minors” or “youth”) from
another (the “non-existent youths” depicted in sexual situations deemed “reckless” or
“anti-social”). Beyond an examination of the significance of this bill and the kinds of
manga it would censor, I look at the common themes and ideas that arise in all of the
texts under discussion here, the notable differences between the monstrous children in
those texts, and the ways in which an analysis of monstrous child characters in literature
could be extended to other national literatures and types of media
As a character and an idea that spans textual forms, genres, and historical periods,
the monstrous child has been and continues to be a figure that offers myriad avenues for
discussion. A comprehensive survey of all monstrous child characters in Japanese film
and literature is beyond the scope of this project—as I hope I have made clear in this
introduction, I do not intend to provide an encyclopedia of monstrous children and their
meanings, though such a volume would certainly be worthwhile. Instead, in selecting a
varied group of monstrous children depicted in different texts during different periods of
historical rupture, I hope to foster a discussion that begins with the monstrous child but
moves beyond it, toward questions of how texts and their characters illuminate the fears,
paradoxes, and shifting boundaries of a particular moment in time.
A note on translations: when no English translation of written or visual material
was available, I have of course made use of my own translations. Given the high quality
and accuracy of English translations of certain works under discussion here, however, I
have frequently cited those translations when quoting text. I often quote only the English
26
translation of a text, though I include the Japanese original whenever the latter differs
noticeably from the former. In the case of Ishikawa Jun’s Yakeato no Iesu, however, I
found William J. Tyler’s translation, while beautiful and readable, to be significantly
different from the original Japanese. Thus while I referenced Tyler’s work and am
indebted to him for his extensive translations of and research on Ishikawa, the
translations of text from Yakeato no Iesu are entirely my own. Any mistakes or
inaccuracies in original translations are also, of course, entirely my own.
27
Chap ter
1

Salvat ion
Thr ough
M onst r osit y :
Childr en
as
Rem nant s
o f
W ar
and

V i ole n ce
i n
Yak eat o
no
I esu
and
Is h i
n o
ra ire k i
The monster is the logical continuation of the cherub.
—James Kincaid

We are tomorrow’s Japan!
—Caption underneath a 1938 propaganda image
of Japanese children in military dress

The third story in Natsume Sōseki’s 1908 collection Yume jūya (Ten Nights of Dream)
depicts a man carrying a blind child on his back. As father and son walk through a forest,
the man begins to feel oppressively weighed down by the child on his back, who taunts
him (“Heavy, am I? I’m going to get heavier”) (Natsume 194). The forest is full of dark
shadows, but the blind boy “illuminates (the man’s) past, present, and future, shining like
a mirror that omits not a single fact” (194). When they reach their destination, the child
reveals that at that very spot one hundred years ago the man murdered a blind man. In
the moment of the narrator’s realization, the child on his back “(becomes) as heavy as a
god of stone” (196). The blind child, an eerie and unsettling presence from the beginning
of the story, is a physical remnant of a hundred-year-old act of violence, weighing
heavier and heavier on the narrator until he acknowledges what he did. With his body
that “shines like a mirror,” the blind child illuminates the uncertainties of past, present,
and future, forcing the narrator to acknowledge his wrongdoing. Though the narrator
desperately wants to “throw away this burden” on his back, the fact that the burden is a
child, and a blind one, forces him to carry on (“Isn’t it good for you that I’m carrying you
28
on my back?”) (194-196). Representing this man’s act of violence and his desire to
unburden himself of his past as an unsettling presence with the body of a child and the
seeming wisdom of an adult creates a mix of poignancy and fear. The man wants to cast
the “incubus” away from him but cannot be so callous toward a figure that, eerie as it is,
maintains an aura of vulnerability and innocence.
In the manner of Sōseki’s ominous yet vulnerable child on a man’s back, children
have long been a useful and poignant device through which to convey the horrors of a
particular kind of violence—that which is wrought by war—in film and literature.
Images and depictions of children are capable of embodying the suffering of an entire
group in very small bodies. These bodies connect present horrors with the possibility of
future violence (these children, of course, could grow up to perpetuate the same atrocities
as the adults around them). Historians Jay Winter and Emmanuel Sivan note that during
the Second World War more “emphasis was put on the killing of harmless people,
especially of children—that is to say, of their own future—whom societies should have
tried to protect” (Sivan and Winter 104). In the Pacific War, the deaths of children in
Japan were accompanied by an unprecedented number of orphans and homeless
children—more than 123,000 according to a 1948 report (Dower 63). In Tokyo, such
children were stigmatized along with disabled veterans and war widows, herded into
trucks and counted in the manner of animals rather than people.
1
Ironically, only a few
years earlier children had been central to Japanese wartime propaganda, their healthy

1
For more on the treatment of children and orphans during the aftermath of the Pacific War, see John
Dower’s Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II, Norton, 1999.
29
bodies and smiling faces used to sell war bonds and promote the idea of the prosperous
future that would come at the end of the war.
In addition to elevating children (or at least the idea of children) to an almost god-
like status during the war, the decades leading up to the Pacific War had seen significant
reforms in child welfare and education, part of the Meiji- and Taishō-era modernization
efforts that included extensive social welfare programs.
2
Such reforms had actually begun
even earlier, during the final decades of the Tokugawa period, when the establishment of
a large number of schools for commoner children created a world for children that was
separate from that of adults, a development also seen in Europe and North America in the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The establishment of such schools, a decline in
infant mortality, and a declining birth rate (which led to a higher value being placed on
individual children) all contributed to changing views of the idea of childhood in Japan
(Platt 965-985). Outside Japan, changes in schooling shifted the focus of childhood from
work to education, making children more of an economic liability (Stearns 55-56).
Philippe Ariès has argued that the concept of childhood itself did not exist in Europe until
these changes took place, citing art and written documents that seem to depict children as
small versions of adults with none of the privileged or protected status commonly
associated with modern childhood (Aries 24). While this claim has long been contested, it
is clear that in Japan and the rest of the world a significant shift in the status of the child

2
For more on Meiji era efforts to crack down on juvenile delinquency and reform education, see David R.
Ambras, Bad Youth: Juvenile Delinquency and the Politics of Everyday Life in Modern Japan, University
of California Press, 2006.
30
took place concurrently with changes in schooling, smaller families, and a decline in
infant mortality, all of which forever changed the way that adults thought about children.
5

By 1945, then, the status of children in Japan as entities separate from adults was
well established. Such a status defined children as being in need of guidance and
protection, and as innocents who could not be held responsible for violence or crime. In
the decades following the Pacific War, Japanese fiction would explore the central
questions of Japan’s involvement and defeat in a variety of ways. Many works of fiction
effectively used child characters as a means to confront the anxieties and confusion that
were so prevalent in a devastated Tokyo where day-to-day survival had become the main
focus. Child bodies, as well as the idea of childhood and everything it represented,
became conduits through which the memories of the immediate past could be both
confronted and re-imagined, and through which the future could be prophesied. In
certain works of fiction, the character of the monstrous child—the child reduced to a feral
state, prone to violence, or existing as a violent reminder of the destruction of the war—
became an especially powerful focus of literary interpretations of war, memory, and
trauma.
In this chapter I will examine two such works of fiction: Ishikawa Jun’s 1946
short story Yakeato no Iesu (“The Jesus of the Ruins”) and Okuizumi Hikaru’s 1993
novel Ishi no raireki (literally The History of Stones, translated by James Westerhoven as
The Stones Cry Out). I hope to show, through my analysis of these two stories, the ways

5
See Kincaid 1998, p. 313. Brian Platt disputes the idea that the Japanese developments in education and
child welfare were an imitation of the West, citing evidence which shows that Japan’s declining infant
mortality rate, shrinking family size, and establishment of schools occurred independent of similar
developments in North America and Europe.
31
in which child characters and child bodies are used as a focal point of wartime violence
and the physical and emotional remnants of conflict. In addition to the stories themselves,
I will examine photographs that depicted children in the 1930s and 1940s, contrasting the
idealized image of children used in propaganda with the feral, violent, and physically
grotesque child depicted in Yakeato no Iesu. I will illustrate the ways in which both
stories deal with the character of the child as a remnant of war and violence, the way that
their characters cling to physical objects as a way to counter the chaos and destruction
around them, and the ways in which their child characters exist as spectral / trace
figures—ghosts that return again and again to force an acknowledgement of the past that
other characters do not want to see.
Yakeato no Iesu and Ishi no raireki are separated by a vast generational, thematic,
and structural divide. Ishikawa Jun lived through the firebombing of Tokyo and depicts
the immediate postwar chaos of the black markets with the eyes of a witness. Okuizumi
Hikaru was born in 1956 and paints his picture of a man traumatized by brutality in the
Philippines through his knowledge of history and other chroniclers of the Pacific War.
6
In
particular, Okuizumi was heavily influenced by the work of Ōoka Shōhei, whose Furyoki
(Record of a POW) and Nobi (Fires on the Plain) both depict the semi-autobiographical
experiences of a starving Japanese soldier in the Philippines near the end of the war.
Ishikawa Jun’s story, while it contains many elements of the bizarre and surreal, is

6
For a detailed analysis of the many categories of authors writing on the Pacific War (including the
categories of those who experienced battle firsthand, those who were children during the war, and those
born immediately after the war), see Angela Yiu’s “Okuizumi Hikaru and the History of War Memory,” in
Imagining the War in Japan: Representing and Responding to Trauma in Postwar Literature and Film
(2010), pp. 140-142.
32
grounded in the realistic depiction of postwar squalor, while Okuizumi’s novel drifts
from the real to the magical, wrapping its story in the structure of a whodunit where the
answer is of little importance. The two stories are united in their use of otherworldly
child characters as a means to connect past, present, and future, and to serve as a conduit
through which the violence and trauma of wartime history can be re-imagined. The
ideology of Ishikawa’s contemporary Sakaguchi Ango, who asserted in his essay
Darakuron (On Decadence)that Japan could only move forward after it had sunk to its
lowest depths, rings true also in Okuizumi’s novel, in which a man haunted by his actions
during the war is able to move on with his life only after penetrating into the deepest
recesses of his brain, confronting the darkness that he had tried so hard to bury—a
darkness that led, however indirectly, to the violent death of one of his sons and the
violent character of the other. In Ishikawa’s story the monstrousness of the child is
obvious. He is feral, physically grotesque, and violent, a creature that even the hardened
denizens of the black market shy away from. The monstrosity of the young boys in
Okuizumi’s novel is not as obvious. The younger child, Hiroaki, is the victim of a brutal
murder, while the older child, Takaaki, is described as “resembling his father more” and
grows up to commit acts of violence and to die a violent death. At the same time, the
boys themselves are not monstrous in the same sense as the feral child in Ishikawa’s story.
Their monstrousness is a remnant of their father’s wartime past and his unwillingness to
confront it. Monstrosity haunts the boys, makes them ghost-like remnants of their father’s
violent past. Ishikawa’s feral boy and Okuizumi’s ghostly brothers are united in a very
specific form of monstrosity: the physical remnant of wartime violence and trauma, the
33
mistakes of adults visited upon children in the form of bodily harm and predatory
behavior.
Beautiful / Abject Monsters:
Competing Fictions of Childhood in 1930s-1940s Japan
Ishikawa Jun’s career spanned five decades, but he is perhaps best remembered for the
fiction and essays that he published in the 1930s and 1940s. Like his contemporaries
Sakaguchi Ango, Oda Sakunosuke, and Dazai Osamu, a group often referred to as the
burai-ha (libertines), Ishikawa wrote provocative prose and criticism that (allegorically)
condemned the blind nationalism of the war years, calling for a celebration of the
physical and an embrace of individual identity over mass ideology. Ishikawa’s depiction
of a feral boy living in the black market and a widow-turned-prostitute as new kinds of
“saints” echoes Ango’s sentiment that “human history will begin with those who have
become black marketeers” (Ango, Darakuron 330). The stories also reflect Ishikawa’s
concern over much of Japan’s seeming desire to forget the past in the wake of defeat, and
the insistence by certain groups that all citizens were to blame, instead of the government
that had led the nation into war.
7
Having always been mistrustful of “prescribed
moralities or ideologies” (Bolles 177), Ishikawa was extremely wary of the “180 degree
turn” in value judgment that seemed to rewrite (or erase) history and not take into
account the everyday struggles of ordinary citizens (Suzuki 42-43).

7
For more on Ishikawa’s views on the government and national ideology in the wake of Japan’s defeat, see
Suzuki Sadami, Ishikawa Jun: Shincho Nihon bungaku arubamu, Shinch ōsha, 1995, and Marilyn Bolles,
“Recovery from the Ruins: The Body and Intellectual Struggle in Ishikawa Jun’s Occupation Period
Fiction,” Japanese Language and Literature, Vol. 40 , No. 2, October 2006.
34
Yakeato no Iesu is one of Ishikawa Jun’s most frequently anthologized stories. It
is told from the point of view of watashi, the nameless, obviously somewhat
autobiographical narrator at the center of many of the author’s wartime and immediate
postwar stories (including Marusu no uta and the previously mentioned Ōgon densetsu).
The story opens with a famously long sentence that describes the Ueno black market,
where the sun beats down fiercely on desperate men and women who sell and buy
anything to survive. The time is 1946, just after Japan’s defeat, when starvation was
common and the black markets were one of the only ways to obtain food and other basic
necessities. Ishikawa’s first-person narrator, watashi, is on his way to Yanaka cemetery
to make a rubbing of an inscription written by Hattori Nankaku. He passes through the
black market, where he encounters the “wild child,” a horrific figure of a young boy
covered in rags and boils. Despite his grotesque physical appearance, the boy carries
himself with a certain amount of pride and charisma, and the narrator begins to think of
him as the new Jesus, “the first of a new race,” a symbol of re-birth come to lead Japan
out of the darkness of its past. After a scuffle with the boy and a woman selling rice balls,
watashi heads off to Yanaka to make his rubbing, only to discover that the boy has
followed him. The boy attacks him and steals his wallet, and in the moment of their
struggle the narrator looks at his face and sees an image of Christ’s suffering—just as the
boy punches him in the jaw. The next day, hoping to catch another glimpse of this
“Jesus,” the narrator returns to the market only to discover that it has been closed down
and swept clean. All that remains of the boy are strange footprints in the dust that
slightly resemble hoof prints.
35
Along with Ōgon densetsu, Kayoi Komachi (“Visits to Komachi”), and Shojo
kaitai (“The Virgin Birth”), Yakeato no Iesu has most often been evaluated in light of its
use of Christian imagery, Ishikawa’s use of mitate (“doubles”), the story’s focus on flesh
(nikutai) vs. spirit (seishin), and the story’s questioning of what government-promoted
ideas of progress and “modernity” truly mean.
8
While all of these perspectives are
relevant to my own analysis, what particularly interests me is the story’s central
character—the wild child—and the ways in which both the idea of this child and the
physical reality of his body are used as intermediaries between worlds. The child-as-idea
is linked to the archetypal wild child and to idealized notions of childhood that were a
mainstay of Japanese wartime ideology, while the boy’s physical body is a horrific
reminder of the realities of war that exist beneath the ideology. The boy’s physical and
mythical selves form a link between Japan’s past, present and future in a figure that is
simultaneously perpetrator and victim of violence, saint and villain, bizarre and familiar.
Figured as a kind of modern-day Jesus, the boy is a physical remnant of recent history, an
image and a reality that forces the story’s other characters to bridge the gap between their
violent past and their equally uncertain future. In imagining him both as violent and as a

8
I use the term “modernity” to refer to a concept, sometimes promoted officially by government and tate
ideology, of an industrialized nation-state that embraces science and rejects superstition in favor of military
might, economic growth, and a move away from a feudal system of wealth and government.
“Modernization” refers to specific initiatives undertaken by governments or government entities toward the
realization of this concept. On the relationship between Yakeato no Iesu and the concept of modernity,
William J. Tyler reads Yakeato no Iesu as a story that depicts “the true emergence of modernity in Japanese
life” in his essay “On ‘The Legend of Gold’ and ‘The Jesus of the Ruins,’” included in his 1998 The
Legend of Gold and Other Stories (Tyler’s 1981 doctoral dissertation, “The Agitated Spirit: The Life and
Works of Ishikawa Jun,” remains the most comprehensive English-language study of Ishikawa’s life and
work). Though they do not specifically address Yakeato no Iesu, Marilyn Bolles and Douglas Slaymaker
both discuss bodily tropes in the fiction of Sakaguchi Ango (Slaymaker) and in Ishikawa’s Ōgon densetsu
(Bolles). Japanese criticism of Ishikawa’s use of Christian imagery and mitate in Yakeato no Iesu includes
Suzuki Sadami’s 2010 Ishikawa Jun to sengo Nihon (edited with William Tyler) and And ō Hajime’s
Ishikawa Jun ron.
36
new breed of saint, Ishikawa’s narrator also endows the wild child with the contradictions
of monstrous childhood—he is frightening but also pitiable, a reminder of an idealized
vision of the past (and childhood itself) in the same moment that he is an emblem of a
very frightening future. Finally, in making a character that the narrator describes as the
“progenitor of a new race” a homeless child, Ishikawa sets the boy up in contrast to
endless propaganda images of children during the war years, images that figured the
child’s body as a tool of the state and ignored the harsh realities (starvation,
homelessness) of children’s everyday lives.
The Abject Body and the Blank Slate
The wild child of Yakeato no Iesu is horrific in a very physical way. He smells foul, his
skin is covered in pus and boils, and his clothes are a clump of filthy rags. Before we
even see the boy, we hear other characters’ reactions to him: “Ugh, you’re filthy.” “Don’t
touch me. Don’t come near me. Don’t you dare touch me.” “Get away from me. Get
out of here.”(Ishikawa 57).
9
The reader’s first impression of the boy is of something
shunned and vile, an outcast even in a place that Ishikawa has described as full of foul
smells and the transactions of beasts (“Mune no waruku naru nioi” / “hitokuchi ni shoubu
no kimaru kedamono torihiki”) (55). The actual physical description of the boy is as
much of an assault to the senses as Ishikawa’s description of the black market and its
denizens:

9
Passages from Yakeato no Iesu are taken from the Bungei bunko edition of Yakeato no Iesu, included in
the collection Yakeato no Iesu / Zenzai (reprinted 2006). Unless otherwise indicated, all translations are my
own.
37
He was the color of ditch mud, and there was no distinction between his rags and
his skin. He was so covered in garbage and dirt that he looked as though he were
covered in scales. His head and face were covered in boils, oozing pus that baked
and dried under the scorching sun, giving off a horrible smell. (Ishikawa 57).

The boy’s body is horrific in the way that it defies boundaries, its insides turned outward
in the form of oozing fluids that crust and stink. His body is abject, a condition defined
by Julia Kristeva as that which “disturbs identity, system, order…the place where
meaning collapses” (Kristeva 2). The wild child’s body manages to disturb order even in
a place mostly given over to chaos.
Though the rules that once governed their own world have fallen by the wayside,
the people of the marketplace still cling to basic laws and taboos, and the abject presence
of the boy threatens to undermine that basic foundation. And yet they must to a certain
extent tolerate his presence, because “that which threatens to destroy life also helps to
define life” (Creed 9). Even as his body repels others with its ruptured surfaces and foul
smells, the boy is also very much alive and existing within the realm of the living,
reminding the people of the marketplace that “that which threatens to destroy life also
helps to define life.” The narrator notes that the boy’s appearance forces the gathered
crowd to look within themselves and to realize with a shudder that they are not so
different (59). Though the narrator is horrified by the appearance of the boy, he is also
strangely drawn to him, describing his “otherworldly dark glow” and the way that his
horrific appearance and smell makes him a spectacle more wonderful than anything else
in the market (59). That which is abject both repels and attracts, causing the people of
the marketplace to heap abuse on the boy and shrink from him in disgust but also to see
their own abject state reflected in him.
38
This dynamic of attraction-repulsion is also a product of the boy’s status as a
“wild child,” a creature that in literature and folklore is traditionally untethered by rules
and laws. Though this particular boy was not raised by wolves or brought up completely
free of adult supervision, he appears to have grown out of the ashes of Tokyo, in the same
way that the people of the marketplace are described as having “sprung forth from the
ruins” (55). He is an animal-child, and as much as he inspires fear and loathing, his
status as a child—an entity separate from adults and one in need of guidance and
protection—means that he cannot be truly condemned for what he does. With his feral
nature that both attracts and repels the boy recalls the archetypal wild child, a character
seen in literature and folklore all over the world who forces questions about states of
nature, the meaning of civilization, and the nature of childhood / innocence. James
Kincaid argues that such wild children “are strangely innocent too, protected by their
ignorance and their ‘primitive’ status from bearing any real responsibility for their
misdeeds” (Kincaid 57). They are both angel and devil, for “The monster is the logical
continuation of the cherub” (141). Though obviously corrupted by the violence of the
recent past, the boy can still be seen as a kind of blank slate, an ideal opportunity for
redemption and salvation via the guidance and education of adults. The problem within
the world of Yakeato no Iesu, of course, is that the adults have also fallen into a state of
barbarism—their physical appearances may be somewhat less repulsive, but looking
within, they realize they are not so different from the boy. How can he offer any real
hope for redemption if those who would redeem him are just as lost?
39
It is very unlikely that images of physically grotesque, feral children like
Ishikawa’s wild child would ever have been used as pro-Japan propaganda during the war
years. At the same time, the idea of children as blank slates was one that undoubtedly
appealed to publishers of wartime photographic magazines, which presented images of
children that were monstrous in a different way—wide-eyed and innocent to the point of
grotesque exaggeration, their eugenically perfect bodies and faces the ideal vehicle to sell
a message of absolute obedience and devotion to state ideology. All the aspects of
wartime and immediate postwar suffering depicted in Yakeato no Iesu were
conspicuously absent in such images—children were frequently presented in idyllic rural
settings, smiling and playing, their bodies healthy. War itself was presented as a game,
with children taking on the adult roles of nurse and soldier as a kind of make-believe.
One such image in Shashin shūhō (Photographic Weekly) depicts a boy who looks to be
about five years old (Figure 2). He is dressed in military fatigues, complete with a
gleaming helmet. He holds a shiny trumpet up to his smiling lips and holds a wooden
sword in his other hand. A rifle is slung over his shoulder, and the caption at the top of
the page reads “Rich Country, Strong Army” (fukoku kyōhei). Though the picture has the
air of a child playing dress-up, the caption at the top reveals the seriousness of the image
and the message, and the purpose of children within this world—to grow up and become
soldiers so that they may contribute to that “rich country, strong army.” The cuteness of
the child—chubby cheeks, large smile, squinting eyes, ruddy complexion, the silliness of
the uniform that’s obviously much too adult for him—mixes with the much darker reality
40
of Japan in February 1938, only two months after the Nanking massacre and a time when
nationalism related to Japan’s invasion of China had reached a fevered pitch.

Figure 2: Boy in military dress on the cover of Shashin sh ūh ō.
Image courtesy of The Japan Archive of Asian Historical Records.

A second collage of images published in the same periodical a few weeks earlier
shows young children playing nurse and soldier, waving the national flag, dressed in
uniforms and staring sternly at the camera, their expressions made all the more comical
by their chubby-cheeked youth (Figure 3). In one picture of a pair of uniformed boys one
is looking through binoculars while the other appears to be picking his nose. The caption
instructs children not to bully each other, to play well together, and to develop a strong
body and a gentle spirit, for “we are tomorrow’s Japan!” (asu no nippon wa bokutachi
da). The pictures depict a fantasy world where the realities of the war in China and the
years of international conflict that would follow it are envisioned as a child’s game. Any
notions of death and mortality are conspicuously absent. These children’s bodies, healthy
41
and smiling, are figured as the illustrious future of Japan, even though in 1938 that future
was inextricably tied to violence and imminent death.

Figure 3: Children playing war in Shashin sh ūh ō.
Image courtesy of The Japan Archive of Historical Records.

Children and child bodies were presented in wartime photographs and propaganda
literature as some of Japan’s most valuable wartime resources. This idea was emphasized
by the kodakara butai (“fertile womb battalion”) campaign, which encouraged women to
give birth to healthy babies, and national “healthy baby contests” held throughout Japan.
Award ceremonies for these contests were often staged in department stores, where
mothers displayed their healthy babies and received certificates for their reproductive
efforts. Similar contests sought to identify the most “eugenically fit” children in Japan,
with photographs of the winners (wearing very little clothing) published in the daily press,
along with their physical measurements and maternal and paternal genealogies
(Robertson 199). Children’s healthy (and sexualized) bodies were thus a valuable
42
commodity during the war years. It is hardly a coincidence that award ceremonies for
these healthy babies and mothers were held in department stores. Images of healthy,
smiling children were also a common feature of war-related advertising. David C. Earhart
writes, “War bonds and soldier’s life insurance advertisements often featured children.
Since your bonds were an investment in the future of the Japanese nation and people,
children were a persuasive force in bond marketing” (191). Where Ishikawa’s wild child
and war orphans like him linked to a past and a future suffused with violence and fear,
the idealized images of children in wartime advertising were reminders of an idyllic past
and a prosperous future to come—even as such images were produced in the context of
future-negating violence.
Though the “magical age” at which Japanese children traditionally leave their
god-like state is usually considered to be seven (coinciding with the shichi-go-san [seven-
five-three] coming-of-age festivals held at temples and shrines throughout Japan),both
Irene Hong-Hong Lin and Brian Platt point out that ceremonies to officially induct
children into the adult world usually took place around the age of fifteen (Platt 968,
Hong-Hong Lin 3). Hong-Hong Lin writes that, until the age of fifteen, children in
medieval Japan “were liminal or socially marginal beings…(who possessed) the ability to
come and go freely between different boundaries set by men and gods.” They were
“…intermediaries between this world and the other world, the inside and outside” (Hong-
Hong Lin 3). In the same way, both the idealized, eugenically perfect child and the wild
child—again, both monstrous in different ways—served as bridges across time and space.
In Yakeato no Iesu, the monstrous child is a hyper-physical, hyper-real vision of
43
everything that was left out of the glossy magazine photos—death, disease, starvation,
filth, and the reduction of human beings to a beast-like state. The vision of childhood—
and consequently of Japan’s future—depicted in the magazines is one completely
divorced from actual physicality. There are child bodies on display, but they are doll-like,
made up to look flawless, showing no signs whatsoever of the suffering and bodily
indignities that were the norm during wartime. The idealized child obfuscates, creating
an idea of a past that never existed and a future that is impossible. The wild child
illuminates, reminding the both Ishikawa’s fictional characters and his readers of a past
they might like to forget, and of a future that is at best uncertain.
Andō Hajime writes that Yakeato no Iesu was published during a time when Japan
was still coming to grips with the death of many fictions—the nationalist ideology that
had propelled the country into war, the idea that Japan was invincible, and in particular
the notion of a divine emperor and Japan as a “land of the gods.” Andō points out that
Yakeato no Iesu was published just a year after the Potsdam Declaration and very shortly
after the January 1, 1946 imperial edict in which the Japanese emperor declared himself
“human” rather than god. The country was stunned by the government’s admission that
their whole history, and really their whole government system, was based on a fiction.
People also realized that it was this fiction that had driven them all into an insane war and
had resulted in horrific losses, as well as the appearance of figures not unlike the “wild
child.” And even though that governmental system had been dismantled, the disaster it
had wrought was right in front of everyone’s eyes. According to Andō, Ishikawa’s story,
like many postwar stories, exposes the irony of a system that elevated a human being to
44
the level of god, used his godlike status (and the idea that Japan was a “land of the gods”)
to engage in violent wars that brought endless suffering and disaster, and then revealed
that the god was human after all. He compares the image of the emperor on a tour
throughout the country, now “human” but still seen as a god by his confused subjects, to
the image of the wild child in the market, covered in filth and boils but seen as a god by
the narrator (Andō 371).
In the same way that the divine emperor and the “land of the gods” were part of
an elaborate fiction that led Japan into years of destructive war, the visual propaganda of
the national and physical body, particularly the body of the child, helped to build a
mythology in which healthy, robust children existed in a world where war was utopia and
an endless game. The future that was envisioned in the physical bodies of these children
(“We are tomorrow’s Japan!”) was one of endless wealth and expansion. The future
envisioned in the physical body of Ishikawa’s “wild child” is one of chaos and
uncertainty, a future of lawlessness and starvation where society has fallen to its lowest
depths and the form it takes when it rises again cannot be predicted. Etched on the body
of this child is also the grim reality of the nation’s past, not the fictional version promoted
in glossy photographic weeklies, but the reality of children without parents or even food,
children once touted as the saviors of the nation and now shunned as outcasts on the
bombed streets. Ishikawa depicts a world that weaves mythologies, fictions, and harsh
realities: the idealized child of propaganda photographs is juxtaposed with starving, feral
child of the marketplace, while the idea of a feral boy as the Messiah is a pathetic
reminder of the destructive emperor-god who turned out to be human after all.
45
Spectral Child Bodies and Ghostly Dialogues
In the same moment that Yakeato no Iesu is a depiction of graphic physicality, an
elevation of nikutai (flesh) over seishin (spirit) in the same moment that the two are
sundered, the landscape of the story is also haunted by multiple ghosts. The marketplace
itself is liminal, a quality defined by Victor Turner as “neither here nor there… betwixt
and between the positioned assigned and arrayed by law” (Turner 1967, p. 95).
10
The
marketplace is poised between the destruction of the immediate past and the uncertainty
of the future, formed out of the desperate struggle for survival and soon scheduled to be
shut down.
11
The wild child himself is a liminal being, a living, breathing reminder of
the horrors of the recent past, with a quality of ghostliness about him: “If he were only a
phantom of the midday moment, even if the figure of the boy were to suddenly vanish, it
is likely that no one in that place would have been surprised” (Ishikawa 60). He is
trapped in multiple in-between spaces—childhood and adulthood, future and past,
wilderness and civilization. He is a figure haunted by the presence of multiple selves. In
the midst of all this impermanence and uncertainty, the narrator is seeking the ghosts of a
more enlightened time in his quest to make a rubbing of an epitaph written by Hattori
Nankaku, even as he is pursued by the ghostly figure of the wild child.
12
William Tyler

10
Turner notes that his definition of liminality comes from Arnold van Gennep, who in 1909 defined the
“liminal phase of rites de passage.”
11
Roman Rosenbaum analyzes both the carnivalesque and liminal aspects of Yakeato no Iesu’s
marketplace in his essay Ishikawa Jun no [Yakeato no Iesu] wo megutte, compiled in Ishikawa Jun to
sengo nihon, ed. William Tyler and Suzuki Sadami, Kokusai nihon bunka kenky ū sentaa, 2010 (2004).
12
There are numerous descriptions of characters’ attachment to seemingly random objects in Japanese
novels and short stories that depict the Pacific War and its aftermath. In Ishikawa’s Marusu no uta (“Mars’
Song”), the narrator wants to find a new (civilian) hat to replace his more military-style cap. In Ibuse
Masuji’s Kakitsubata (“The Crazy Iris”), the narrator is desperate to save an antique water jar that he is
46
writes that the “amnesia of postwar life… (has) erased the memory of (both Dazai
Shundai and Hattori Nankaku) from the public mind” (213). The narrator is thus seeking
out a trace of a person and a time that the rest of the world has forgotten, positioned as
they are in a hyper-present, obsessed only with the day-to-day scrabble for food and basic
necessities. The rubbing is also a tangible thing, a symbol of permanence in a world
defined by destruction and uncertainty. But the world of Yakeato no Iesu has no place for
such certainty, at least not yet. The beacon is the boy. In the multi-layered mitate
(symbolic double)of a young boy, a wild child, and a Messiah, we see the possibilities of
rebirth (albeit a potentially monstrous rebirth), as well as the spectral nature of the boy
himself and the historical moment that Ishikawa’s characters inhabit, a moment haunted
by multiple temporalities and histories / futures even as it struggles, futilely, to exist only
in the present.
In a story about ghosts and ghostly spaces it is appropriate that the wild child is
figured as Jesus, in particular a version of Jesus that, as Andō Hajime argues, vanishes
only to live again in different forms (as evidenced by the strange prints in the dust of the
marketplace at the end of the story).
13
For Ishikawa, this embrace of Christian, and in
particular Catholic imagery was mostly limited to the series of short stories written in the
years immediately following Japan’s defeat. Stories such as Kayoi Komachi, Sh ōjo kaitai,

sure will be destroyed in air raids. In Okuizumi Hikaru’s Ishi no raireki (The Stones Cry Out, discussed
later in this chapter), the protagonist tries to forget his wartime past by focusing on stone collecting. The
privileging of physical objects is a way to cling to permanence and order in a time when constant
destruction and disorder are the norm.
13
In this assessment And ō disagrees with Isoda Koichi, who called the story an “elegy” (banka) with the
vanishing wild child standing in for something lost—for And ō, the wild child / Jesus does not vanish but
disappears only to possibly return again in a different form (And ō 370).
47
and Ōgon densetsu all use images of Jesus, saints, or the virgin Mary as central mitate.
Ishikawa’s depiction of the liminal world of postwar Tokyo and its black markets,
prostitutes, and ideological confusion thus coincided with a transitional period in his own
development as a writer, a period in which he made use of new devices and styles that
would be just as quickly abandoned.
Given the disdain that characters in Ōgon densetsu and Yakeato no Iesu seem to
have for comprehensive ideologies, the narrator’s embrace of Catholic ideology and
notions of a Messiah might seem to be an odd choice. Interestingly, Ishikawa’s own
development as a writer and intellectual was marked by the frequent embracing and
subsequent rejection of a writer or literary figure—his passion for Anatole France was
transferred to André Gide when he began to see the former as an anachronism, and his
early love for Mori Ōgai and Nagai Kafu eventually turned to harsh criticism (Suzuki
1995, Andō 1987, Tyler 1981). There is no lack of irony, then, in presenting a narrator
who immediately imbues a feral boy with the power of a god—only to have that god
punch him in the face and steal his wallet.
Ishikawa’s violent, physically grotesque Christ-figure is a spectral figure in a
spectral landscape, an image of spatiotemporal liminality in a year (1946) poised between
the horrors of the past and the uncertainty of the future, and a place (the black market of
Ueno) that will soon be shut down. It is a place in which people exist in an almost
anarchic state, living only according to their immediate needs. The fact that the wild
child is a boy, a child “somewhere between the ages of ten and fifteen,” further inscribes
him with a sense of birth and renewal—but what kind of birth and renewal? Not the
48
healthy, idealized vision of childhood and childbirth promoted by “healthy baby contests”
and images in popular magazines, but a haunted birth, an image of the child infused with
ghosts of past and future, hovering around a figure not entirely present, existing as a
shade. The wild child belongs a very particular realm of history and memory, one that
those in the present would prefer to forget. In 1966’s “Structure, Sign, and Play in the
Discourse of the Human Sciences,” Jacques Derrida describes a future from which people
“turn their eyes away when faced by the as yet unnamable which is proclaiming itself and
which can do so. . . only under the species of the nonspecies, in the formless, mute, infant,
and terrifying form of monstrosity” (Derrida 1966, p. 293). It is this kind of future that
the wild child represents—he who proclaims himself the “first of a new race” (shuzoku
no sakigumi) in the world of the black market is something unnamable and fearful, but in
the same instant “mute” and “infant” (Ishikawa 64).
The denizens of the black market are indeed those who would “turn their eyes
away” from the monstrous birth that stands before them in the form of the wild child.
Ishikawa’s narrator laments their desire to forget recent history:
Even if counting back to a date as recent as Showa 16 (1941), the historical
meaning of such a distance felt like a separation of some five thousand years...in
this land scorched by flames, wandering into the marketplace that had grown out
of the ruins, one could see not a single person who remained from that time
before...(Ishikawa 58)

The world in which Ishikawa’s characters exist is one “with no yesterday and no
tomorrow” (kinō ga naku mata ashita mo nai), where people exist in a hyper-present and
where survival trumps morality. Their rejection of the past and refusal to look toward the
future allows them to live as outlaws (kyōto), a state of being that the narrators of both
49
Yakeato no Iesu and Ōgon densetsu lament, fearing that in forgetting the lessons of
history people will simply trade one ideology for another. But the appearance of the
“wild child” forces the people, at least momentarily, to step out of their present and look
toward both past and future:
Dirty, foul-smelling, with an otherworldly black sheen, he stood in the midst of
the marketplace and outshone even its stench and filth in his hideous glory. These
lowly people who feared nothing unthinkingly looked within themselves and
realized with a shudder that he resembled them…(59)

The image of the boy’s body, half-starved and covered in boils and pus, reminds
everyone in the marketplace of the all-too-recent past in the same moment that it drives
home the reality of their current state. But his status as a child—one of not-quite-
definable age—points them toward the future, and in seeing their own inward
resemblance to him, even if they are not as physically horrifying, they see their own
frightening future, a future in which, like the boy, they could become murderers, thieves,
or other unimagined creatures. We know that the boy has come to the market before
(“You, back again, huh?”) and will likely come again, the specter that never truly leaves.
For Derrida, the spectral figure “is always a revenant. One cannot control its comings
and goings because it begins by coming back” (Derrida 1993, 11). The question is “not
only whence comes the ghost but first of all is it going to come back? Is it not already
beginning to arrive and where is it going? What of the future? The future can only be for
ghosts. And the past” (37). The boy, like the recent past that so many in the black market
want to forget, announces himself by returning, by presenting an alien but familiar
grotesque image that haunts with the knowledge that it is not going away. He is
50
emblematic of a haunted future and a haunted past, where memories of the war
continually rise up from the dead to color whatever future Japan is carving out for itself.
The specter haunting the black market arrives at a liminal time as well as place,
for we learn early in Ishikawa’s story that the market is to be closed down the next day.
With the end of the market comes the end of a certain brand of lawlessness and hedonism,
the end of the visceral response to years of deprivation in which physical bodies and
physical pleasure were strictly regulated and rationed. For Ishikawa, the black market
represents humanity at its lowest, but it also represents their ability to rise up again and
embrace the ikiyo ochiyo (to live is to fall) ideology of his contemporary and colleague
Sakaguchi Ango. Ian Smith describes Ango’s version of daraku (to fall / become
decadent) as “an inversion of a socially constructed morality and as a fall or decline from
that morality in order to effect positive change as a function of progress for Japan’s
future” (Smith 2) It is fitting, then, that the specter haunting the center of their world is
a child, a boy seemingly grown from the ashes and waste of the ruins (yakeato)
14
who
announces silently to the world, “I am the first of a new race that will flourish in this
wasteland” (64). And not only a child, but Jesus, that “most spectral of specters...at once
the greatest and the most ‘incomprehensible of ghosts’” (Derrida 1993,144). This
grotesque child who is at once familiar and strange, a feral orphan in the same moment
that he is figured as an “incomprehensible” Messiah, is the vehicle through which Japan
can experience a rebirth and re-imagining of its own identity.

14
William Tyler points out that Ishikawa plays a great deal with the word “ato,” which can mean “ruin,”
“trace,” and “scar.”
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A boy, a ghost, a Christ figure, and a remnant of violence and destruction—
Ishikawa’s wild child is layers of absence and presence. He is marked by what he is not,
and what he does not have—he is not yet an adult, he is not a member of civilized society,
and he seems to have no family or kin to speak of. His presence, though, is impossible to
ignore. In his filthy, foul-smelling state he is a physical, sensory reminder of the basic
struggle for survival that all Tokyoites are engaged in, but like Ishikawa’s other Christian
mitate he is more allegory than fully-fledged character. He is the replacement of one
myth with another. The mythology surrounding the emperor was dead. Having blindly
followed a man revered as a god into years of destruction and suffering, only to discover
that the god was mortal after all, Ishikawa now proposes that the people nominate a feral
child as their next god and follow him into a chaotic and uncertain future. Instead of
embracing an ideology of racial and national superiority, he asks that they embrace chaos
and debasement.
This confusion of fictions, along with the desire to embrace that which is at once
necessary and repellant, is played out in a pivotal scene near the end of Yakeato no Iesu.
The scene depicts the narrator’s climactic fight with the wild child, who has followed him
to Yanaka cemetery. Until this point the story has mostly emphasized the boy’s
monstrous characteristics over his youthful ones, though noting his possible age and
frequently referring to him as a “youth” (shōnen). As I mentioned earlier, where once his
youth might have inspired feelings of tenderness and the possibility of a bright future
(along the lines of the children pictured in weekly magazines), feelings toward homeless
children have by 1946 degenerated into disgust and annoyance. Not surprisingly, the
52
narrator’s immediate reaction upon realizing that the boy is following him is fear, and he
refers to the boy as “the enemy” (teki) and “a wolf hungry for blood” (chi ni ueta ōkami).
Yet in the moment that the boy attacks him and they wrestle with one another—a scene
reminiscent of Jacob wrestling with Jesus / God—the narrator is surprised by his “soft
skin” (nameraka na hifu), reminding him that this “enemy” is still in fact a boy. In that
moment he is also feels “a shudder of something like ecstasy” (kōkotsu to naru made ni
senritsu shita) as he sees etched on the boy’s face the pain and suffering of Jesus, the
same pain etched on Veronica’s veil. And in that moment of ecstatic recognition the boy
struggles free, punches him in the face, and steals his wallet.
The sudden compassion that the narrator feels for the boy is of course primarily
linked to the idea of him as Jesus, but it is also linked to the idea of the “wild child” as a
figure of innocence. James Kincaid writes that the wild child figure “does so many
things for us: puts us in touch with our most stirring nostalgic fantasies of what we might
have been, might have come from. Beyond this, the wild child seems to resist all, and in
so doing, allow all. We see in the wild child something of ourselves and something that
also mocks us” (Kincaid 58-59). In 18
th
century France, Victor, the wild child of
Aveyron, seemed to confirm the doctrines of the democracy that was being created; he
“represented the new world: the focus on the future, the confidence in the power of
education, the fervent belief in the goodness of the tutored human heart” (58-59).
15
In
the liminal world of immediate postwar Japan, such ideals are twisted. The boy still

15
Given that Enlightenment ideas held that the ability to learn language was one of the more significant
differences between humans and animals, Victor’s lack of language and the question of whether he could
learn it also made him a case study for what separates animals and human beings.
53
embodies hope for the future, the idea that Japan will eventually climb out of the rubble
and restore itself, but the future that he represents is a scarred one, where the ghostly ato
of violence and destruction continues to haunt a host of possible futures.
What does it mean, then, that in this one moment of religious epiphany and
compassion, the object of the narrator’s emotion punches him in the face and steals his
wallet? And that he takes the charcoal and paper that the narrator would have used to
make his rubbing—that essential symbol of permanence and order—and throws them
crumpled and dirty in his face? In the context of Ishikawa’s postwar short stories and
Sakaguchi Ango’s ikiyo ochiyo ideology, the message is clear: the new order represented
by this violent youth will not be based on an ideology of clear right and wrong. Rather,
the future that the boy represents will be a chaotic one, an order of uncertainty that
humanity must pass through in order to re-gain its humanity. Though frightening, it is
still preferable to the myth of “seishin” that, while idyllic and bright on the surface
(embodied in the images of healthy, smiling children), ultimately led the country to its
lowest depths.
Absence and Presence
In Ishikawa Jun’s depiction of a burned-out shell of Tokyo and a monstrous child who is
a product of it, we see the spectral nature of Japan’s past, present, and future, the
competing mythologies of the nature of childhood and national identity, and the way that
monstrous child bodies serve as a physical remnant of war and violence, their grotesque
yet vulnerable selves markers of both absence and presence. Akira Lippit describes the
54
physical traces left by the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as a kind of
trace-erasure, a remnant that is also a negative space:
Seared organic and nonorganic matter left dark stains, opaque artifacts of once
vital bodies, on the pavements and other surfaces of this grotesque
theater…Nothing remains, except the radiation…Instantly penetrated by the
massive force of radiation, the hibakusha were seared into the environment with
the photographic certainty of having been there. (Lippit 94-95).

The bodies affected by the atomic bombings are both traces and erasures, made invisible
and hyper-visible in the moment of the blast. The end of Yakeato no Iesu describes
another kind of trace / erasure: the closing of the black market and the strange footprints
left in the dust. Having returned to the market hoping to catch another glimpse of the boy,
the narrator is shocked to discover that the market has been completely dismantled, roped
off and guarded by guards that look like “white-clothed posts” (shirofuku no kui), its
insides resembling “a stable without a horse” (uma no inai kyūsha) (71). The area within
the ropes appears to have been “swept clean” (kirei ni hakinarashite), as if “all that was
there until yesterday had been sucked into the depths of the earth” (kinō made no
uzoumuzou wa mina chi no soko ni suikomarete shimatta) (71). The narrator wonders if
everything that happened the day before might have been a dream, having only the bite
marks of the wild child to prove to him that it wasn’t.
What has been erased and dismantled is not just the market itself, but the lawless
world that it represented. As quickly as that world seemed to grow out of the earth and
“spread out like a weed out of a clump” (zassō no habikoru you ni ikka tamari), it just as
quickly vanishes back into the earth. The liminal moment of barely contained anarchy
that followed defeat has ended, to be replaced by what sort of new order no one is quite
55
certain. The world of the black market is gone, erased, but the physical space remains,
guarded and marked off by ropes and empty reed stalls, a reminder of everything that
came before.
And of course there is one more trace in the midst of this erasure—the strange
prints on the ground that appear to have been made by a beast (fuminokosareta kemono
no ashimoto), resembling hoof prints (hizume no katachi no you ni mieta). This mark, not
the mark of Hattori Nankaku that the narrator wanted to preserve on paper, is what
remains. The wild child is the last creature to leave his imprint on this erased space,
further calling into question his status as human, animal, or something in between. Andō
Hajime argues that the ending is reminiscent of Herod’s slaughter of the infants and
Jesus’ flight from Bethlehem, adding that it drives home the idea that Christ exists in
many forms, dying only to live again—truly the “greatest and ‘most incomprehensible of
ghosts,’” arriving only to leave and come back again. The wild child has become W.B.
Yeats’ rough beast slouching toward Bethlehem, birthed from the ruins of Tokyo and
representative of Sakaguchi Ango’s ikiyo ochiyo version of a second coming. In the end,
the most visible trace-erasure that remains is that of monster and child.
The Child Who Wasn’t There (Or Was He?):
Trace-Erasure and War Memory in Okuizumi Hikaru’s Ishi no raireki
Nearly fifty years after Ishikawa Jun published Yakeato no Iesu, novelist
Okuizumi Hikaru won the 1993 Akutagawa Prize for Ishi no raireki (translated by James
Westerhoven as The Stones Cry Out), a story of one man’s attempt to block out the
memory of his involvement in the Pacific War, an attempt that ultimately fails because of
56
two very visible reminders: his two children and the violence that surrounds both of them.
Like Ishikawa’s wild child, Okuizumi’s child characters are also specters, facets of their
father’s own personality and memory and ultimately the pathway to his own salvation
through a kind of destruction and rebirth not unlike the ikiyo ochiyo philosophy portrayed
in Yakeato no Iesu. The older boy is not a perpetrator of violence and bears little
resemblance to the feral, grotesque child in Yakeato no Iesu, but he is haunted by the
monstrosity of his father’s past, existing less as an actual character and more as a physical
remnant of the bloodshed that Manase has tried to erase. The younger son, meanwhile,
grows up to be a violent and disaffected youth who may or may not have had a hand in
his brother’s murder. Both boys are, like Ishikawa’s wild child, more allegory than flesh
and blood character, liminal beings in their father’s liminal universe, conduits through
which past and present can finally be reconciled. In the violent death that claims the older
son and the life of violence that claims the younger, these children embody the
monstrosity that comes not only from a violent past, but from the inability to reconcile
that past with present and future.
Ishi no raireki begins in a cave on the Filipino island of Leyte, where the soldier
Tsuyoshi Manase is one of a group of starving, desperate men under the command of a
ruthless captain. He becomes close to a compassionate lance corporal, who teaches him
the importance of history through stones. As conditions in the cave become more
desperate, the captain begins ordering the killing of sick or wounded soldiers, and the
uncertainty of whether Manase himself took part in the killings—especially of the lance
corporal that he had come to love and respect—will haunt him long after the war ends.
57
After the war Manase marries, opens a used bookstore, and immerses himself in stone
collecting, doing his best to erase his past. He has two sons and forms an especially
strong bond with his older son, Hiroaki, who shares his passion for stone collecting. But
when Hiroaki is mysteriously murdered in a cave where father and son often looked for
stones, Manase’s life begins to fall apart. His younger son, Takaaki, turns to a life of
delinquency and violence, eventually dying a violent death. His wife becomes an
alcoholic and loses her mind. Finally forced to confront his past, Manase returns to the
scene of his older son’s death and in a dream-like sequence travels back into the world of
the Leyte cave, where he receives absolution from the lance corporal. It is only through a
direct confrontation with the violence of his past that Manase is able to heal the scars of
the present.
The bulk of Okuizumi’s novels published after Ishi no raireki have been a mix of
science fiction and mystery, and Angela Yiu points out that he uses the “whodunit” style
to great effect in Ishi no raireki, setting up unanswered questions about Manase’s past
and Hiroaki’s murder but never providing conclusive answers (Yiu 144-145). Yiu notes
that the book also contains science fiction-like elements, placing its protagonist in more
than one place at a time and allowing him to seemingly travel back in time in the final
scene (though one could argue that this is a journey that takes place more in his own
mind than in the physical reality of the story). What is of primary interest for the purpose
of this study, however, is Okuizumi’s depiction of Manase’s children, who from their
very first appearance have an air of unreality about them. Yiu argues that their names,
Hiroaki and Takaaki, which both contain the kanji for crystal ( 晶), indicate the boys’ link
58
to Manase’s passion for stone collecting, as well as the fact that they are “facets” of his
own personality. I would take this a step further to say that the boys appear to be pieces
of Manase’s history, the crystallization of a blurred past that he would like to forget but is
forced to view up close and under a microscope—not unlike the way he views stones—
when violence re-enters his life through his sons. Through his sons, Manase is able to
confront the monsters of his past, moving from a life of blurred memories and ambiguity
to one of (crystal) clarity.
The narrative of Ishi no raireki is divided between descriptions of real time and
Manase’s flashbacks / dreams. Though Manase often has trouble distinguishing the real
world of his present life from dreams and flashbacks of the war, a surface reading of the
story would give no strong indications that Manase’s sons were figments of his
imagination—they are presented as living, breathing characters. But the ambiguity
surrounding their existence cannot be ignored. In addition to the “crystal” in each of their
names, there is the summer that Hiroaki spends with his father searching for stones,
which Manase has trouble remembering clearly, describing it as dream-like:
All Manase could remember of that summer was the light pouring over everything.
Time and again, trying to recall all that had happened, he looked back on those
days, always feeling as if he were trying to chase an ebbing dream. Maybe it had
all been impossible from the start, he and Hiroaki, floating in a transparent vessel
filled with light. The vessel drifted before his eyes, but when he reached out it
moved away, and if he suddenly grabbed for it the vision burst like a soap bubble.
Was the past nothing more than an illusion, unrelated to his real self?
(Westerhoven 62)
16

16
English translations are taken from James Westerhoven’s 1999 translation of Ishi no raireki.
59
Manase doubts the reality of his experience with his son, thinking of it as an “ebbing
dream” (tōi yume) and an “illusion” (genei). He tells himself that “fifth graders are
simply not interested in geology,” that Hiroaki had absorbed too much knowledge for
someone so young, and that he was definitely “different” (ijōji). He wonders if Hiroaki’s
existence was “an illusion, or perhaps the crystallization of a dream” (Hiroaki wa kakū no
sonzai, arui wa hitotsu no yume no kesshō, jibun ni ataerareta okurimono de wa
nakatta).
17
His memories with his son blur in the same way as his memories of the war,
memories he describes as “worm-eaten” (mushikui) and full of “black holes that became
wider every day” (kuroi ana wa hi ni hi ni hirogari). Ironically, his sons will be the
conduit through which he is finally able to confront his own past, viewing it not as a
“landscape in monochrome” (hitoshii irodori no fūkei), but as a crystallized, vivid world
bathed in light.
The uncertain, dream-like quality that surrounds Manase’s memories of his past
and his experiences with his sons exists in sharp contrast to the tangible stones he collects.
The stones, at least, are real and certain, and in his hours of obsessive cataloguing and
staring into a microscope Manase can distance himself from the uncertainty of his past
for a present that he can see and touch in the palm of his hand. Like the rubbing of
Hattori Nankaku’s inscription in Yakeato no Iesu and the more general trope of wartime /
immediate postwar characters who privilege objects over people, Manase’s stones are a
piece of permanence in a very impermanent world. Ultimately, though, his son Hiroaki’s

17
In the original Japanese the idea of Hiroaki as a “crystal” is made especially clear with the juxtaposition
of his name (裕晶) with the word for “crystal” (kesshou 結晶).
60
sudden and violent death by stabbing in the same cave where he and Manase had often
looked for stones forces Manase to abandon the certainty of his stone collecting and
confront the ambiguity of his own memories. He begins to have nightmares about Leyte,
where he may have been made to kill the lance corporal that he respected so much, and
his memories of Leyte mix with images of Hiroaki’s death: “ ‘Kill him,
Manase!’…Manase brings the sword down with all the force he can muster…Still the
man refuses to die. ‘Please! Please, don’t!’ The voice begging for mercy has suddenly
changed into that of a child…” (Westerhoven 88). Awake and washing his hands at the
sink he imagines blood that will not wash off. Much later, in a confrontation with his
now-grown younger son, Takaaki tells Manase that he was with Hiroaki in the cave on
the day that he died. He recalls riding away on his bike and leaving Hiroaki alone, only
to realize that he had blood on his hands: “When I got home, I tried desperately to wash it
off.” Takaaki recalls hearing a voice in the cave, a voice that Hiroaki was convinced
belonged to Manase, though Takaaki knows this is impossible, as Manase was away on a
trip: “But of course you weren’t there that day. Were you?” (Westerhoven 124-126)
Despite the “whodunit” setup of the story, the point of Hiroaki’s murder and the
confusion surrounding it is not to determine exactly who killed him and why, but to
illustrate the ways in which Manase’s violent past has spilled over into the lives of his
sons. He may not have been physically present in the cave on the day of Hiroaki’s death,
but something was clearly there, some remnant of his past. His own memories of the war
that confuse reality and fiction seem to have been passed on to Takaaki, who remembers
blood on his hands that he was unable to wash off, despite Manase’s insistence that there
61
was no way such a young child could have killed his brother. It is ultimately through
Hiroaki and Takaaki’s deaths, through the monstrousness that manifests itself in their real
bodies and more ambiguous existences, that Manase is able to revisit and exorcise the
ghosts of his own past.
Despite the many years that have passed since his time in Leyte, Manase has
clearly not been able to put any real distance between himself and the trauma of his past.
This lack of distance means that he is unable to process what happened to him, and that
his violent past continues to bleed into his present, both metaphorically and, in the
occasionally ambiguous reality of the novel, literally. Ironically, those who were closest
to a traumatic event often have the most difficulty processing it, a concept that writings
on trauma often emphasize. In their analysis of trauma and its relationship to historical
memory, Cathy Caruth and Shoshana Felman describe a “crisis of truth” that occurs when
the “overwhelming immediacy” of a traumatic event produces a “belated uncertainty”
about what actually happened (Caruth 6). The problem, Caruth argues, is not “having too
little or indirect access,” but rather the reverse—the very act of being immersed in an
event makes it inaccessible, incomprehensible. Dori Laub goes so far as to say that, due
to both its overwhelming immediacy and the “delusional ideology” imposed upon the
victims by the perpetrators, the Holocaust was an event that “produced no witnesses”
(Laub 66). For Caruth, the nature of trauma and memory
…extends beyond the question of individual cure and asks how we in this era can
have access to our own historical experience, to a history that is in its immediacy
a crisis to whose truth there is no simple access….the attempt to understand
trauma brings one repeatedly to this peculiar paradox: that in trauma the greatest
confrontation with reality may also occur as an absolute numbing to it, that
62
immediacy, paradoxically enough, may take the form of belatedness…a history
can be grasped only in the very inaccessibility of its occurrence. (6-8).

In a work such as Ishi no raireki, written by an author with considerable distance from
the traumatic event he describes, the problem of immediacy and inaccessibility would not
seem to be overwhelming. But for his fictional protagonist, the question of how to arrive
at the truth of his wartime past—if such a truth can even be accessed—is deeply tied to
Tsuyoshi Manase’s relationship to the events around him, to the immediacy of his
experience in the Leyte cave that results in a “belated uncertainty” that haunts him.
The paradox of immediacy / inaccessibility grows more complicated when we
examine the concepts of “official” memory and counter-memory; the versions of history
recorded for posterity versus the narratives recorded by individuals that often differ
significantly from the official record. Citing Foucault’s Language, Counter-Memory,
Practice, Reiko Tachibana argues that certain postwar narratives in Japan and Germany
exist as a form of “counter-memory,” an alternative to the accepted version of history. In
the case of Japan, Tachibana argues, the dropping of the atomic bombs “coalesced into an
overwhelmingly powerful symbol of suffering that that partially obliterated other
Japanese responses to the war” (Tachibana 10). As a result, much of Japanese postwar
literature “seems more frequently to protest against victimization than to acknowledge
the atrocities committed by the Japanese army in Asia” (10). While neither Yakeato no
Iesu or Ishi no raireki directly addresses Japan’s brutality toward indigenous populations
in China, Korea, or South-East Asia, both stories do move beyond the notion of the
Japanese as victims by presenting postwar worlds in which notions of responsibility, guilt,
and victimhood are confused. In Yakeato no Iesu, the narrator scorns the way that many
63
are eager to completely forget who they were and what they did during the war, and notes
that the feral, monstrous boy is horrific to them precisely because they realize that they
have sunk to an equally low point. For Manase, rejection of victimhood takes the form of
claiming responsibility for the violence surrounding his sons and the madness of his wife,
ultimately “penetrating to the back of the cave” to face his own actions. In taking control
of his own memory, his story becomes a “counter-memory,” a defiant response to official
records. Both stories attempt to make sense of the events of the war not by providing
clear answers, but by embracing chaos and uncertainty, and by presenting traditionally
victimized characters who see themselves more as perpetrators of violence.
The trajectory of Manase’s journey from the Leyte cave to the resolution of his
past also adheres to the qualities of traumatic memory outlined by Caruth and Laub.
After living through unspeakable horrors during the war, Manase first experiences a kind
of numbness—his inability to process and make sense of what happened to him causes
him to simply shut the door on the memories, settling into an everyday life with a wife
and children. But the trauma of what he has lived through enters his life in unexpected
ways—in his passion for stone collecting, in the sudden violence of his son’s death, and
in the subsequent nightmares that blur his own violent acts with the death of his child.
He is truly “possessed by the event,” as Caruth would say, forced to quite literally relive
it again and again, until finally, having taken control of his memories and re-writing them,
he is able to leave the past behind. His repeated re-living of the event also constitutes
what Caruth would describe as “a continual leaving of its site” (10)—trauma is a means
of survival by which the repeated re-visitation of the traumatic event allows the victim to
64
move further and further away from it. In broader historical terms, I would argue that
Manase’s experience points to the idea that the only way to move beyond the past and
into the future is to continually examine and critique a traumatic past event, letting each
examination serve as a step away from the past and toward the future. For Manase, the
vehicle through which he is able to enact the survival mechanism of trauma is his
children, the physical and spectral remnants of his violent past who ultimately serve as
the means of his salvation.
Monsters in film and literature have long existed as blank slates onto which the
terror of the moment can be projected or vanquished. Yoshikuni Igarashi writes of the
ways that monstrous bodies, particularly the bodies of professional wrestlers and the
screen monster Gojira, allowed the Japanese public to revisit the horrors of war—and
even to tame those horrors by “slaying” the monster. With the establishment of the
foundational narrative of postwar Japan, a narrative in which “any history between the
United States and Japan that was incongruous with the political necessity of the Cold War
was soon repressed in the United States as well as in Japan” (20), direct confrontation
with past memories was prohibited (105). Monstrous bodies
…became replacements for tangible markers of loss. Memories of the war, even
without specific markers, were still ubiquitous in postwar society. However,
increasingly removed from the scene of destruction and devoid of particular
references, the memories were transformed into amorphous destructive forces.
Monstrous forms that defy human comprehension were burdened with the mission
to represent memories of war loss. (Igarashi 114).

Though Manase’s desire to shut himself off from his wartime past cannot logically be
connected to foundational narratives of U.S.-Japan relations, his ultimate decision to
confront his past through the bodies of his children—through both their spectral selves
65
and the physical reality of their deaths—bears a striking resemblance to the public’s
confrontation of war memories through the destruction and taming of fictional monsters
(as opposed to the very “real” monstrousness of enemy soldiers and the atomic bomb).
Takaaki’s revelation that they both may have been involved with Hiroaki’s death, as well
as Takaaki’s own death, become the final motivators for Manase to confront his past. In
taking responsibility for his sons’ deaths he also, indirectly, takes responsibility for his
involvement in the war:
The person who has driven my wife insane and sent my two children to their
death is none other than me. Once that unshakeable conviction had crystallized in
his heart, he directed his anger at himself and at a mysterious black shadow
standing behind him and keeping his body locked in an unrelenting embrace. He
would have been unable to give it a name, and when he tried to get a better view
of it, his heart shrank with fear. (Westerhoven 128).

The “mysterious black shadow” that Manase is afraid to look at has been with him all his
life, a manifestation of everything that he has buried since his time in the Leyte cave. It
is a specter defined by temporal uncertainty. I return again to Derrida, who describes the
specter in terms of its constant movement through time and space: “…no one can be sure
if by returning it testifies to a living past or to a living future, for the revenant may
already mark the promised return of the specter of living being…a ghost never dies, it
remains always to come and to come-back” (Derrida 1993, 99). The shadow that Manase
fears is a shadow of his past, present, and future, a threat that must be confronted if he is
to move on with his life. With the deaths of his sons the shadow’s embrace moves from
ambiguity to clarity within his memories, and he realizes what is necessary: “To penetrate
to the back of the cave. To conquer his fear and walk on. To do what he must do:
confront the thing waiting for him at the back of the cave” (Westerhoven 132).
66
Communicating With Loss, Communicating With Monsters
Having come to terms with the deaths of his sons and the need to confront his own past,
what Manase really desires is the ability to communicate with the dead. Not only his
dead children and his dead comrades, but the painful world that he worked so hard to
bury. In Japan, such communication has traditionally happened through spirit mediums
and sites such as Osore-zan, a mountain described by Marilyn Ivy as “a doubled ‘other
world,’ a place that is visited both to memorialize and thus safely distance loss (here
described as ‘death’), and to communicate with that loss” (Ivy, Discourses, 148). Such
places allow for a “fragmented revoicings of that which has passed on. The dead can
literally be made to speak again on Mt. Osore” (143). For Manase, it is imperative that
the dead speak again, and the way that they are ultimately able to speak is through the
trauma surrounding the deaths of his children, and through the space of a cave where he
once collected stones with Hiroaki. Like Mt. Osore and its famed spirit mediums, the
space of the cave and the fact of his sons’ deaths becomes a “doubled ‘other world’” for
Manase, a space and an event that allows him to communicate with loss.
It is also imperative that Manase’s communication with the dead be conducted
through a mediating event / space—as Yoshikuni Igarashi has pointed out, monsters and
ghosts often served as effective stand-ins for the reality of a wartime past that could not
be looked full in the face. What Manase experienced was in a sense unspeakable,
incommunicable, a horror so vast that, like the singular moment of the atomic bomb, it
leaves the witness mute or incapable of conveying “what really happened.” In this sense
it is appropriate that Okuizumi Hikaru has situated his story within the basic parameters
67
of a mystery that lacks the clear resolution of the traditional mystery novel, because to
clearly answer the questions raised by what Manase and those like him have witnessed
would be impossible. Atomic bomb survivors speak of the futility of language and words
in describing what they saw: “One has so many things to say, but speaking always feels
like a lie” (Ozaki Shiro, qtd. in Treat 1995, p. 28). Manase’s own dilemma is similar to
that of many A-bomb victims: “Does one abandon the past—and perhaps risk living in an
ersatz present—or remain obsessed, and thus equally compromised, by it?” (Treat 1995,
p. 29). Since abandoning his past has been unsuccessful, he must immerse himself in it,
but he runs the risk of being consumed by it. There is some solace, then, in the indirect
nature of his confrontation—it moves him into the realm of the fantastical, into a space
that seems to exist in two time periods at once, and into a re-imagined version of what
happened to him in the Leyte cave. Re-imagined but not imaginary, not false—it is a re-
imagining that finally allows the truth to be bathed in light.
The primary means through which Manase is able to achieve resolution with his
past is the monstrous child, his own sons, who have ceased to be only his sons and have
taken on the quality of historical mirror, historical remnant, and passageway through time.
Their particular brand of monstrousness is the monstrousness of a father’s violence
visited on his children, and of a liminal, ghost-like state that they are never able to leave
behind. Manase’s children were never going to have the chance to “grow up,” to achieve
autonomous existence—they remained imprisoned in their father’s ahistorical world,
forced to exist as remnants of his past and as opposing facets of his own personality.
68
The site of Manase’s confrontation is the cave where his son was killed, now
transformed—in his own mind or in some temporary space of time-travel—into the cave
in Leyte. His nightmares that mixed the dying voice of the lance corporal with the dying
voice of his own son come to life in the cave. But the confrontation he experiences will
not be direct, nor will it solve the mystery of who killed his older son or whether he,
Manase, in fact killed the lance corporal at the urging of his sadistic captain. Rather,
Manase’s journey into the darkness of the cave, his confrontation of the “mysterious
shadow,” will be an opportunity for a reconciliation with his past—a re-visioning of the
death and suffering that have permeated his life as part of a larger history of life, death,
memory, and the dead brought back to life. Ultimately, it will be the ghostly presences of
his children, the monstrous bodies wrapped up in the shadow that he feared, that will
provide the means for him to re-imagine his life as a narrative of re-birth.
In the cave, Manase sees again the image that has haunted him for so many years.
A sword in his hand, the dying lance corporal at his feet, he hears the voice of his
commander telling him to kill the lance corporal –they are all dying anyway, and the
limited food supply cannot be wasted on those who might as well be dead already.
Manase holds the sword, ready to strike, but then the lance corporal begins talking to him
about stones, reminding him: “Even the most ordinary pebble has the history of the
universe written on it.” Holding out a stone to Manase, he tells him, “One day, our bones
will be like this. This is how the dead come to life again.” The two men chant the names
of stones like a sutra—“Hornblende-gabbro, quartz-diorite, variolite, olivine basalt”. In
speaking the names of the stones aloud, Manase and the lance corporal turn language into
69
a talisman to awaken the dead. Manase finally flings his sword away, running out of the
cave with the lance corporal on his back. By the side of a river the lance corporal
continues his story of the long history of the earth written in stones, and Manase realizes
that his words “were spoken by a human being and offered incontestable proof that he
was still alive.” Finally, the lance corporal gives him a stone and tells him, “This is what
the children gave me. The two children that came to the cave…They gave it to me.” The
novel ends with the river “bathed in a transparent light,” the dark shadows and black
holes of Manase’s memory finally illuminated, the grey stone in his hand “changed into a
radiant crystal.” (Westerhoven 199, 133-138).
What Manase’s children have given to the lance corporal, and to Manase himself,
is the crystallization of his own memories, the transformation of a “worm-eaten”
landscape full of “black holes” into a vividly clear world of light. Where the “vessel of
light” that surrounded Manase and Hiroaki’s summer was an escape, a way of distancing
himself from reality, the light that fills the final moments of Manase’s return to his past
serves to bring it closer to him. In the lance corporal’s description of “how the dead
come to life again,” Manase realizes that his own memories do not need to stay buried—
that in fact their “coming to life again” is what will allow him to move on with his own
life. The specters of his children, once dark reminders of his own violent past, are now
the conduits through which he can reach salvation, literally handing over the key to the
mystery in the form of a plain stone that transforms into a radiant crystal. In the multi-
layered metaphor of the cave that stands in for his own mind, the site of Hiroaki’s murder,
and the center of his own suffering during the war, Manase is able to re-imagine history
70
not as a darkness to be buried, but as part of an endless cycle etched in stone, a place
where the dead can be buried and simultaneously come to life again.
Chapter Conclusion
I return now to Natsume Sōseki’s blind child in the forest, the eerie and oppressive
presence that weighs heavily on the back of the narrator. A child who embodies a single
act of violence, growing heavier and heavier on the back of its perpetrator, until finally
the knowledge of what he has done makes the burden “as heavy as a god of stone.”
Imbued as they are with countless acts of wartime violence and suffering, the children of
Ishi no raireki and Yakeato no Iesu constitute an even heavier burden—the burden of
history buried and obfuscated. But unlike S ōseki’s blind child, the weight of these
children does not overwhelm the bearer when all is revealed. Rather, it is in the moment
that the past is revealed that the monstrous burden is lifted, and the monstrous child
ceases to be a figure of horror. In Yakeato no Iesu the prints left in the white dust of the
marketplace signal the end of one stage of history and the beginning of another, the end
of both the black market and the period of chaos that followed the war. In Ishi no raireki
a crystal given by Manase’s sons bathes his world in light, finally offering clarity and
understanding of the unfathomable violence that has haunted him for years. Though
frightening in their physical abjection, their ghostliness, and their violent acts, these
children are ultimately the passageway through which those around them can move
beyond a dark past and into an illuminated future.

71
Chap ter
2

E tch e d
I n t o
H um a n
M e m ory :

Ō e
K enz abu r ō
and
t he
A t om ic
Child
In early 2011, as I was conducting research for and writing this chapter, Japan was
struggling to recover from one of the worst disasters in its history: the March 11, 2011
magnitude 9 earthquake and subsequent tsunamis that reduced entire towns to rubble. In
Tokyo, aftershocks continued for weeks, and in Tohoku, tens of thousands of people lost
everything they owned and were forced to live in communal shelters for months. Whole
swathes of land were flattened into brownish-gray piles of debris, with only a few
concrete buildings dotting the landscape. Images from the tsunami-devastated areas
recalled the landscape of Hiroshima immediately after the dropping of the atomic bomb.
Ironically, the post-quake issue that most riveted the international community also
brought Hiroshima to mind—the continuing crisis at the Fukushima Dai-Ichi nuclear
power plant, where tsunamis damaged the cooling systems and sent the Tokyo Electric
Power Company scrambling to prevent a full-scale meltdown. In the days immediately
following the quake and tsunami a 30-km evacuation zone was put into effect, but
reliable information was difficult to obtain, and exaggerated or misinformed reporting
was common—at one point it appeared that the French embassy in Tokyo was warning
its citizens to leave the city because of the threat of an approaching “nuclear plume”.
1

The report was discredited (it had, in fact, not come directly from the French embassy),

1
Regan, James, and Vey, Jean-Baptiste. “France Urges Citizens to Leave Tokyo Area.” Reuters, March 13,
2011; “French Embassy Fuels Panic With False Message About Approaching Radiation,” Japan Probe,
March 15, 2011.
72
but the “nuclear plume” scenario was picked up by other media outlets,
2
and other
embassies began handing out iodine pills.
3
Many international media outlets latched onto
the idea of “another Chernobyl.” In Japan there are reports of Fukushima evacuees
facing prejudice amid fears of “contamination,” an eerie echo of the stigma faced by A-
bomb survivors.
4

While the atmosphere of panic has long since ceased to dominate the media
narrative of Fukushima, the crisis has revealed that international fears of nuclear power
are still strong, while knowledge and understanding remain scattered. In addition to
Chernobyl, the invisible but deadly threat of radiation has galvanized anti-nuclear
activism in Japan and, along with images of complete devastation, brought back
memories of Hiroshima. In the March 28, 2011 issue of The New Yorker magazine,
novelist, Nobel laureate, and longtime anti-nuclear activist Ōe Kenzaburō published a
short essay entitled “History Repeats.” In it he writes:
What did Japan learn from the tragedy of Hiroshima? One of the great figures of
contemporary Japanese thought, Shuichi Kato, who died in 2008, speaking of
atomic bombs and nuclear reactors, recalled a line from “The Pillow Book,”
written a thousand years ago by a woman, Sei Shonagon, in which the author
evokes “something that seems very far away but is, in fact, very close.” Nuclear
disaster seems a distant hypothesis, improbable; the prospect of it is, however,
always with us…Like earthquakes, tsunamis, and other natural calamities, the
experience of Hiroshima should be etched into human memory. (Ōe 2011)

2
Broad, William J. “Scientists Project Path of Radiation Plume.” The New York Times, March 16, 2011.
“Availability of Potassium Iodide Tablets.” Warden message, U.S. Embassy in Tokyo, March 28, 2011;,
“Japan Earthquake: Britons given iodine tablets,” BBC News UK, March 20, 2011.
4
Kligman, Aimee. “Fukushima residents suffer discrimination at refugee shelters.” Examiner.com, April
13, 2011; Wallace, Rick. “Discrimination Increases Torment of Fukushima.” The Australian, June 11, 2011.
73
Etched into human memory. At the heart of much atomic bomb literature and criticism—
the work of Ōe, Ibuse Masuji, Ota Yoko, Hara Tamiki, and John Whittier Treat, to name
a few—is this question of memory. What is the best way to remember a tragedy? Who
has the right to speak, and who has the right to remain silent? How does one write the
unwriteable? Finally, how can an event like Hiroshima be placed in the context of history
when, by its very existence, it signals the end of history—the sudden knowledge of the
exact manner in which the world will end?
Such questions are of course integral to Ōe’s Hiroshima Notes, but they also
permeate his work that does not deal directly with Hiroshima—specifically, the novels
and short stories that center around the motif of the “idiot son.” The first of these works,
Kojinteki na taiken (A Personal Matter), was published shortly after the birth of Ōe’s first
child, Hikari, who was born with a brain hernia and was not expected to live. During the
first weeks of Hikari’s life Ōe was in Hiroshima interviewing a-bomb victims for a series
of essays that would be published as Hiroshima Notes. He would later write that his
experiences in Hiroshima would give him the strength to return home and make the
decision to let his child live, approving the brain surgery that would render Hikari brain-
damaged but save his life. The literary motif of the monstrous infant / idiot son, Ōe’s
personal tragedy, and the larger tragedy of Hiroshima thus merged in much of his
subsequent writing:
Ever since Hikari was born, I have found myself returning again and again to
Hiroshima… I experienced an identity crisis of my own at the age of twenty-eight,
in the year Hikari was born…It was in the midst of this crisis that my son’s birth
burst like a bombshell (dokan to no shikakatte kita); and it was through the pain
of this experience that I somehow regained my equilibrium. (Ōe, A Healing
Family, 21-28, Kaifuku suru kazoku, 31).
74

The “bombshell” of Hikari’s birth, combined with Ōe’s experiences in Hiroshima, would
forever alter the thematic focus of his writing. The monstrous infant, particularly as it is
depicted in Kojinteki na taiken and Sora no kaibutsu Aghwee (Aghwee the Sky Monster),
both published in the same year, would become the symbolic focus of the author’s
struggle to define what it means to be human, to understand the connection between
personal and public tragedy, and to question what it means to live in the atomic age.
This chapter examines Ōe’s depiction of the monstrous infant in Kojinteki na
taiken and Sora no kaibutsu Aghwee, with reference to the development of the “idiot
son”
5
motif in Warera no kyōki wo ikinobiru michi wo oshieyo (Teach Us to Outgrow
Our Madness), Pinchirannaa chōsho (The Pinchrunner Memorandum), and Atarashii
hito yo, mezameyo (Rouse Up, O Young Men of the New Age!). I will also examines Ōe’s
writings on Hiroshima, including recent essays and work collected in Hiroshima Notes
and Kaku no taika to “ningen” no koe (The Nuclear Conflagration and the “Human”
Voice). In juxtaposing an analysis of the monstrous infant / idiot son motif with Ōe’s
writings on Hiroshima and the nuclear age, I will attempt to illustrate the ways in which
the monstrous infant functions as a device to move Ōe’s narratives between the realm of
personal, semi-autobiographical tragedy and the very public guilt / anxieties over Japan’s
atomic past and the realities of an atomic future. Like Ishikawa Jun’s “wild child,” Ōe’s

5
I use the words “idiot son” throughout this chapter to refer to a term / concept coined by Ōe himself and
frequently used by Michiko N. Wilson. In the same way, I use the words “monstrous infant” to refer to the
dominant image in the two stories under discussion here. I do not mean to imply that physical and mental
deformities make children “monstrous,” only that the characters are portrayed as monstrous by Ōe, and
viewed that way by the narrators and other characters in Ōe’s stories.
75
monstrous infant links past, present, and future in a single physical body that cries out for
sympathy even as it terrifies and threatens.
Historical Context
Before turning to an analysis of Ōe’s fiction, it is necessary to examine the historical
events that immediately preceded the publication of Kojinteki na taiken and Sora no
kaibutsu aghwee—the “historical rupture” in which Ōe’s particular monstrous infant
character was created. In 1960, three years before the publication of Kojinteki and
Aghwee, Japan would see a period of political and ideological unrest marked by the
largest public protests in the nation’s history (Krauss et al 15, note 3). The protests
concerned the revision of the U.S.-Japan Security Treaty (ANPO), rushed through a
House of Representatives Committee during a midnight session of the Diet. Division had
been building between the conservative Liberal Democratic Party, which was in favor of
certain modifications to the 1951 Security Treaty (including the maintenance of a self-
defense force and the partial recentralization of the education and police systems), and
the left, which saw such changes as a return to a pre-democratic Japan. The left was also
concerned about clauses in the treaty which provided for the stationing of American
troops in Japan and the possibility that American forces in Japan would be used to quell
international disturbances (the latter clause was eliminated during negotiations) (Krauss
et al 16, note 3). As a staunch anti-nuclear advocate, Ōe took part in the protests and
years later would go on to found the Article 9 Society, which seeks to combat any
proposed revisions to Japan’s renunciation of war and an active military.
76
As Takeshi Ishida, Ellis S. Krauss, and J. Victor Koschmann have pointed out, the
ANPO debate was about much more than a single treaty. The government’s rushed
ratification of the treaty without real debate led to a “crisis of democracy” in which ‘even
many who supported the treaty became alarmed at the government’s high-handed tactics
and joined the movement ‘to protest parliamentary democracy’” (Krauss et al 11). For
certain intellectuals, the Anpo debate “had served to expose the emptiness of the liberal
ideals of postwar democracy” (Koschmann 409). It was also a test of certain democratic
principles, leading to the Grand Bench decision of 1960 which upheld the right of
freedom of assembly and would set a precedent for Japan’s very lenient attitude toward
public protest and demonstration, in sharp contrast with the strict prewar prohibition of
any form of mass assembly or association-formation (Krauss et al 79-80). Though the
treaty was ultimately ratified, the prime minister would be forced to resign.
In short, during the years leading up to the birth of Ōe’s son and the publication of
Kojinteki and Aghwee, Japan was in the midst of a profound crisis of identity, questioning
its role on the world stage, its relationship to the U.S., and its position on military
aggression and defense. Anti-nuclear and anti-war activists like Ōe protested changes in
policy that they saw as a return to the dangerously nationalist / militarist ideology of
1920s, 30s, and 40s, while conservatives sought to re-interpret Article 9 of the
constitution (a practice that continues today, with those on the right frequently calling for
the abolition of Article 9 and the formal establishment of a Japanese military). Japan’s
future—specifically, the question of what kind of power it would be in the wake of
postwar reconstruction—hung in the balance.
77
The 1960s were also a period in which government policies and state-sponsored
ideology encouraged a mass forgetting of the war years, focusing on Japan’s economic
growth and the individual acquiring of material goods as markers of success. Harry
Harootunian writes of the way that campaigns such as My Home-ism “aimed at stuffing
the cramped but private spaces of middle-class apartments that had become the ideal
domain of everyday life” (Harootunian 167). Daqing Yang argues that the high economic
growth of the 1960s produced “a spreading sense of anxiety among the war generation
about the ‘weathering’ (f ūka) of the war experience…The Cold War ideological
confrontation between communism and the ‘free world’ not only came to frame much of
the discourse in postwar Japan, as it did as elsewhere; but the political reality of the Cold
War, separating Japan from one of its main victims—China—further contributed to the
reorientation of postwar Japan’s war memories” (Yang 82). Politically and socially,
Japan in the 1960s had a vested interest in forgetting (or at least re-shaping) the memories
of its wartime past and focusing instead on present and future economic growth, with an
emphasis on the acquisition of material goods for individual Japanese homes. For Ōe and
other writers and anti-nuclear activists, it was the responsibility of all Japanese, but
particularly writers, to make sure that the rest of the world never forgot, even as the
Japanese state seemed determined to bury and re-shape certain parts of Japan’s wartime
history.
Japan’s national identity crisis preceded Ōe’s own “identity crisis of (his) youth,”
as he labeled it (Ōe, A Healing Family, 27). In 1963 Ōe’s wife gave birth to their first
child, Hikari. The child was born with a severe brain hernia, and his parents were forced
78
to make the decision between surgery, which could save his life but would leave him with
an uncertain level of brain damage, and allowing the child to die. In those anxious days,
Ōe wrote of existing in a kind of limbo, ready to fill out a death certificate for his son one
moment and a birth certificate the next. During the period of Hikari’s birth and the
uncertain weeks in which he hovered between life and death, and immediately before the
publication of Kojinteki and Aghwee, Ōe was interviewing doctors and victims in
Hiroshima, an experience that would inspire a profound change in both his literary focus
and his response to his son’s birth. Having left for Hiroshima certain that his son would
die, Ōe’s experiences there would ultimately give him the strength to return home and
consult with doctors as to how to save his son.
6
Soon after, he would publish the first of a
series of novels and short stories that contained his dominant character / metaphor for the
next twenty years—the “idiot son.” This focus, which Ōe himself credits with inspiring a
dramatic shift in his writing and his maturity as an artist, was born both out of Ōe’s own
personal tragedy and his experiences in Hiroshima.
8
From the very beginning, then, the
monstrous infant is tied to Hiroshima and to the mistakes of the past that threaten the
possibility of nuclear annihilation in the future. He is a fusion of the wider, more public
tragedy of Hiroshima and the very personal world of Ōe’s own tragedy (though in a way
the latter tragedy ceased to be “entirely a personal matter,” to quote Ōe’s novel of the
same name, when he chose to make it a prominent feature of his writing).
9

6
Ōe, My Moratorium 1, p. 201, qtd. in Wilson, p. 6
8
Ōe, My Moratorium 1, p. 219-220, qtd. in Wilson, p. 6-7
9
Ōe’s decision to name his child Hikari (written with the kanji for “light”) is clearly a reaction against the
darkness surrounding his son’s birth and grim prognosis. In A Personal Matter, the protagonist is reluctant
79
Ōe is quick to point out the distinction between his “real” son and the character
that he depicts in his novels:
I have written a lot about the physical abnormality of my child and his retardation.
However...I have not presented him as I would in an ‘I-novel.’ His existence in
real life continues to make various kinds of impacts on me…What these impacts
had produced, what was at the core of our communal life—only when these things
became imaginatively independent and came out of my interiority, did I write
about him…when I write about trees and whales, these words, which embody
symbolic meanings, constantly reflect the shadow of the child’s existence.
Conversely, I write about the idiot infant (hakuchi no yōji). The words that
describe him, however, do not portray the retarded child who exists in my own
family. My words…like a surrealist painting that places the sky and an ocean in
the orifices of a human body, are the very image of this cosmos-world-society
which I glimpse through the flesh and spirit of the idiot child (hakuchi no
kodomo). (Ōe, My Moratorium I, qtd. in Wilson, pp. 6-7)

The character that appears in Ōe’s novels carries so much symbolic weight, then, is an
amalgam of Ōe’s real experiences with his son and his lifelong interpretation of the world
around him. Ōe has taken the life of his actual son and combined it with his constant
examination of “what it means to be a human being” (in particular, what it means to be a
human being in the nuclear age) to create a potent symbol: a monstrous child who
embodies fears of a nuclear future and whose physical self calls to mind the horrors of a
nuclear past.
At the same time, it is important to acknowledge what some (very justifiably) see
as Ōe’s exploitation of Hikari.
10
Ōe has said he wrote fiction in part to give his son a

to name his child at all, fearing that this will force the protagonist to finally take responsibility for him. In
choosing Hikari, Ōe indicates that both he and his literary counterpart are taking responsibility not only for
their sons but for their pasts and futures.
10
In his review of Yasuko Claremont’s The Novels of Ōe Kenzabur ō (itself one of the first English-
language texts to openly discuss the shortcomings of Ōe’s writing), John Whittier Treat writes: “For years I
have heard intellectuals of Ōe’s generation complain about him in private: not only about his fictional
80
voice (St. John Mackintosh et al 17),
11
but it often feels as if Hikari has had a voice thrust
upon him, forced into a limelight that he may never have wanted. Ōe’s claim that the
words that describe the idiot infant “do not portray the retarded child who exists in (his)
own family” rings hollow when one sees that Ōe makes little effort to hide the idiot son
character’s similarities to the real-life Hikari (particularly in later works such as The
Pinchrunner Memorandum and Rouse Up, O Young Men of the New Age!, Ōe even calls
the character “Hikari” or gives him the nickname “Eeyore,” when Hikari’s childhood
nickname was “Pooh”). Yasuko Claremont calls Ōe’s work “neither fact nor fiction, but
deliberately intermixed, at times pure fact or pure fiction, at other times neither”
(Claremont 158). The same can be said for the idiot son motif, which at times appears to
be a factual representation of Hikari and at times clearly exists as allegory.
Gavin Walker’s analysis of what he calls the “double scission” of Mishima
Yukio—an author who “relied on figurations of himself as a primary device”—cites
Shimada Masahiko to differentiate between "Mishima Yukio the living person"
(seikatsusha Mishima Yukio) and "Mishima Yukio as work/text" (sakuhin toshite no
Mishima Yukio) (Walker 150-151). Ōe’s idiot son also exists as both a living person and a
work/text, with his latter form confusingly blurring the boundary between biography and
fiction. One major difference, of course, is that Mishima himself created his text-persona,
while Hikari-as-text was created by his father, leaving Hikari-as-living-person out of the
creation process. Using his son as a template, Ōe combined precise biographical details

drivel, but his hypocrisy (his hero, Sartre, turned down the Nobel Prize) and, worse, his exploitation of his
handicapped son, Hikari. (This deserves to be a public issue, since it is after all Ōe who made a public
figure of Hikari in the first place)” (355).

81
and symbolic imagery to forge an image of a monstrous child that embodied fears of past
violence and impending future calamity. But in doing this without the express consent of
his son, Ōe unwittingly made Hikari-as-text an unwilling / unknowing monstrous child
character, a voiceless voice, a hybrid of reality and textuality who had no control over the
use of his real-life details in the development of his symbolic status. The ethical
implications of such a choice are beyond the scope and focus of this project, but given
Ōe’s frequent assertion that writers must not be silent, and that they must give a voice to
those who cannot (or choose not) to speak, the ethical quandary of using the real-life
details of his voiceless son
12
as a central image / character in his novels must be
acknowledged.
The first incarnations of Ōe’s “idiot son” motif appear in Kojinteki na taiken and
Sora no kaibutsu Aghwee, essentially as two versions of a monstrous infant—one who
lives and one who dies but haunts his father as a ghost. As I have illustrated, these
monstrous infants were created shortly after a period of intense identity confusion for
Japan as a nation, and during a period of personal identity crisis for Ōe himself. In a time
when state policy and a focus on material goods encouraged the Japanese to forget certain
aspects of their wartime past, Ōe’s monstrous infant served as a physical reminder of
history, a bridge between individual and national crisis. The character is surrounded by a
historical and cultural crisis in the same moment that he embodies Ōe’s personal crisis—
a crisis that, as he would write in Kojinteki na taiken, could never be entirely personal,

12
Given that Hikari Ōe has made a name for himself as a composer, one could argue that he now has a way
of communicating with the world, but during the time period in which many of Ō e’s “idiot son” novels were
written he had not yet discovered this talent, and his verbal abilities remain limited.
82
because eventually one must live in the world and in public with one’s choices. I will first
examine the monstrous infant as depicted in Kojinteki na taiken, in which the protagonist
must make a decision about his infant son’s life that impacts not only his personal world
but the more fundamental questions of responsibility and what it means to be human.
Birth, Violence, and Responsibility
Kojinteki na taiken tells the story of “Bird,” a young father-to-be who, as the novel opens,
feels trapped in his marriage and dreams of escape. He soon learns that his wife has given
birth to a baby with a brain hernia that is unlikely to survive. He begins to see the baby as
a monster weighing down on his back, fearing that if the child does live it will be a
lifelong burden, and thus he encourages the doctors to feed it only sugar water, but the
baby continues to thrive. Bird seeks refuge in sex and drunkenness with an old girlfriend,
though he admits that he is now terrified of women—or specifically their genitals and
womb, which produced the monster baby now lying in the hospital. Ultimately Bird
decides he can no longer deal with the responsibility of the baby and arranges to have it
killed at a clinic. At the last minute, though, he decides to “stop running” and allows the
doctor to perform surgery on the baby that will save its life but leave it permanently
brain-damaged. Bird feels that he has now become an adult who will no longer strive to
escape the real world, instead choosing to live in it with his son. His decision to move
from childhood to adulthood, from escape and denial to responsibility could be seen as an
allegory for Japan’s postwar democracy.
83
Kojinteki na taiken opens with two acts of violence: Bird’s battle with a gang of
street youths, and the painful birth of his brain-damaged son, a birth that ushers into the
world a child that Bird continuously refers to as a monster. While his wife is in labor in
the hospital, trying to give birth to a child who is “suffering to death” (8)
13
, Bird is losing
himself in dreams of youth and escape—he buys maps of Africa and plays shooting
games in an arcade, feeling with the imminent birth of his child that he is “being forced to
say good-bye…to the single and final occasion of dazzling tension in his youth,” that he
“has been in the cage ever since (his) marriage but until now the door has always seemed
open; the baby on its way into the world may clang that door shut” (3, 5). When Bird
gets into a fight with a group of boys he feels that “the joy of battle had reawakened in
him; it had been years since he had felt it” (13). When he discovers that his wife has
given birth to a brain-damaged child, Bird will spend the rest of the novel wrestling with
his own responsibility for the birth, engaging in wild fantasies of escape, and finally
deciding to let his son live and take responsibility for him. The escapist violence of his
fight with the boys is overwhelmed by the more frightening violence of his son’s painful
birth and the physical reality of his disfigured body.
The novel’s first descriptions of Bird’s brain-damaged son are of a creature
“something like Siamese twins,” “a monster with a cat’s head,” and “a body as swollen as
a balloon.” When Bird first sees his son he describes him thus:
An ugly baby with a pinched, tiny, red face covered with wrinkles and blotchy
with fat. Its eyes were clamped shut like the shells of a bivalve, rubber tubes led
into its nostrils; its mouth was wrenched open in a soundless scream that exposed

13
All English quotations from A Personal Matter are taken from John Nathan’s 1969 translation. Original
Japanese references are taken from the Ōe Kenzaburo shosetsu, Vol. 2.
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the pearly-pink membrane inside…Beneath the bandage, the skull was buried
under a mound of bloody cotton; but there was no hiding the presence there of
something large and abnormal(iyō na). (24)

When he arrives at the hospital and announces “I’m the father,” Bird imagines how the
hospital staff must now see him (“I’m the monster’s father”) (18). When the doctor first
asks him if he wants to see “the goods” (genbutsu), Bird misunderstands him and thinks
he’s asking if he wants to see “the monster” (kaibutsu). (Ōe Kenzaburo shōsetsu vol. 2,
307). First consumed with shame that he is somehow responsible for his son’s deformity,
Bird’s state quickly turns to anger when he realizes that the child is continuing to live, its
presence bearing down on him like a weight:
The baby continued to live, and it was oppressing Bird, even beginning to attack
him. Swaddled in skin as red as shrimp which gleamed with the luster of scar
tissue, the baby was beginning ferociously to live, dragging its anchor of a heavy
lump. A vegetable existence? Maybe so, a deadly cactus. (71)

The particular variety of monstrosity imagined in Kojinteki na taiken is a haunting
presence of possibility—an infant who, if he dies, will burden Bird with the guilt of
having murdered his own son, and if he lives will force him to acknowledge his
responsibility in creating a monstrous son, and to care for that monster for the rest of his
life. Wrapped up in the image of Bird’s son are anxieties about the mistakes of his own
generation, fears of a nuclear future, and the knowledge that his “personal matter” is in
fact a reflection on very public ideas. The monstrous infant also stands in for the larger
dilemma of whether to “live with the monster” (and thus to live with history) or to run
from it, to make the conscious choice to face the past and remember it clearly or to erase
it from historical memory. When Bird chooses “to confront this monster honestly instead
of running away from it” (162), he is choosing to remember and live with history.
85
As Michiko N. Wilson and Susan Napier have pointed out, Ōe’s stories often
concern themselves with those on the margins of Japanese society—children, the
deformed or mentally ill, foreign nationals. Some of his earliest works, including
Memushiri kouchi (Nip the Buds, Shoot the Kids, 1958) and Shiiku (Prize Stock, 1957),
were told from the point of view of children, specifically “children who had been
damaged by the adult world” (Napier, The Fantastic, 32). Napier also notes that these
stories make childhood more idyllic by placing the narrative in a rural setting, though
“his pastoral settings have a dark side that initially comes from the outside world of
military and centrist authority. Later on, as his vision grows more complex, Ōe
introduces the reader to the dark side of the pastoral world itself, although he sees the
violence it contains as potentially salvific” (Napier, The Fantastic, 158). The birth of his
son would allow Ōe to begin to explore a different kind of marginality—that of the
mentally disabled child. Within this marginal landscape, certain archetypes are twisted:
birth and creation are juxtaposed with Bird’s bloodthirsty violence, his infant son is
figured as inhuman and deadly, and the female womb is imagined as “the dark recesses
where that grotesque baby was created” (82) Sequestered with another woman, Bird tells
her that he finds her terrifying specifically because she has a vagina and a womb: “I have
this feeling there’s what you’d call another universe back in there. It’s dark, it’s infinite,
it’s teeming with everything antihuman: a grotesque universe. And I’m afraid that if I
entered it, I’d get trapped in the time system of another dimension…”(83-84). Like his
infant son, to Bird the womb is a frightening realm of simultaneous destruction and
creation, a place that is both inhuman and creates inhuman things. Instead of producing
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life, it has produced death—in the form of a child that Bird feels is sucking the life out of
him: “(Bird) was pregnant himself, in the womb of his brain, with a large squirming mass
that was the sensation of shame” (92). Bird feels trapped regardless of the choice he
makes—to kill the child would be to remain “pregnant” with shame over the deed, but to
live with the child would forever remind him of his own failings as the father of a
“monster.”
Ultimately, Bird’s decision to let his child live seems to come out of the blue and
is completely at odds with the selfishness that he has exhibited throughout the novel.
Yasuko Claremont writes that Bird “suddenly, and without any build-up in the
narrative…simply changes his mind,” and calls the ending “an artistic flaw in what is a
minor masterpiece in modern Japanese fiction” (59). I would argue, though, that the
decision also arises from Bird’s realization that his child need not be a burden—that in
the child’s state of deformity and near-death he has in fact allowed Bird to reclaim an
attachment to life. In a period of his life when Bird is still young and full of vigor, when
he is able to live without feeling any real sense of responsibility or guilt for past
transgressions, the physical reality of his son “bursts like a bombshell,” to quote Ōe’s
description of the birth of Hikari, onto his life. Seeing his son’s bandage-wrapped head,
his body covered in tubes, Bird feels trapped by the hyper-visuality of his son’s presence,
the image inextricably tied to his own failings (“I’m the monster’s father”). His decision
to ultimately let the child live, to give it a name and a human identity, is, according to
Michiko N. Wilson, tied to the baby’s double function as “the cause of the father’s
personal tragedy as well as a symbol of the tragedy of mankind” (85). Despite the dark
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future taking shape—Bird hears that the Japan Anti-Nuclear Warfare League has come
out in support of Soviet nuclear testing—he decides to live with the monster baby so that
he can “ ‘stop being a man who continually runs away from responsibility’…Thus the
baby is the beginning of the father’s new life, a life of commitment to the world” (Wilson
85-86). The monster baby thus becomes yet another figure of simultaneous destruction
and creation, imagined first as a “deadly cactus” who would drain the life out of his
father but later revealed to be the regenerative force that causes his father to reclaim his
connection with the world and the future, however frightening that future might be.
Alternative Realities: Sora no kaibutsu Aghwee
Published in the same year as Kojinteki na taiken, Sora no kaibutsu Aghwee allows Ōe to
imagine the results of the path almost taken in the former story—what would have
happened if the brain-damaged child had been allowed to die. The narrator of the story
takes a job as a companion to a composer, “D,” who has begun to have delusions “about
living with a monster” (225)
14
. We learn that D had an infant child born with a brain
hernia, and that D conspired with the doctor to withhold nourishment from the baby until
it died. The monster in question is “a fat baby in a white cotton nightgown…Big as a
kangaroo” (237). D calls it Aghwee, after the only sound his infant child ever made.
Aghwee floats up in the sky, occasionally coming down to communicate with the
composer, who explains Tokyo to him “as if it were a paradise” (233). The composer’s
former wife says that he is haunted by the fact that the baby’s brain hernia was revealed

14
Quotations are taken from John Nathan’s 1977 translation, Aghwee the Sky Monster.
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via autopsy to be a benign tumor, and the composer has thus “fled from reality into a
world of phantoms” (241-242). The composer’s former girlfriend says that he “decided
not to create any new memories for himself” after the baby died, and that he calls the
ghost-baby down to earth “so he can create new memories for it” (247). Ultimately this
seemingly benevolent ghost leads the composer to his death—D rushes into oncoming
traffic in an attempt to save Aghwee. The story ends ten years later with the narrator’s
description of being violently attacked by a gang of children—similar to the violence
described in the beginning of Kojinteki—and feeling the gentle presence of Aghwee at
his side before the baby floats back into the sky.
Ōe’s central question in Aghwee and Kojinteki—and in so many of his stories that
deal with the “idiot son,” including The Pinchrunner Memorandum, Teach Us to
Outgrow Our Madness, and Rouse Up, O Young Men of the New Age!—concerns the
kind of future that adults have predestined their children, brain-damaged and not, to live
in. For Ōe, such a future is inextricably linked to Hiroshima and the threat of nuclear
annihilation. In Kojinteki na taiken Bird ponders whether radioactive fallout could have
caused his son’s deformity, while in Pinchrunner the protagonist’s battles with anti-
nuclear groups seem to be directly related to creating a peaceful future for his brain-
damaged son—a son who, in a way, functions as a messiah for that non-nuclear future.
Michiko N. Wilson chronicles the development of Ōe’s “obsessive metaphor” of the idiot
son in A Personal Matter, Aghwee, Pinchrunner, Teach Us, and The Waters are Come in
Unto My Soul, arguing that said metaphor should not be dismissed “merely as a repetition
of an old theme, but rather (we) must consider the five works as one large narrative in
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progress” (83).
15
Further, Wilson argues that the five stories exist in syntagmatic fashion,
building off of each other through a series of questions and answers (“Should I kill the
baby or live with it?” “Am I really only a victim?”) (84). Kojinteki and Aghwee are
somewhat set apart from this group in that they are essentially two versions of the same
story—one in which the baby dies, and one in which it lives. And both posit the “idiot
son” as an infant—a creature without agency that nonetheless exerts a monstrous power
over its father.
In his various incarnations Ōe’s “idiot son” is usually characterized as fat and
beast-like, with those around him described in similarly unflattering terms.
16
The “Mori”
of Teach Us to Outgrow Our Madness is described as a fat son with a fat father and an
equally fat grandfather—the father is referred to only as “the fat man” and describes how
when his son had grown too large for his bicycle seat, he sought out a special bicycle for
the both of them. Bodies-especially female bodies-are almost always described
unflatteringly: D’s ex-wife suffers from pyorrhea and is described as “a short woman
with a pudgy red face on top of a neck that was just as pudgy and as round as a
cylinder…too round and overweight to achieve dignity” with legs “round and bloodshot”
and (240); The Pinchrunner Memorandum is full of descriptions of “Mori” the idiot
son’s penis and his feeble attempts to urinate properly; Rouse Up!’s Eeyore is described
at one point as “being devoured from the inside by a beast in the grip of that

15
Wilson’s book was published in 1986 and was completed before the publication of Rouse Up, O Young
Men of the New Age!, though the “idiot son” motif is also central to that novel.
16
Given that Ōe’s real-life son has had lifelong issues with weight, this characterization often comes off as
particularly cruel, or at least insensitive.
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wildness…and the rest of his face, his dark eyebrows and finely arched nose and bright-
red lips, was slack and blank” (Nathan, Rouse Up!, 10). Sex and female genitals are
vaguely horrifying in both Pinchrunner and Kojinteki (“…the pitch-black pubic hair
clung helter-skelter to [her underbelly] like a thick entangled mass of sheep hair. Beyond
in the shadows lay her half-open genitals, dark and menacing.” / “I have this feeling
there’s what you’d call another universe back in there. It’s dark, it’s infinite, it’s teeming
with everything antihuman: a grotesque universe”) (Wilson, Pinchrunner, 139 / Nathan,
A Personal Matter, 84). Flesh is a source of fear and revulsion, not only the flesh of the
“idiot son,” but female flesh and both male and female genitals—anything connected
with sex and reproduction. The physical reality of the monstrous infant and everything
that surrounds his birth is always grotesque. There is no compulsion to touch or
embrace—the monstrous infant / idiot son only repels.
It is appropriate, then, that the more benevolent incarnation of Ōe’s monstrous
infant, Aghwee, is not fleshy at all—he is a ghost. And yet there is still an air of size-
related monstrousness about him—he is not simply the ghost of a baby, but “a baby the
size of a kangaroo,” or “a fat baby in a white cotton nightgown.” His bigness makes him
a caricature of an actual baby, comical in the same moment that he’s a tragic reminder of
what the composer has lost. The composer D, by contrast, is described as a small, thin
man, recalling Bird’s feeling in Kojinteki that his son was “oppressing Bird, even
beginning to attack him” like a “deadly cactus” (71). D has transferred all of his energy
and life force into the phantom Aghwee, having “declined to live his own life, just as he
had declined to let the baby go on living” (241). Ultimately, the baby takes the last drop
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of his life force when D runs into oncoming traffic “as if he were trying to rescue
something” (257), rushing to save the phantom baby and dying in the attempt. The
phantom’s literal and figurative bigness consumes the composer, moving him from a
reality in which he lives only in the alternate universe of Aghwee to a death in which he
seems to make peace with his past—the narrator’s last image of him is of a smile that
“might have been a mocking smile and it might have been a smile of friendly mischief”
(260).
While Kojinteki’s monstrous infant seems to Bird an emblem of his own personal
failings and the failings of society at large, one of the horrors of the phantom baby in
Aghwee is that it exists as an empty vessel, having died before it could absorb any
memories. D’s ex-girlfriend imagines a place where “the souls of the dead (live) with
their memories for all eternity. But what about the soul of a baby who never knew
anything and never had any experiences? I mean what memories can it have?” (247). She
argues that D “calls that baby ghost down to earth all over Tokyo so he can create new
memories for it” (247). Haunted by the fact that his child died empty of memories, D
begins to live outside of time, forsaking the possibility of any new memories for himself
so that he can create new memories for the phantom. This idea of children as empty
vessels also appears in The Pinchrunner Memorandum, in which Hikari and the other
mentally disabled children are described as empty and untethered by ideas of the past or
the future. It is their “idiot” status that allows them to exist as a kind of beacon in the
world and the grounding force in their father’s lives. In Rouse Up!, the narrator-father is
deeply troubled by the fact that his son does not dream, or at least does not understand the
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concept of dreams. The narrator ties this to his own shame about the first weeks after his
son’s birth, when he selfishly wanted to murder him. He fears that one day, when his son
has developed a certain level of intelligence, he will finally say, “ ‘Father, to tell the truth,
since I was very small I’ve been having the same dream. I’m even smaller in my dream,
I’ve just been born, and you’re trying hard to find a way to murder me’” (91). Though his
own child does not dream, the narrator projects his own nightmares onto the empty vessel
of his son, again reinforcing the monstrous infant’s role as the reminder of both the
father’s personal shortcomings and the shortcomings of society at large. A key feature of
the various incarnations of the “idiot son” / monstrous infant is thus their relationship to
memories and dreams, with a lack of them seen as both a tragedy and a blessing, or at
least as central to their abilities to serve as guides toward an uncertain and unfamiliar
future.
In the case of Kojinteki, Bird fills the monstrous infant up with his own failings as
a human being and as a father, with the heavy sense of responsibility that caring for the
child entails, and with his fears of a future that includes the baby. In the case of Aghwee,
the ghost of the baby is empty but a huge presence, and the father is desperate to fill it
with the memories it was never able to acquire in life. Imagining two versions of the
same story in Aghwee and Kojinteki thus allows Ōe to imagine two variations of the
monstrous infant: one a living, fleshy reminder of the father’s / world’s responsibilities
and mistakes, and one a ghostly, oversized specter of the father’s / world’s guilt.
Regardless of whether the infant lived or died, it seems, the monstrosity remains. For Ōe,
it is a monstrosity inextricably tied to the threat of nuclear annihilation and shaped by the
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experiences in Hiroshima that he recorded in Hiroshima Notes and that continued to
influence his writings on the nuclear age for years to come.
17
It is also tied to memory
and forgetting—in Kojinteki the baby is a very physical reminder of Bird’s
responsibilities in the world and of a violent history that he would like to forget, while in
Aghwee the ghost-baby exists as a kind of receptacle for the memories that its living
counterpart was never allowed to collect. In its layered existence that ties together fears
of a nuclear past / future and the responsibilities of individual / historical memory, the
monstrous infant in Aghwee and Kojinteki is deeply tied to Hiroshima—an “atomic
child,” a force shaped by a bomb that is itself a bombshell of an event. While the birth of
Ōe’s son was undoubtedly the inspiration for the idiot son motif that would be central to
so many of his subsequent novels, it was the fact of Hiroshima and the threat of a nuclear
future that would combine with Hikari’s birth to shape the monstrous infant / idiot son
into the atomic child, the physical and spiritual reminder of Hiroshima and the future that
Hiroshima might predict.
Hiroshima, Memory, and the Atomic Child
Stefan Tanaka writes that the concept of childhood during the Meiji Period “became that
originary point (mythic) that unifies all Japanese as the same; it is simultaneously one’s
own past, the present (through contemporary children) and a hope and prescription for the

17
On the connection between Kojinteki na taiken and Hiroshima, John Nathan writes: “ Ōe’s own
perception of the child’s destructive force, the metaphor that first presented itself to him, was a nuclear
explosion. The year Pooh (Hikari) was born he wrote two books at once and asked his publisher to release
them on the same day. One was A Personal Matter…The other was…Hiroshima Notes. Ōe was of course
asking that the books be considered together; in one he chronicled the survival of an actual atomic bomb, in
the other he sought the means of surviving a personal holocaust” (Nathan, introduction to Teach Us, xvii).
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future “ (Tanaka 134). Childhood “is always a category of the past. Few, if any, children
understand childhood until after they have left it. As a temporal category in a
developmental structure, it also reinforces change; people must leave childhood” (135).
Beyond the Japanese Meiji period, Philippe Aries has argued that by the 18
th
century in
Europe the notion of childhood as a special / distinct space, one that needed to be
protected from the “pollution” of the adult world, had been well established.
18
Ōe’s
monstrous infants, then, exist in a temporal and conceptual realm that has the status of
myth, that is simultaneously past, present, and future, and that reinforces change and
transformation. Created in the recent shadow of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, an
author’s personal struggles with his own tragedy, and the desire to remember and record
pieces of history that many would rather forget, these children are also inextricably tied
to Hiroshima and the fears of the atomic age.
John Treat has described the “unwriteable” nature of the atomic bomb, of
survivors and authors who struggled to find words to describe the indescribable. He notes
that “atomic bomb literature is already diminished before it starts, but in ways that say
much. The silences, the oft-noted lacks and gaps in A-bomb writing, may be precisely
where the genre ‘speaks’ to us the most” (Treat, Ground Zero, 30). For Ōe, silence is also
key to understanding Hiroshima. He writes of those who have “the right to remain silent”
and those who are required to speak up—Hiroshima victims had criticized Ōe and other
writers for calling on victims to speak out about their experiences, when what many of

18
Many of Aries’ claims, particularly his argument that childhood did not “exist” in Europe until the 17
th

century, have been proven to have little historical basis in fact (see Tanaka, Stearns 2006, Kincaid 1998).
But James Kincaid points out that many of Aries’ ideas, such as that of “invented childhood,” are a helpful
way of looking at childhood as a concept.
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them wanted was simply to remain silent and live a life (and die a death) disconnected
from Hiroshima. For Ōe, only the victims have the right to remain silent—all others are
required to speak out, particularly artists. In his essay “Teach Us How to Survive in the
Nuclear Age” (Kaku jidai wo ikinobiru michi wo oshieyo), Ōe would invoke Kurt
Vonnegut’s claim that artists are “canaries in a coal mine,” the most sensitive to any
sickness or decay in society and thus invaluable beacons of clarity in confusing times. He
ends the essay by arguing that it is the responsibility of all Japanese to speak out about
Hiroshima, because silence means forgetting. In the case of Ōe’s monstrous infants in
Kojinteki and Aghwee, though, silence works differently—the physically and mentally
deformed child and the enormous ghost-baby are mute witnesses to the horrors around
them, and their silence serves as a more powerful reminder of those horrors than words
possibly could. Ironically, the very act of using his real-life son as the inspiration for the
various monstrous child characters in his novels creates yet another level of silence in
Ōe’s work: the silence of the real-life Hikari, who could not voice acceptance or rejection
of the monstrous, fictional version of himself. The fictional monstrous children are
voiceless witnesses to the horrors around them, and the child who inspired them had no
voice in the process of their creation.
Beyond silence, Ōe also reads Hiroshima through the lens of memory, examining
the desire that some have to erase Hiroshima from their minds, and the responsibility of
witnesses and artists to make sure that Hiroshima and events like it do not disappear from
world consciousness. He cites the example of an American journalist who, during the
1964 Tokyo Olympics, was disappointed that a man born in Hiroshima on A-bomb day
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was chosen to carry the Olympic flame, saying that it would remind Americans of
Hiroshima. Ōe notes that this sentiment is not unique to the journalist—the world at large
seems eager to forget what happened in Hiroshima so that it can continue its nuclear arms
race without thoroughly contemplating the human misery caused by a single atomic
bomb. He argues that the growth of “affluent consumer society” has caused the Japanese
to lead a “doughnut” life, leaving a hole in the center of their world as they move steadily
further away from the misery of war: “With our double effort to get away from, and also
above, the misery of war, the simple doughnut has been replaced by a three-dimensional
pyramid as the shape of our common lifestyle—with the Olympics at the top. The deep,
dark cavern inside the pyramid, however, has never been filled” (Ōe, Hiroshima Notes,
108, 161-2). The Japanese people, he argues, must fill in the gaps and make sure the
world does not erase the memory of Hiroshima.
Finally, Ōe looks at Hiroshima through the lens of what it means to be human
(ningen to wa nani), a theme that is central to almost all of his work. In “Teach Us to
Survive in the Nuclear Age,” he writes that the physical extent of the atomic bomb’s
destruction is relatively easy to quantify (seiri / rikai), but the extent of human suffering
caused by the bombs is unquantifiable (51). His analysis recalls the famous line from
Alain Resnais’ Hiroshima Mon Amour, in which the woman describing the victims she
saw in a Hiroshima hospital is told by her lover, “You saw nothing.” You saw nothing
because you can never truly see the extent of what the bomb did. Amidst the
unquantifiable human suffering, Ōe also writes of certain acts that will “allow us to
remain human,” such as not showing the corpses of deformed, or showing stillborn
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babies to their mothers (Ōe, Hiroshima Notes, 83). At the same time, Ōe worries that the
reality of radioactivity that destroys human cells will lead to a future in which living
beings “would be no longer human but something grotesquely different… The most
terrifying monster lurking in the darkness of Hiroshima is precisely the possibility that
man might become no longer human” (182). Hiroshima thus forced the world to deal
with two potential ways that living beings could become “less than human”: the physical
alteration of their cells and genes, and the loss of their spiritual humanity through
repeated exposure to the many horrors of their situation.
19

The function of silence, the role of memory / forgetting, and what it means to be a
human being—all of these facets of Hiroshima are embodied in Ōe’s parallel stories of
two monstrous infants, one living and one a ghost, both central to questions about
Hiroshima and what it means to live in a post-Hiroshima world. In Kojinteki, Bird’s
decision to let his baby live is a decision to live with history and memory, and to not
remain silent and disconnected. As he drives his baby to an abortionist, he notices that his
watch has stopped, recalling the watch famously stopped at 8:15, the moment of the
atomic blast. This realization is quickly followed by a radio announcement about the
Soviet resumption of nuclear testing (149). Even in the face of a future where nuclear
catastrophe again appears possible, Bird chooses to live in the world with his child, and

19
Ōe’s insinuation that the physical changes caused by exposure to radiation can make people “less than
human” is odd—particularly in light of his sympathetic portrayal of scarred a-bomb victims and those who
face their physical ailments with dignity, the passage comes off as offensive. Given that this passage comes
near the end of Hiroshima Notes, though, when Ōe is making a larger point about the potential dangers of a
nuclear future, I would argue that his “less than human” does not refer so much to the Hiroshima hibakusha
as it does to a generation of potential a-bomb victims who could be physically altered in unforeseeable
ways.
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his decision is connected to what Ōe sees as a larger, worldwide duty to live fully with
the realities of past, present, and future. In Aghwee, D’s struggle to create new memories
for the ghost of his son parallels the drive of writers and artists to document and record
Hiroshima, to “etch into human memory” the realities that others would rather forget. For
Bird, to be a human being ultimately means to remember and to speak. For D, it is
necessary to forsake his own humanity—to live outside of time and give up creating new
memories for himself—so that he can create new memories for the ghost of his son.
Ultimately, he gives up his own life in the belief that he is saving his son—thrusting both
arms in front of him “as if he were trying to rescue something” (257), he rushes into
oncoming traffic and is killed. In a universe in which the father turned his back on the
monstrous infant and let him die, it seems the father could not live. For both Bird and D,
then, to be a human being in a nuclear age is to acknowledge and embrace the monstrous
infant, and in doing so embrace the reality, history, and memory of a post-Hiroshima
world.
Silence, memory / forgetting, and the notion of what it means to be human are all
integral to Ōe’s conception of Hiroshima and the reality of the nuclear age, and they are
also integral to the character of the monstrous infant as depicted in Kojinteki and Aghwee.
Both infants are silent witnesses: to Bird’s sense of guilt and responsibility toward the
“monster” he has created, to D’s act of violence, and to the violence of Japan’s past,
present, and future. In an age when so much of Japan wanted to forget the horrors of the
recent past and move forward, both babies are reminders and remnants of that past—one
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a fleshy reality that its father cannot escape, one an oversized ghost / empty vessel
waiting to be filled with memories.
Chapter Conclusion
Near the end of Kojinteki, Bird describes the way that his own personal tragedy connects
to the rest of the world:
You’re right about this being limited to me, it’s entirely a personal matter
(kojinteki na taiken). But with some personal experiences that lead you way into a
cave all by yourself, you must eventually come to a side tunnel or something that
opens on a truth that concerns not just yourself but everyone …But what I’m
experiencing personally now is like digging a vertical mine shaft in isolation; it
goes straight down to a hopeless depth and never opens on anybody else’s world.
So I can sweat and suffer in that same dark cave and my personal experience
won’t result in so much as a fragment of significance for anybody else. (120)

Bird may see his own personal experience as insignificant to the rest of the world, but
Ōe’s depiction of one man’s struggle with the birth of a child that he sees as a monster is
clearly not just the story of a man and his personal tragedy. Created during a time of
political and social upheaval, the two monstrous infants of Kojinteki and Aghwee are
remnants of a violent past and a premonition of a chaotic future. They are physical and
psychic pieces of history that illuminate that which Japan would prefer to forget. The
fleshy body of Bird’s child, a body that confuses and frightens in the same moment that it
evokes pity, grounds the violence of past and future in a physical reality. The ghostly
figure of D’s murdered child is an empty vessel, a haunting presence meant to be filled
up with the memories that its father can no longer bear the burden of. In their existences
that confuse and frighten these “atomic children” make sense—the only sense that can be
made in the chaos and uncertainty of a post-Hiroshima world.
100
C hapt er
3

E m bra cin g
t h e
M on st e r:
Vengef ul
Child
Spir it s
in
Cont em por ar y
Japanese
H or r or
F ilm s
Having explored the character of the monstrous child in works of fiction of the 1940s,
1960s, and 1990s, I would now like to transition into a discussion of monstrous child
characters in Japanese film—specifically, Japanese horror films released during the “J-
horror boom,” which occurred roughly between the late 1990s and early to mid-2000s.
Though films like Ringu and Dark Water are mostly remembered for their atmospheric
eeriness and their revitalization of the ghost story, a large number of films in the J-horror
category featured vengeful child characters, female protagonists, and a focus on the
themes of motherhood and family. J-horror clearly borrowed many character types and
story elements from American horror films of the 1970s, 80s, and 90s—the female
protagonist / victim, conservative ideas about gender and sexuality, and an examination
of birth and the womb as both a sacred and horrifying space
1
—but the films also drew on
ancient Japanese stories of the onryō, or vengeful spirit narrative, as a driving force and
archetypal image of their stories. In mixing ancient Japanese imagery and narrative with
established conventions of modern American horror films, J-horror created monstrous
child characters that served as multi-faceted signifiers, characters that drew on

1
For an examination of American horror films’ depictions of gender and sexuality, see Carol Clover’s Men,
Women, and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film (Princeton UP, 1993); Barbara Creed’s The
Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis (Routledge, 1993); Linda Williams’ “Film Bodies:
Gender, Genre, and Excess” (Film Quarterly, vol. 44, no. 4, summer 1991); and essays collected in The
Dread of Difference: Gender and the Horror Film, edited by Barry Keith Grant (University of Texas Press,
1996).
101
transnational and specifically Japanese imagery that proved frightening both for their
ghostly qualities and their reminders of the horror of the everyday.
The J-Horror Boom
The release of Ringu in 1998 marked the beginning of what would come to be known as
the “J-horror boom”: a sudden revival of horror filmmaking in Japan, a renewed interest
in Japanese films abroad, a scramble by Hollywood to snatch up the rights to remake
many Japanese horror films (in some cases before the originals had even been
greenlighted)
2
, and the birth of the “Asia Extreme” label, which promoted Japanese,
Korean, and Hong Kong horror films internationally as examples of pure terror that were
unmatched in European and American films.
3
Where American horror films seemed to
have stagnated into repetitive slasher stories or special effects extravaganzas (and would
at one point be dominated by the “torture porn” genre that included films like the Saw
franchise, Hostel, Turistas, and Captivity), East Asian films were praised for being
“atmospheric,” relying less on visual effects and sudden shocks and more on the
development of a pervasively eerie atmosphere. Jay McRoy wrote in 2005 that landmark
horror films such as Psycho and The Birds “(had) been replaced by hi-tech rollercoaster
rides,” while Japan was producing horror films that featured “a relationship to society
similar to that of American horror in the post-Vietnam 1970s” (McRoy xii). Though films

2
In a graduate seminar on contemporary Japanese cinema conducted in spring 2007, Akira Lippit
commented on the phenomenon of “remaking before making,” in which Japanese film producers would
seek out American film producers to determine whether the American producers might be interested in re-
making a not-yet-produced Japanese film.
3
Interestingly, in the mid to late 2000s the country with the most “extreme horror” credibility seemed to be
France, with its “New French Extreme” movement, which included films such as Martyrs and Inside.
102
like Saw and Hostel were often analyzed in light of their connections to societal
anxieties,
4
outside of the “torture porn” genre, the low-budget, quasi-allegorical horror
film seemed to be almost non-existent in the U.S. in the mid to late 1990s.
Into this void came Japanese horror films, which in the late 1990s and early 2000s took
familiar horror motifs such as ghosts and serial killers and combined them with the
modern fears and anxieties of urban dwellers. In particular, films like Ringu, Kairō (Pulse,
2001), and Chakushin ari (One Missed Call, 2003) used video cassettes, hard disks, the
Internet itself, and cell phones as avenues for vengeful spirits to wreak havoc, revealing
the ways in which technologies designed to connect human beings often intensified their
sense of isolation. In addition to their focus on media and the loneliness of city life, all of
these films included examinations of modern social crises such as divorce, single
parenthood, and child abuse. Equally as terrifying as these films’ ghosts and other
malevolent forces was the horror of everyday urban existence.
A certain group of horror films released between 1998 and 2004—Ringu (1998),
Honogurai mizu no soko kara (hereafter referred to as Dark Water, 2002), Chakushin ari
(2003), and Shibuya kaidan (2004)--centered around a single, defining image: a woman
cradling the monstrous, abject figure of a vengeful ghost. This moment encapsulates a
theme and a visual aesthetic that seemed to dominate numerous successful Japanese
horror film franchises during the late 1990s and early 2000s—the breakdown of the
family unit (in particular the inadequacies of the mother), the idea of monstrous children

4
For academic analyses of films in the “torture porn” genre, see Jeremy Morris’ “The Justification of
Torture –Horror: Retribution in Saw, Hostel, and The Devil’s Rejects (in The Philosophy of Horror, ed.
Thomas Richard Fahy, 2010) and Dean Lockwood’s “All Stripped Down: The Spectacle of Torture Porn”
(The International Journal of Media and Culture, Vol. 7, No. 1., 2009).
103
(specifically girl-children) being a product of this breakdown, the loneliness and isolation
that were central to urban existence, and the use of monsters who alternated between
horrifying and pitiful. In all of these films, the connection between mother, child,
monstrosity, and the crisis of the family unit is made manifest in the conflicted figure of
the woman cradling an abject body, an image at once poignant and grotesque. In this
chapter I will examine the monstrous child characters in these four films, looking at the
ways in which technology, the urban landscape, and changing ideas about motherhood
and children contribute to the monstrous child’s unique status. I will conclude this
chapter with an examination and comparison of the “woman embracing the monstrous
child” image that serves as a climactic moment in all four films.
Ringu: The Tech-Womb and the Endless Copy
Given modern Japan’s remarkable ability to not only absorb and adapt elements of
American and European culture into Japanese mainstream life, but its ability to copy and
spread pieces of Japanese pop culture throughout the world, it is appropriate that one of
Japan’s most famous exports, the horror film Ringu, grew in popularity and esteem
primarily through word of mouth and unofficial copies exchanged across East Asia,
Europe, and the U.S. Based on the bestselling novel by Suzuki Koji, Ringu was first
adapted as a made-for-television movie, then turned into a successful Japanese film with
a number of sequels and prequels, adapted by a Korean director as Ring: Virus, made into
a manga series, and remade by American director Gore Verbinski. For the second
American Ring film (which bore little resemblance to the Japanese Ringu 2), Nakata
104
Hideo, director of the original Japanese Ringu, took over directing duties. In mid-2011
there was still talk of a third American Ring film, The Ring 3D.
5
With the Ringu
franchise, the line between original and copy has become indistinct (if it ever existed in
the first place). Like the curse that is at the heart of its story, it has become a circle
without end, a chain of adapting, copying, and re-making that has given birth to new
ways of experiencing transnational media.
There is perhaps no more iconic image in the world of Japanese horror films than
that of Sadako, clad in a white dress and with her face covered by a curtain of black hair,
transitioning from grainy TV image into real-life monster as she crawls through and out
of a television screen. Ringu spawned a sequel and a prequel, a manga series, and a
Korean and an American remake. It revitalized horror filmmaking in Japan and inspired a
range of films that featured haunted objects and vengeful female spirits. Its story is a
twist on the classic ghost story / urban legend horror film: after watching a certain video
tape, a person will die in seven days unless they make a copy of the tape and show it to
someone else. The tape is revealed to be a supernatural entity—it is the embodiment of a
young girl’s rage. The girl, Sadako, was the daughter of a woman with psychic powers,
and Sadako herself seemed to be able to control others with her mind. She was thrown
into a well by her own father, where she died after attempting to claw her way out.
Though the protagonists of the film eventually find Sadako’s corpse and think they have
broken the curse, the end of the film and its sequels reveal that Sadako’s rage cannot be
appeased, and her victims must continue spreading her video tape to avoid death.

5
Fischer, Russ. “Paramount to Make The Ring 3D.” Ringworld.com
105
Not surprisingly, of all Japanese horror films released since the late 1990s, Ringu
has received the most attention in academic circles. Scholars including Sheng-Mei Ma,
Colette Balmain, Ruth Goldberg, Tom Mes, Jasper Sharp, and Eric White have analyzed
Ringu as a reflection of Japanese societal problems (White), as part of a long tradition of
onryō (vengeful spirit) narratives in Japanese fiction and film (Mes and Sharp), as a
subtle critique of ineffective mothers (Goldberg), and as a psychoanalytical rumination
on the womb, birth, and death (Balmain, Ma). An entire collection of essays on the Ringu
/ Ring films, Kristen Lacefield’s The Scary Screen: Media Anxiety in The Ring, brings
together essays on technology and human-machine hybrids, comparisons between the
Japanese and American versions of the films, and the speed at which certain forms of
technology (like the VHS cassette) become dated. While there is merit in all of these
arguments, what I find especially interesting is Tom Mes and Jasper Sharp’s observation
of the way that the plot of Ringu mirrors the rise of its popularity:
Taking off like a storm across Southeast Asia, spawning a Korean remake along
the way (Kim Dong-bin’s The Ring: Virus in 1999), the story modeled the very
method by which Sadako’s curse transmitted itself. The Ring’s reputation spread
across the world by means of video dupes, Hong Kong VCDs and word of mouth,
with well-received festival screenings followed by more widespread theatrical
distribution throughout much of Western Europe. (Mes and Sharp 261)

Just like the video cassette at the heart of its story, Ringu spread across the world not
through traditional film distribution methods, but via pirated copies and word of mouth,
not unlike urban legends and ghost stories passed from teenager to teenager (the film
opens with one teenage girl telling another the story of the cursed video cassette, and
ends with a voiceover of another girl describing how to escape the curse by copying the
tape and showing it to someone else). The manner of the film’s rise to international fame
106
adds another layer to its story. Beyond its “uncanny mother” and monstrous girl-child,
Ringu is a film about monstrous wombs that give birth to technological and supernatural
viruses, and how both Sadako and the medium in which she exists were able to produce
offspring that were a mix of rage and contemporary technology.
Classified as “tech horror” or “media horror” when it was first released, Ringu’s
technology now seems to be something of a relic—teenagers viewing it for the first time
in 2011 may never have used a VCR or video cassette.
6
It marks the first stage in another
continuum of birth and evolution: that of the tech horror film, which would move from
video cassettes to dial-up internet and hard disks (Kairō) to cell phones (Chakushin ari).
In Ringu, the cursed video cassette seems to have transpired out of thin air, appearing in
the rental cabin near the well that holds Sadako’s corpse. But the rage of Sadako’s virus
itself is transmitted through very material means—someone who has watched it must use
a machine to make a copy, and must then give the new copy to another victim, who must
make another copy, and so on. The “ring” of the title thus refers to the endless cycle of
viewing and copying that victims must engage in to survive the curse.
Ringu is based on a bestselling novel of the same name by Suzuki Koji, and
certain differences between the novel and the film, as well as story details not included in
the film, raise interesting questions about the story’s themes of haunting through
technology and vengeful spirits. In the novel, we learn that Sadako was eighteen at the
time of her death—her age is uncertain in the film, but she appears much younger, and

6
Several writers have commented on how Ringu’s VHS technology would confused contemporary teen
audiences, or at least seem incredibly dated. According to The Hollywood Reporter, “one potential scenario
(for The Ring 3D) involves teens finding a VHS player that still works” (slashfilm.com).
107
subsequent manifestations of the vengeful female ghost with the long black hair (as seen
in Dark Water, Chakushin ari, Shibuya kaidan, and Juon [The Grudge]) have been pre-
pubescent children. In the novel, however, Sadako is described as a sexual being, with the
protagonists commenting on her beauty in photographs. She is thrown into a well to her
death moments after being raped. We also learn that she had both male and female
genitals, and one of the protagonists concludes that though she was unable to bear
children, her rage-virus constituted a kind of offspring: “What had Sadako given birth
to?...She’d wanted to have a child, but her body couldn’t bear one. So she’d made a
bargain with the devil, for lots of children” (Suzuki 264). Through the fusion of her own
supernatural powers and the tangible world of the video cassette / dubbing machine,
Sadako creates a monstrous womb from which to unleash an endless loop of “children,”
copies of her rage that must be eternally dubbed and spread throughout the world,
simultaneously protecting the initial victims from death but also furthering the contagion.
Another key difference between the novel and the film is the gender and relationship of
the protagonists. In the novel, the person who first discovers the cursed video cassette is
Asakawa Kazuyuki, a newspaper reporter with a wife and daughter. He seeks to solve the
mystery of the video with his best friend Ryuji, and ultimately becomes desperate to
protect his wife and daughter when he learns that they have unknowingly watched the
video. In the film, however, the protagonist is a single mother, and she investigates the
mystery with the help of her ex-husband, Ryuji. Novelist Suzuki Koji, who has written
books on parenting and spent time as a stay-at-home father raising two daughters, was
not happy about this change:
108
In the original Ring movie—I wanted the director to use my situation. A male
Asakawa, Aasakawa Kazuyuki. I wanted to write a ‘father story’, a father who
protects his lovely daughter. But that’s not customary in Japan because the
instinct to protect a daughter is considered more maternal, a mother’s task. So in
the Japanese movie version, the heroine is a woman, Asakawa Reiko. (Interview
with Koji Suzuki, JapanReview.net, March 2003)

The filmmakers’ decision to make Asakawa a single mother creates tensions that likely
would not have existed had the protagonist been male—a subtle critique of motherhood
centered on both Asakawa and Shizuko, the psychic mother of Sadako who committed
suicide, and the parallels between Asakawa’s son Yoichi and the ghostly figure of Sadako.
Yoichi himself is a mysterious, somewhat ghostly child who seems wise beyond his
years—when Asakawa arrives home to prepare for the funeral of her niece, Yoichi has
laid out her clothes for her. He zips up her dress before they leave. When Asakawa works
late with her ex-husband and he expresses concern that Yoichi is alone, Asakawa replies
that Yoichi is “used to it” (ano ko wa nareteiru kara). As with Dark Water (also based on
a Suzuki Koji short story, though one that featured a single mother protagonist), Ringu is
not overtly critical of single motherhood or mothers in general, but the choice to depict
two not-quite-of-this-world children, one a perpetrator of violence and the other a victim,
as children of single mothers connects the film to a long history of “monstrous mother”
narratives, as Ruth Goldberg describes: “Perhaps what is most interesting to note is how
much subtler Ringu is about blaming the mother, concurrent with more nuanced
ambivalences about motherhood in contemporary Japanese society” (Goldberg 374).
Goldberg compares Ringu to films like Masumura Yasuzo’s Mojū, The Manchurian
Candidate, Psycho, and The Exorcist, which she argues are really more about the
109
monstrosity of the mothers than of the children. In these films, the mother’s desire to be
independent and to have her own identity, as well as her inability to be an effective
homemaker and nurturer, turns her child into a monster. But the child’s monstrosity is
more to be pitied, whereas the mother’s monstrosity is her own fault (Goldberg 374).
7
In
Ringu, then, the monstrosity of both Sadako herself and the virus she releases into the
world is tied to traditional notions of motherhood and childbirth. Asakawa’s son, the film
suggests, becomes a victim because his single mother could not adequately protect him.
Sadako herself is the offspring of a strange and uncanny mother, and her rage-virus is her
only means of giving birth.
Sadako’s rage-infested offspring recall the monstrous offspring depicted in David
Cronenberg’s The Brood, in which a woman undergoing a controversial form of therapy
repeatedly gives birth to tiny, violent creatures that are “physical manifestations of her
enraged psyche” (Creed 45). Barbara Creed writes that the womb in general “represents
the utmost in abjection for it contains a new life form which will pass from inside to
outside bringing with it traces of contamination—blood, afterbirth, feces” (49). In The
Brood, the womb is made even more horrifying by being placed outside the woman’s
body “like a cancerous growth…the viewer is thereby confronted directly with the scene
of horror” (49). In the case of Ringu, Sadako’s womb is a mix of monstrosities—it is the

7
It is interesting to note that in the years leading up to the release of Ringu the Japanese media reveled in
stories of the maza-kon (mother complex) and kyoiku-mama (education mothers). Maza-kon referred to
men whose mothers had pampered them excessively and who as a result wanted their wives to do the same,
going so far as to not have sex with their wives because they associated them with mothers. Kyoiku-mama
referred to mothers who devoted all their energy to their (usually male) children’s education. In both cases,
the failings of Japanese men (sexual apathy, an inability to care for themselves) were often blamed on these
overbearing / overinvolved mothers.
110
product of person who was both male and female
8
, and it merges with machine
technology to produce offspring that perpetuate a cycle of kill-or-be-killed via the cursed
video cassette and the need to copy it. Like any archetypal womb image, Sadako’s womb
is contaminated, but with her own memories and rage, which taint whoever comes into
contact with her offspring.
Ringu’s horror is thus centered on images of reproduction, birth, and the copy: the
endless “ring” of viewing and dubbing, the birth of technological offspring through the
haunted video cassette, and the idea of real mothers producing monstrous children. That
cycle continues in the film’s manner of spreading throughout the world—through the
media of pirated copies and videos passed from one person to another, and through word
of mouth, a story spread like the legend of the haunted video cassette is spread in the film.
Sadako’s monstrous womb, a thing born of her own rage and the physical technology of
the video cassette and the dubbing machine, thus gives birth not only to a fictional cycle
of rage-infection, but to an entirely new way of spreading a film and a story throughout
the world, through the fusion of a compelling story, the ingenuity of the viewers, and
available technology that circumvents traditional methods of film distribution. In a final
series of bizarre twists, the line between Baudrillardian referent and copy became blurred
when the American remake of Ringu was so wholeheartedly embraced and promoted by
the creators of the original that it was deemed necessary to kill the referent for good—by
staging a funeral for the character of Sadako at Harajuku’s LaForet Museum. The

8
I do not mean to suggest that intersexuality is inherently monstrous, only that it is viewed as monstrous in
the context of clearly defined gender boundaries, and that it is clearly viewed as monstrous by the
protagonists of the Ringu novel.
111
filmmakers and novelist Suzuki Koji appeared in formal dress and officiated the funeral
service. A spokesperson for Asmik Ace Entertainment said that the purpose of the funeral
was “to speed Sadako along to the afterlife in order to welcome the new horror soon to
arrive from Hollywood” (“The Ring Exhibit,” September 2003). The funeral coincided
with the opening of an exhibition appropriately titled “Ringu to The Ring,” a name that
evokes the endless circle of copy and original that permeates both the film narrative and
the story of its production and spread. When director Nakata Hideo signed on to make a
sequel to the Hollywood version of Ringu, also called The Ring 2 but based on a new
script that bore little resemblance to the Japanese Ringu sequel, the line between referent
and copy seemed to have been lost forever (“The Ring Exhibit”).
Within the narrative of Ringu, Eric White writes that even those who survive the
curse by showing the video to someone else “are ineluctably transformed by the
experience of having viewed Sadako’s enigmatic message from beyond” (41). They “fall
victim to a logic of the simulacrum as well: they will never again quite be themselves”
(41). Sadako’s monstrous womb is thus an agent of reproduction, destruction, and
transformation. She was able to produce an initial “child” with the help of technology,
and her rage-offspring managed to not only kill, but to turn victims into killers
themselves. Survivors are haunted by both the fact that they must duplicate Sadako’s rage
and by the experience of having viewed the tape. And in the “real” world, the circle of
referent and copy has continued until the distinction between mother and offspring,
original and duplicate no longer matters. Sadako’s curse extends beyond the grave and
beyond the screen.
112
Monstrous Wombs, Monstrous Infants: Shibuya Kaidan
Where Ringu’s monstrous womb was a fusion of technology and a child’s rage /
supernatural powers, Shibuya kaidan’s is more mundane: a haunted coin locker where an
infant, Sachiko, was abandoned by her mother. From both the film and its sequel, we
learn that a young woman was raped and after trying to stab herself (and ostensibly
induce an abortion), gave birth alone in her apartment. She then wrapped the crying baby
in a blanket, left it in the coin locker, and threw away the key, committing suicide
sometime after. The baby’s rage haunts the coin locker and kills anyone who uses it.
When a group of college students return home from a camping trip and remove their bags
from the coin locker, they are gradually killed off in different ways. Throughout the film
they hear the occasional sound of a crying infant, see momentary visions of a child’s
handprints, and are finally confronted with a crying object wrapped in a blanket and a
child with long, black hair who moves like an insect and fixes them with a single, staring
eye. As with Ringu, the crisis seems to be resolved when the surviving member of the
group takes pity on the monstrous girl and assures her that “no child is ever born
unwanted,” but the film ends with that same woman in a hospital bed, hovering near
death and clutching the key to the haunted locker.
The coin locker became a potent symbol of the breakdown of the family unit in
Japan in the 1970s and 80s, when it was used as a place to abandon unwanted and
murdered infants. The term “coin-operated locker baby” was first used in 1975, and until
1981, approximately 7% of all infanticides reported in Japan were “coin locker”
infanticides. The number decreased rapidly in the 1980s, due to education about
113
contraception and stricter regulation of the coin lockers themselves (Kouno et al 104), but
the bodies of babies are still found abandoned in coin lockers, and each story is taken as
affirmation of the decline of the Japanese family unit, and of morality as a whole. In 2007
Japan opened its first “baby hatch” at a Catholic hospital in Kumamoto, a drop box
similar to those found in hospitals worldwide, in which mothers can anonymously leave
infants.
9
Not surprisingly, it sparked a heated debate, with then-prime Minister Abe
Shinzo arguing that such a drop box only encouraged parents to abandon their children.
10

(Sadly, in a development that seemed to confirm these fears, the drop box was first used
by a father to abandon his 3-year-old son). Media coverage of the drop box repeatedly
emphasized the decline of parental morality and also the selfishness of parents who put
themselves above their children.
11
Though the number of infants abandoned in coin
lockers has always been an extremely small percentage of all infanticide / abandonment
cases in Japan, the image of the baby in the coin locker, like the image of enjō kōsai or
the violent youth, became a potent symbol of the breakdown of the family unit. The “coin
locker baby” was perhaps most vividly depicted by Murakami Ryū in his novel of the
same name, which tells the story of two infant boys, abandoned in adjacent coin lockers,
who grow up to destroy Tokyo by releasing a poison that causes ordinary people to turn
violent. In Shibuya kaidan, then, the choice of a coin locker as a space of haunting and
vengeful child spirits can hardly be viewed as random.

9
“Don’t want your baby? Drop it off,” The Japan Times, November 10, 2006. The title of this article
typifies the judgmental tone of most domestic and international media coverage of the baby drop box.
10
“Baby drop box sparks fury in Japan,” Liveleak, May 16, 2007.
11
“Baby hatch takes unwanted Japanese babies,” Australian Broadcasting Corporation, February 18, 2011.
114
The story of Shibuya kaidan centers on the idea of unwanted children, one of
whom is made monstrous when she is abandoned by her mother in a locker. As with
Ringu’s Sadako, the audience is led to believe that they cannot fully blame the child—it
was the mother who created her monstrosity by abandoning her, and the rape of the
mother that forced her into the position of abandoning her child. A key subplot in
Shibuya kaidan involves the relationship between Reika, the film’s “final girl” (who, not
surprisingly, is the most sexually conservative in her group of friends)
12
and the junior
high school student that she tutors, Ayano. Ayano reveals to Reika that her mother died
in childbirth, and as a result Ayano’s father is distant and blames her for “killing” her
mother. Reika responds that “there is no baby who is born unwanted,” and Ayano
declares that this will become her “personal motto” (zayū no mei). The more sexually
promiscuous and irresponsible of Reika’s friends are killed off by the vengeful spirit of
the abandoned baby, but Reika, mother figure to Ayano and the most nurturing /
responsible member of the group, lives until the end of the film. In its portrayal of the
twenty-something characters, the film hints that the vengeful spirit of the abandoned baby
was born not only of her mother’s act of violence and neglect, but of people like Reika’s
friends, who sleep around, concern themselves only with superficial activities like
shopping, and engage in casual acts of vandalism (one male member of the group defaces
a Buddhist statue during their camping trip). On the one hand, this is a classic horror film
narrative—irresponsible teens or college students are killed off one by one, with the most
virginal (usually female) character left alive to vanquish the monster. On the other hand,

12
For more on the trope of the final girl in modern horror films, see Carol Clover’s Men, Women, and
Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film (Princeton UP, 1993).
115
it speaks to a contemporary Japanese narrative of blaming irresponsible youth—
particularly irresponsible and selfish women—for a declining birth rate and an overall
decline in the strength of the family unit. In a childless / family-less society, blame must
fall on the youth, and on “the fatal lure of sterile, narcissistic enjoyments understood as
inherently destructive of meaning and therefore as responsible for the undoing of social
organization, collective reality, and, inevitably, life itself” (Edelman 13). As with
narratives that privilege the heterosexual family unit in the U.S., in Japan blame is placed
on those whose selfish pursuits have little relation to establishing and maintaining a
family unit—people not unlike the characters in Shibuya kaidan.
Like all of the films under discussion here, Shibuya kaidan portrays two horrors:
the horror of supernatural, malevolent forces that wreak seemingly indiscriminate havoc
on unlucky victims, and the horror of the everyday, in this case the tragedy of being
abandoned and unwanted, paralleled in the ghost of the abandoned baby and the real-
world character of Ayano, who feels that her father does not want her, and the fear of a
society in which the child and the family are not a priority. The fearsome specter of a
ghostly child haunting a coin locker is mirrored in the gruesome reality of a young
woman’s rape and attempt at self-induced abortion, and eventual suicide. The abandoned
baby has a real-world counterpart in Ayano, who was not abandoned but feels unwanted
and resented by her father. In Ringu, Shibuya kaidan, Chakushin ari, and Dark Water, all
of the ghostly children have a real-world foil—someone who has been or who could be
victimized in a similar way, someone who embodies what must be protected and saved
from the ghostly presence, and someone who points the narrative toward the future,
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serving as what Lee Edelman calls the “telos of the social order…the one for whom that
order is held in perpetual trust” (Edelman 11). In Shibuya kaidan, the “bad” mother-child
relationship of the woman who abandoned her baby and killed herself is mirrored by the
“good” mother-child relationship of Reika, who acts as a surrogate mother to the
neglected Ayano. The vengeful spirit of the baby is what Ayano could have become, and
also the thing that Reika must protect her from. But like most contemporary Japanese
horror films, Shibuya kaidan resists easy resolution.
13
The climactic scene has a tearful
Reika asking “Why?” repeatedly and receiving no answer from the mute monster in front
of her. The idea that “there is no baby who is born unwanted,” held up as a sort of
conservative ideal, clearly does not hold true for the abandoned baby, and Reika’s mere
stating of the sentiment is not enough to lift the curse and put a stop to the child’s rage.
Ultimately, the movie seems to tell us, the monstrous child is a force born of both past
neglect and present moral decline, and there is no positive counter-force strong enough to
stop it. The future indicated by the ghostly child’s real-world counterpart is a dark and
uncertain one.
Vengeful Mothers, Vengeful Daughters: Chakushin Ari
At first glance, Chakushin ari seems like a half-hearted Ringu imitation, capitalizing on
the former’s runaway success to essentially tell the same story with a different form of
diabolical media (cell phones). Like Ringu, Chakushin ari includes a vengeful female

13
The tendency of Japanese horror films to end on an ambiguous note likely has a mundane cause: it
ensures the possibility of sequels. Of all the films under discussion here, only Dark Water ends with
anything resembling resolution, and it was, not surprisingly, the only film in the group not to generate
sequels.
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spirit with long black hair, messages accessed through technology that warn the receivers
of their impending death, and a race against time to discover a means to lift the curse
before the protagonist becomes its next victim. Chakushin ari even displays dates and
times in a sort of “countdown” to death in the same manner as Ringu. Both films became
successful franchises, with Chakushin ari also spawning sequels, a TV series, and an
American remake (One Missed Call, 2008). Where Ringu relies mostly on atmospheric
creepiness, however, Chakushin ari is remarkably gory (it was directed by Miike Takashi,
whose credits include the ultra-violent Ichi the Killer and Audition). It also touches in
more detail on the issue of child abuse and has a decidedly darker second half. Initially it
appears that the film will be a “vengeful mother spirit” story, with the root of the curse
being the rage-filled death of an abusive mother who haunts her victims through their cell
phones. But in the film’s final twist, we learn that the actual abuser was her child,
Mimiko, who repeatedly hurt her sister before being abandoned by her mother as she died
of an asthma attack. As in Ringu and Dark Water, then, the vengeful spirit is the rage-
filled ghost of a girl child, in this case a truly demonic one who seems to enjoy doing
violence to others. Chakushin ari thus twists the audience’s expectations multiple times.
A mother is initially portrayed as a despicable abuser and then turns out to be the curse’s
first victim, but is still of questionable moral character for abandoning her child to an
asthma attack. A seemingly innocent child, set up as the film’s victim, is in fact the most
despicable character of all—but can she really be, given her status as a child? The female
protagonist, herself a victim of child abuse, seems to find some kind of redemption and
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release in finding out the cause of the curse, but then she is possessed by the spirit of the
demonic child to become an abuser herself.
Where Sadako transmitted her rage through a video cassette, the monsters of
Chakushin ari do their damage through the keitai, that ubiquitous object that became an
appendage in Japan long before it seemed that everyone in the world was constantly
texting, checking email, or receiving calls via a mobile device. As Mizuko Ito has noted,
the name keitai itself (in contrast with “mobile” and “cell”) suggests not so much a
machine as “a snug and intimate technosocial tethering, a personal device supporting
communications that are a constant, lightweight, and mundane presence in everyday life”
(Ito 1). The seemingly obvious solution of previous “media horror” films—why don’t
you just throw out the video cassette / hard disk / TV set—is rendered meaningless with
Chakushin ari, because by 2003 no one in Japan, particularly college students like the
film’s protagonists, could imagine life without their cell phones. When one of the
characters finally does take the drastic step of cancelling her phone contract (a sort of
modern-day version of staking the vampire) and tossing the handset in the phone
recycling box, she still can’t escape it—the phone, and its signature “ringtone of death,”
follows her everywhere. There is no escape from a vengeful spirit when it has harnessed a
technology that no one, literally and figuratively, can detach themselves from.
Chakushin ari is really a film about two vengeful spirits: a mother haunted by the
death of one of her children, and the dead child herself. The film at first seems to center
entirely on the vengeful spirit of the mother, who, with her long black hair and her ability
to bring about death through an electronic device (a cell phone) seems reminiscent of
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Ringu’s Sadako. We learn that the mother in question was suspected of having
Munchausen syndrome by proxy, abusing her children for attention. She is set up as the
ultimate anti-mother for not only injuring her children, but doing it out of a desire for
respect for her parenting abilities from others. In a darkly lit scene, with quietly ominous
music playing in the background, a hospital worker describes the rumor that when her
daughter was dying of an asthma attack in front of her, the mother simply stood and
watched her die (Marie san soba ni inagara, migoroshi ni shita). We are thus led to
believe that the abusive mother has returned as a vengeful spirit, transmitting her rage
through cell phones. In a particularly poignant twist, one of her intended victims, the
protagonist Yumi, was also abused by her own mother. For Yumi, the terror of the
vengeful spirit that haunts her phone and seems to be creeping slowly from the realm of
the dead into the realm of the living is not only a fear of ghosts, but a fear of her real
mother and the abuse she endured as a child.
In another strange twist, and a scene that both mirrors and reverses the climactic
scene in Dark Water, in which a mother is almost strangled by the corpse-like figure of a
the spirit of a drowned child but then tells her “I’m your mother” and leaves the earthly
world behind to comfort her, Yumi is confronted by the horrifying figure of the dead
mother, who moves across the floor with wet, slimy limbs and rotting flesh that slowly
falls from her body. As she reaches out to strangle Yumi with green, scaly hands, Yumi
looks up and sees the image shift between the ghost and her own real mother reaching out
to strangle her. As the ghost’s hands close around her neck, Yumi, weeping, tells her that
she “understands,” that she won’t run away anymore, and that she’ll be a good girl. Still
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weeping, she embraces the corpse, and the camera cuts between images of her own
mother and the corpse’s face, which also weeps. Where Dark Water’s mother character
appeased the child-ghost by cradling her and agreeing to be her surrogate mother, Yumi
appeases the mother-ghost by embracing her and telling her that she’ll be a good girl.
As with Ringu, this embrace seems to be the climax of the film—the mother’s
corpse (and her malignant cell phone) have been found, her soul is at peace, and the
mystery seems to be solved. But in a final twist, we learn that it was not the mother who
abused her children—it was her own child, Mimiko, who repeatedly inflicted harm on her
younger sister. Having caught Mimiko in the act, her mother watches as Mimiko begins
to have an asthma attack, falling on the floor and begging for help, but picks up the
younger Nanako and rushes out of the house, leaving Mimiko to die. Thus it seems that
the mother is not the perpetrator of the cell phone death virus, but its first victim. The real
vengeful spirit is the ghost of Mimiko, who, despicable though she may have been, was
still a child abandoned to die by her mother. The climactic scene of Yumi cradling the
mother’s corpse takes on a new meaning—the mother was seeking forgiveness for
abandoning her child, while Yumi was seeking some sort of reconciliation with the
mother who abused her. Both parties saw what they wanted to see: Yumi her abusive
mother, Marie the child that she abandoned.
As with the scene of Asakawa embracing Sadako’s corpse in Ringu, however,
Yumi and Marie’s embrace doesn’t lift the curse or bring the story to a conclusion.
Instead of killing Yumi, the vengeful ghost of Mimiko possesses her, her rage having
moved from cell phones into the physical body of another person. When Yamashita, the
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brother of one of Mimiko’s victims, arrives to help, Yumi stabs him. When he looks in
the mirror, he sees an image of Mimiko instead of Yumi, who tells him that she’ll take
him to the hospital in the same voice that she used with her sister. The final scene of the
film shows Yumi in the hospital by his bedside, feeding him the same kind of sweet that
Mimiko always gave her sister after hurting her.
Though Mimiko’s actions were horrifying, the film clearly wants the audience to
sympathize with her. Though violent, she was still a child, and while she was alive there
is never any hint that, like Sadako, she might have been something other than human. Her
death from an asthma attack, lying on the ground gasping with blue lips while her mother
watches, is pitiful. And in a final scene that seems added almost as an afterthought, a
hospitalized Yamashita imagines that he enters Yumi’s apartment to find Mimiko’s body
lying on the floor. He holds her and presses an inhaler to her mouth—breathing in, she
looks vulnerable and innocent. The final scene of the film seems deliberately ambiguous.
A silent Yumi/Mimiko feeds Yamashita a sweet as she fingers a butcher knife behind her
back. The camera then cuts to her smiling radiantly, and then a shot of a bright blue sky
as a pop song plays over the credits. Her smile seems to suggest that all is well, that it
was all a joke…but why does she still have the butcher knife? The ending calls to mind
another deliberately ambiguous conclusion, the final shots of Kurosawa Kiyoshi’s Cure,
a coda in which the police detective who has been chasing the serial killer begins to
exhibit some of the same characteristics as the killer himself, and then, right before the
credits roll, the waitress who has been serving him grabs a butcher knife, suggesting that
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the cycle of killing continues.
14
Interestingly, with the exception of Dark Water, all of the
films in this group—Chakushin ari, Ringu, Shibuya kaidan—end with a hint that the
virus / haunting / killing will continue (though one could make the cynical argument that
this was simply to allow for the possibility of sequels, and indeed Dark Water is the only
one of these films that did not spawn sequels).
In the case of Chakushin ari, the film seems to be deliberately playing on the
audience’s sympathies, not only with the ambiguous ending but with the portrayal of both
Marie and Mimiko as victim one moment, aggressor the next. In the beginning we are led
to believe that Marie is a monster, not unlike Yumi’s mother, who seems to have taken
sadistic pleasure in abusing her daughter. The creeping figure of Marie that peers out of a
cell phone screen and seeps through the floor, her long, black hair spreading out like a
spider’s web, seems to be a direct descendant of Sadako. (In what is surely a wink at
Ringu, one of the victims is murdered on live television while undergoing an exorcism—
earlier, one of the deadly “missed calls” appeared on her phone as she was being filmed
by the television crew.) But then, suddenly, when we see the horrifying figured of the
mother’s burned body, she becomes pitiful. She wasn’t vindictive or monstrous, it seems,
only in pain. Conversely, her child, who had been the subject of much pity after the
audience learned that her mother let her die of an asthma attack, is revealed via a hidden
camera slicing her younger sister’s arm with a knife and looking on unemotionally as she
cries on the floor. Suddenly Mimiko is the monster—but she’s still a child, and still
vulnerable, and the audience is left uncertain as to who the villain is.

14
Akira Lippit points out the strangeness of this ending, which may not even be noticed by many viewers,
in Atomic Light (Shadow Optics) (2005, p. 153).
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Cry of the (Child) Monster: Dark Water
Often seen as a companion piece to Ringu (both films were based on Koji Suzuki stories,
and both were directed by Nakata Hideo), Dark Water is yet another story of a vengeful
child spirit stalking the living from beyond the grave. Of all the films under discussion
here, Dark Water seems the most conflicted about its protagonist and her responsibility in
what befalls her daughter. The protagonist is a single mother, but she is portrayed
sympathetically, and though she is overcome with guilt at not being able to properly care
for her daughter, the film seems to see her as a hero. When she eventually makes the
ultimate sacrifice by dying in order to save her child, however, the message is unclear,
and the film’s coda raises more questions than it answers.
Dark Water tells the story of Yoshimi, a mother trying to settle into a new life as
she struggles to maintain custody of her daughter during divorce proceedings. The new
apartment that she finds for herself and her daughter is an old, concrete block of a
building typical of Tokyo suburbs. From the moment they move in something isn’t quite
right—water drips constantly from the ceiling, the mother sees glimpses of a child in a
raincoat who quickly vanishes, and a child’s abandoned red purse is thrown away only to
appear again and again. In the midst of trying to find a job and prove that she is stable
enough to maintain custody of her daughter, Yoshimi learns that a young girl, Mitsuko,
went missing two years previously, and she realizes it is the vengeful spirit of this girl
that is causing the water to drip into her apartment and dogging the footsteps of her
daughter. Ultimately it is revealed that the missing girl, who had been abandoned by her
mother, drowned in the apartment’s water tank. To save her own daughter from
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Mitsuko’s vengeful spirit, Yoshimi joins the girl in her ghost-existence to become her
surrogate mother.
Dark Water’s opening credits unfold over a backdrop of stagnant, murky water lit
from above by an amber light. From there the film moves into a scene of falling rain and
an image of the young Yoshimi waiting for her mother at school, then cuts to an image of
the adult Yoshimi waiting in the rain to begin a divorce mediation meeting. Yoshimi and
her daughter trudge through the rain to view their new apartment, where water is puddled
on the floor of the elevator. While playing at school Ikuko is attacked by the ghost
Mitsuko, whose watery presence almost drowns her—Ikuko will almost drown again
multiple times, once in the water-soaked apartment where Mitsuko used to live and again
in her own bathtub when Mitsuko attempts to pull her underwater. The landscape of the
film itself, Mitsuko’s former apartment, Yoshimi and Ikuko’s bathtub, the apartment
water tank where Mitsuko drowns (repeatedly described as “flesh-colored” [hadairo] in
the original short story), and even the apartment elevator become deadly, womb-like
spaces that eject murky water into hallways and through ceilings, “birthing” the
monstrous presence of Mitsuko. Not content to send forth destruction and pollution into
the world of the living, these womb-like realms must also pull the living into the realm of
the dead—when Mitsuko cannot succeed in drowning Ikuko, Yoshimi enters Mitsuko’s
womb-world in her place. Unclean water, wetness, and the various water-filled spaces in
the film create a realm of abjection, defined by Julia Kristeva as that which “does not
respect borders, positions, rules. The in-between, the ambiguous, the composite.” The
corpse, the “utmost of abjection… is something rejected from which one does not part,
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from which one does not protect oneself as from an object. Imaginary uncanniness and
real threat, it beckons to us and ends up engulfing us” (Kristeva 4). Mitsuko’s corpse and
the polluted water that surrounds it are at first rejected by Yoshimi, who pushes
Mitsuko’s body away and cries out that she is not her mother. In the end, though,
Yoshimi realizes that being “engulfed” by the abjection of Mitsuko, embracing that
which she would push away in disgust, is the only way to save her own daughter. The
monstrous child embodies the space of in-between, transgressing the boundaries between
cleanliness and purity, innocence and abjection, death and birth.
The womb-space of the bath, traditionally a place of innocent play and family
bonding, is made uncanny by the tortured presence of Mitsuko. In one scene we see
young Ikuko soaking in the bath, happily splashing, but then she begins speaking to
someone who isn’t there—the ghost Mitsuko, who “loves the bath” and “wants to stay in
it forever.” It is a larger version of this bath, the apartment water tank, that Mitsuko,
perhaps seeking the same kind of comfort that she found in the bath, ultimately falls into
and drowns. Drowning itself takes on a complicated significance in the film—the very
real threat of drowning almost kills Ikuko several times, Mitsuko drowns at least partly as
a result of neglect (she was playing alone near the water tank when she fell in), and
Yoshimi chooses to drown voluntarily in Mitsuko’s world in order to save her daughter.
In her death by drowning Yoshimi is in a sense “reborn” as Mitsuko’s ghost-mother,
while Mitsuko herself is reborn as a monstrous spirit as a result of her drowning. In the
film’s final image of water, after Yoshimi has left Ikuko to join Mitsuko, we see the
flooded elevator open its doors to release a torrent of murky water that washes over Ikuko.
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Lying pitifully on the ground and crying “Mama, Mama,” her body drenched in water,
Ikuko resembles a newborn infant, one pitifully helpless in the absence of her mother.
(Figure 4) The births, re-births, and deaths or near-deaths of the film’s characters all take
place within the context of a watery, womb-like world that signifies a perverse sense of
renewal in the same moment that it embodies death and decay.
15

Mitsuko’s existence as a vengeful spirit in a murky, watery world is clearly
connected to parental neglect, in particular to her abandonment by her mother. Though
Dark Water presents a mostly sympathetic portrait of the struggling single mother, it still
drives home the idea that parental selfishness (in the form of divorce, to be certain, but
also in the form of mothers who choose to work and pursue lives outside of the role of
homemaker) is responsible for any “abnormal” behavior on the part of the child. Ikuko is
literally threatened by the presence of a vengeful ghost and figuratively threatened by the
dissolution of her family, which the film not so subtly hints is responsible both for
Mitsuko’s disappearance and Ikuko’s “odd” behavior. The child figure thus embodies
hope for a future that must be made better than the present, and an attachment to an
idealized sense of a fixed, unchanging past in which parental roles and the stability of the
family unit were unquestioned. Like Mitsuko, Ikuko is constantly alone, whether
purposefully left that way by her mother or because she has wandered off, lured into
dangerous situations by the ghost of Mitsuko. Alone and unattended, just as Mitsuko was
when she fell into the water tank and drowned, Ikuko narrowly escapes being pulled into
Mitsuko’s monstrous world. Shots of Ikuko waiting for her working mother are

15
For an analysis of water and womb imagery in Ringu, see Sheng-Mei Ma’s “Asian Cell and Horror,”
included in Asian Gothic: Essays on Literature, Film, and Anime (2008).
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juxtaposed with shots of Yoshimi waiting for her own absent mother, and shots of
Mitsuko waiting for the mother who abandoned her. When Yoshimi sees a “missing
child” leaflet with Mitsuko’s picture, the fear on her face suggests that her own child
could be next—another victim of parental selfishness. In the film’s final scenes Yoshimi
confuses her own child with Mitsuko—finding what she believes is Ikuko’s water-soaked
body on the bathroom floor, she runs with her to the elevator. As it floods with water,
she looks out to see Ikuko emerging from the apartment—and realizes that the girl in her
arms is in fact Mitsuko, who calls her “Mama” and tries to strangle her with green, scaly
hands. Juxtaposed with the image of her own daughter vulnerable and crying out for her,
this scene of Yoshimi rejecting but ultimately embracing Mitsuko drives home the idea
that Yoshimi is facing her ultimate fear—the fear that her own child will be made
“monstrous” through neglect and abandonment. The only way to prevent this, it seems,
is to embrace Mitsuko and leave her own daughter behind.
While the constant message of the film seems to be a warning to parents not to
abandon or neglect their children, its choice of resolution is puzzling. Yoshimi saves her
own daughter from Mitsuko’s wrath, but in doing so must abandon her. The resolution
seems to not resolve anything, but in a film that is often of two minds about its
protagonist (subtly shaming her one minute for being a working, single mother but also
sympathizing with her struggle to do the right thing), I would argue that such a
contradictory ending fits. The film’s coda initially seems unnecessary but ultimately
provides an intriguing perspective on the nature and result of Yoshimi’s sacrifice. Ten
years after Yoshimi embraces Mitsuko and leaves Ikuko behind, we see a teenage Ikuko
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wander into the now-abandoned apartment building where she once lived. The skies are
clear and there is no rain in sight, a sharp contrast to the grey, damp landscape that
dominates the rest of the film. The apartment building itself is decayed and uninhabited,
but Ikuko’s former apartment looks exactly as it did when she lived there as a child. Her
mother is waiting for her, dressed in the same clothes she wore on the day she left, and
apparently the same age. They share a few idyllic moments as mother and daughter, but
their peace is disrupted by the dark presence of Mitsuko, who lurks in the background.
Yoshimi tells Ikuko that they cannot be together. As Ikuko leaves the building, her
voiceover tells us that she realized her mother had always been there, protecting her.
This world of the apartment, a world seemingly disconnected from both the time
and space of the derelict building and the changing world outside, is a sort of idyllic,
idealized space where Ikuko can momentarily take refuge. Combined with Ikuko’s final
voiceover, it presents the idea that Yoshimi did not completely abandon her daughter,
only moved into a separate world with Mitsuko, one from which she could continue to
watch over and protect her own daughter. This world exists in stark contrast to the
elevator world of murky water and death that Mitsuko pulled Yoshimi into. It embodies
a fixed and unchanging past, the kind of idealized world that is threatened by the forces
of neglect, abandonment, and instability embodied in a monstrous figure like Mitsuko. It
is the threatened past that connects to a threatened future. The film’s coda provides us
with a final juxtaposition of seemingly disparate elements: there are the womb-like
spaces that embody a mixture of death and birth, decay and renewal, the merging of
monster and child that brings together that which must be protected and that which it
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must be protected from, and finally a disconnected world that, while inhabited by ghosts
and vengeful spirits, exists as an idyllic vision of a peaceful, unchanging past.
Embracing the Monster
All of the films under discussion here—Ringu, Dark Water, Chakushin ari, and Shibuya
kaidan—feature a strikingly similar climactic scene: that of the female protagonist
cradling the abject figure of the monstrous child (though in Chakushin ari the situation is
reversed, with the young girl cradling the vengeful spirit of an adult woman and seeing
flashes of her own abusive mother) (Figure 4).

Figure 4: Woman embracing the monster. Clockwise from top left:
Dark Water, Ringu, Chakushin ari, and Shibuya kaidan.

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In every film, this scene is a misdirect. In Ringu, Asakawa tenderly holds Sadako’s black-
haired corpse and believes that the curse has finally been lifted, only to learn later that
giving Sadako’s bones a resting place had no effect on the curse. In Chakushin ari, Yumi,
the “final girl,” embraces the mother-monster that she thinks is the cause of the cell
phone curse, but we learn soon after that the mother was a victim herself, and that the real
monster, her child, has possessed Yumi. In Shibuya kaidan, final girl Reika assures the
tormented spirit of an abandoned baby that “no child is born unwanted” and embraces her,
but the film ends with her lying in a hospital bed. Only in Dark Water, in which single
mother Yoshimi embraces the abject figure of Mitsuko and tells her “I’m your mother,”
abandoning her daughter Ikuko to be a ghost-mother to Mitsuko, does the embrace of the
monster seem to offer some resolution. Though Ikuko later encounters the ghost of her
mother and the malevolent presence of Mitsuko, the audience has the sense that Mitsuko
is satisfied and will not continue to haunt others.
What is the significance of building up a monstrous child as a horrifying presence,
reducing it to something pitiful and tragic, and then re-affirming its monstrous status?
Why does this particular image, of a woman in one moment rejecting a female child in
horror, and then cradling her affectionately, hold so much power? How does the image
encapsulate these films’ somewhat conflicting but oddly similar ideas about motherhood,
women, children, and the perceived disintegration of the family unit?
One manner of “everyday horror” that all of these images can’t seem to escape is
the specter of Japan’s declining birth rate and the fear of shōshika, the “childless society”
that Japan seems to be heading toward. When the 2005 census revealed that the number
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of deaths had exceeded the number of births for the first time, the threat of shoshika
seemed all the more real.
16
Both domestic and international media have focused endlessly
on Japan’s declining birth rate, blaming higher employment rates for women that mean
fewer women feel the need or desire to marry, sexless marriages, the high cost of
weddings, the inability of women to return to work after having a child, and the
phenomenon of “sōshoku-kei,” or “herbivore men,” men who prefer to focus on their
hobbies and friendships rather than devote themselves to a full-time job and a full-time
search for a partner.
17
In both domestic and foreign assessments of the low birth rate,
there is an unquestionable tone of moral judgment and moral panic—though the blame
frequently shifts, it seems there is always someone to blame. Initially the culprits were
women, who were told to simply leave the workforce, stay at home, and have more
children. When this kind of shaming had no effect, the government moved to establish
more day-care centers and create more financial incentives for having children, also to
little effect. The new object of blame became the men, who were decried as immature,
selfish, and uninterested in the pursuit of physical relationships and starting a family.
Indeed, though enjō kōsai and the phenomenon of violent youth have prompted media
frenzies and heated discussions over a perceived decline in values, the dominant “moral
panic” of the 2000s seems to be the threat of a childless society.

16
“The dearth of births,” The Economist, Nov. 18, 2010.
17
“200 billion yen eyed to kick start baby boom,” The Japan Times, April 7, 1999; McCurry, Justin
“Birthrate fear as Japanese prefer sleep to sex,” The Guardian, March 15, 2007; Head, Jonathan, “Japan
sounds alarm on birth rate,” BBC News, December 3, 2004; Harney, Alexandra, “The Herbivore’s
Dilemma” Slate, June 15, 2009.
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In addition to the subtle shaming of women (and more recently men) who choose
not to marry and have children, Japan continues to have mixed attitudes toward abortion.
Specifically, the practice is legal and common and is not surrounded by the same level of
taboo as in the U.S., but post-abortion shame and remorse seem almost obligatory, and
the idea of being “haunted” by the vengeful spirit of an aborted fetus remains powerful.
As Helen Hardacre notes, in the 1970s, religious entrepreneurs engaged in aggressive
marketing tactics to promote the practice of mizuko kuyo, a ritual designed to appease the
spirit of an aborted fetus. The point of the ritual was to ward off tatari (spirit attacks)--
vengeful fetus-spirits were said to attack parents and family members, but also
completely unrelated people. The tabloid press targeted young women with fetal
photographic images of “scowling, full-term fetuses turned head-up, hovering over young
women cowering in their beds in terror” (Hardacre 3). The message was that these
selfish women should have carried the babies to term, and the only way to assuage their
guilt was to perform the ritual (Hardacre 2-3). In the 21
st
century, the cult of jizo remains
popular, with women who have had both miscarriages and abortions—or simply children
who died very young—adopting jizo statues and presenting offerings to them in the name
of the lost child. These rituals are often tinged with remorse and guilt, with women and
men saying that they fear being “cursed” and that they have “murdered” someone.
18
In
the late 2000s, many women have turned to the Internet to express their remorse and guilt
on message boards specifically for women who have had abortions. As Chika Kinoshita
notes, these websites are not pro-life and bill themselves as “therapeutic” places for

18
Wudunn, Sheryl. “In Japan, a Ritual of Mourning for Abortions,” The New York Times, January 25, 1996.
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women to discuss their feelings, but the confessions follow a very similar narrative-- the
most common statement on these boards is “I will never forget that I killed my baby. I
carry this guilt to the grave” (Kinoshita 2010). Though women who post on forums like
these and women who pay a priest to perform mizuko kuyo may not use words like tatari
or vengeful spirit, the fear of retribution from beyond the grave clearly still exists.
Viewed in this context, the vengeful child-spirits of Ringu, Shibuya kaidan,
Chakushin ari, and Dark Water can be seen as another manifestation of the angry fetus
hovering over the bed of the terrified woman—grim reminders of the consequences of
selfishness and imperfect motherhood. As Ruth Goldberg has argued, the monstrosity of
the children in all of these films comes not from the children themselves, but from society
(and more explicitly, their mothers). Within their standard horror film narratives of
ghostly presences, curses, and groups of friends dying off one by one, Ringu, Dark Water,
Chakushin ari, and Shibuya kaidan all espouse conservative ideas about motherhood and
family, essentially arguing that even a monstrous child just wants to be loved and
nurtured by a mother figure. Unlike hahamono and other texts that espoused a ryōsai
kenbo (good wife, wise mother) ideology, these contemporary horror films are more
subtle in their normative messages, in the same way that American horror films of the
1970s and 80s quietly promoted gender norms in the midst of depictions of death and
mayhem. Like the ghost of the aborted fetus that was pictured hovering over a woman’s
sleeping form, the specter of the monstrous child in these films is a reminder not only of
what bad mothers can produce, but of what good mothers should do: embrace the child
and offer it love, even when it may mean the death of the woman in question.
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There are remarkable similarities not only in the tone, but in the aesthetic
composition of all of the woman-embracing-the-monstrous-child shots in these four films.
All are filmed in an environment of decay, all are lit darkly, and all end in a close-up of
the woman in question embracing the physically grotesque body of the monstrous child
(the woman, in contrast, is conventionally beautiful and feminine). The scene in Ringu
features actress Nanako Matsushima, who in the late 1990s and early 2000s was
frequently voted the most beautiful woman in Japan, sitting in a pool of mud and water at
the bottom of a well and slowly cradling the skeletal corpse of Sadako against her chest
as soft music plays. In Dark Water, actress Kuroki Hitomi huddles in the flooded, womb-
like space of the elevator, first pushing away the green, scaly body of Mitsuko but
eventually embracing her with the words, “I’m your mother.” In Shibuya kaidan, petite
and conventionally beautiful Reika
19
first recoils in horror from the terrifying figure of
Sachiko, who confronts her in the remote area of urban blight that houses the cursed coin
locker. Ultimately, Reika tells Sachiko that “no baby is born unwanted” and reaches out
to embrace her. And in Chakushin ari, the final scene takes place in the darkness of a
hospital mostly destroyed by fire. A terrified Yumi stares up at the rotting corpse of the
woman that she thinks is the cause of all her friends’ deaths—an image that flashes back
and forth between the present reality and Yumi’s own memories of her abusive mother.
Eventually, she tells the corpse / her mother that she “understands,” she “won’t run away
anymore,” and she’ll “be a good girl,” reaching out to embrace the woman’s rotting body.
The final shot shows the face of the mother weeping. The contrasting image of the

19
Interestingly, Reika is played by the actress Asami Mizukawa, who also portrayed the teenage Ikuko in
Dark Water.
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traditionally beautiful heroine embracing the abject, physically grotesque monster—but
treating that monster as someone who simply needs love and maternal care—drives home
the inherent message of all of these films: no child can ever truly be a monster, and even
a flawed mother can be redeemed with a willingness to sacrifice herself for any child, no
matter how inhuman or frightening the child may seem. Ultimately, though, the embrace
is not enough—with the exception of Dark Water, none of these films allow the
embracing woman to live on unscathed. The rage of the abandoned, neglected, or
murdered child is simply too great.
Chapter Conclusion
If the monstrous child character can be seen as a signifier of the fears and anxieties of its
time, then the monstrous child characters depicted in this group of Japanese horror films
paint a fairly clear picture of societal anxieties in the late 1990s and early 2000s: the
breakdown of the family unit, the loneliness and isolation of urban life (exacerbated by
the ubiquity of technology), and the fear of a completely childless society, or at least a
society in which children are not prioritized. Their shared imagery of a victim embracing
a monster instead of vanquishing it points to eternally conflicted ideas about the nature of
innocence and monstrosity, posing the question of whether a child can ever be truly
monstrous, and even if it is monstrous, whether it can be redeemed by maternal
compassion. Ultimately, none of the films offer easy answers—the rage of the monstrous
children lives on, even after they have been shown maternal love and acceptance, and
even after all the traditional horror film strategies of lifting a spirit-curse have been
136
carried out. The monstrous child’s quest for vengeance is unending, pointing toward a
future that, while it may not be childless, is full of terrors that stalk both adults and the
children they want to protect.

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Chap ter
4

“Bu t
I
am
a
kid”:
O pt i m i z i ng
C hi ld hood
i n
O sh ii
M a m oru ’s
The
Sk y
Cr aw l er s
There is no war, then, without representation, no sophisticated weaponry without
psychological mystification.
—Paul Virilio

Demo, ashita shinu kamo shirenai ningen ga otona ni naru hitsuyotte arun desho
ka? / But do people who might die tomorrow really have any need to grow up?

—Kannami Yuichi, The Sky Crawlers

There is arguably no greater illustration of the inextricable link between war and cinema
than Frank Capra’s Why We Fight series, a group of seven films produced from 1942 to
1945 by the U.S. government primarily to boost U.S. civilian and military support for the
war effort. These films mixed animation, stock footage, and reenactments to present a
stark view of the conflict at hand—a “slave world” versus a “free world” (depicted via
two separate black and white planets), a battle for the very souls of human beings. The
films are full of scenes meant to inspire fear of the Axis threat (in particular, marching
armies of thousands in the style of Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will), but some of
the more chilling images make use of children. In one scene, a voiceover warns of
German “breeding” programs that brought together young men and young women for the
purpose of creating “thoroughbred children” (Why We Fight Part 1, 36:10). The film then
cuts to an image of a dozen squalling babies laid out on a table, while another dozen are
pushed by on a cart. As the camera pans over the mass of indistinguishable babies, their
screams are layered over one another until they sound like insects. The voiceover warns
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that these babies “belong to the state, to be scientifically trained for conquest.” The image
of an assembly line of babies, all bred specifically to be weapons of the state, spoke and
continues to speak to a primal fear: fear of indoctrination and brainwashing at an early
age, fear of a society of drones, fear of the wholesomeness of childbirth and childhood
twisted into a tool of violence. Fear of the loss of children themselves, both their bodies
and their minds. Appropriately, the first Why We Fight film ends with a montage of
destruction that includes images of children wearing gas masks and fighting in trenches.
We are warned of all we could lose if we don’t fight, including “our hopes for our
kids…the kids themselves. They won’t be ours anymore.” Images of gun-toting children
in gas masks stoke fears not only of indoctrination and the breeding of child weapons, but
of the loss of all children and childhood itself.
The horror of child soldiers, child weapons, and children reduced to cold-blooded
killing machines has been the subject of a number of novels and films—Lord of the Flies,
Village of the Damned, Children of the Corn, The Bad Seed, and the recently popular YA
series The Hunger Games, to name a few. In Japan, Ōe Kenzaburo’s Nip the Buds, Shoot
the Kids places children in a Lord of the Flies-like setting, while the film Battle Royale
and its sequels imagined a future in which children were forced to become killers on a
deserted island. All of these stories play, to some extent, on the cognitive disconnect
between images of the smiling, diminutive child and acts of cold-blooded violence, as
well as (in the case of Village of the Damned in particular) the image of groups of
children driven by a single, calculating purpose. These children defy all expectations and
139
preconceptions of children. Worse, their status as children makes us conflicted about
using any means necessary to put a stop to their violence.
In Oshii Mamoru’s 2008 film The Sky Crawlers (Sukai kurora), the idea of child
soldiers and child weapons moves beyond the realm of the horror film and toward the
question of what it means to be a child, a killer, and a human being in a world where
reality and spectacle have become indistinguishable. Oshii Mamoru’s film and the novel
it is based on imagine an alternate world in which the main players in corporate-
sponsored warfare are kildren, beings who seem trapped in a state of perpetual childhood
even as they engage in very adult activities. In The Sky Crawlers, both the individual
kildren and the idea of childhood itself become focal points for an examination of the
relationships between violence, spectacle, and memory. The kildren (kill + children) are
victim-monsters born of a human fascination with war and innocence. And the anime
medium, with its history of drawing gender-, race-, and age-ambiguous characters and
depicting a sharp contrast between human and mecha (machines / robots) against a
backdrop of wartime propaganda, is ideally suited for conveying the symbolic potency of
the story’s main characters. Through anime, we see the kildren as ambiguous figures
existing somewhere between child and adult, we see the anime-style deathless body that
dies but lives again, and feel the visual poignancy of the kildren’s symbolic status as
innocent protagonists in the war-as-spectacle world of the future.
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Reading Anime
In the second decade of the 21
st
century anime and manga remain a multi-billion dollar
industry for Japan. Popular films, TV series, and comic books have long since moved
beyond the realm of small groups and specialist conventions and into the mainstream
marketplace, where they are consumed by eager fans all over the world. The Anime Expo,
an annual event held in California, has grown from a gathering of just over a thousand
people and a handful of guests in 1992 to attracting nearly 50,000 people and A-list
publishers and performers in 2011.
1
Tokyo’s Akihabara district, once primarily a center
of electronics, has been reborn as an anime and manga Mecca, with tourists flocking to
shops that sell anime and manga-related videos, comics, costumes, and character goods.
Anime and manga also find themselves at a creative and legal crossroads, with the
Japanese government poised to take what many see as drastic measures to limit the sale
of sexually explicit manga to anyone under 18, a move that has met with strong
opposition among manga publishers.
2
The legislation has prompted debate not only over
the sale of “harmful” material to minors, but over exactly what constitutes “harmful”
material, and the question of whether manga can be subject to the same restrictions as
photographs. If anything, the legislation and the debate surrounding it indicate the overall
power and influence of the manga and anime medium. Whatever the long-term results of

1
“Anime Expo: 47,000+ Unique Attendees Came This Year,” Anime News Network, July 4, 2011;
“Information on Anime Expo 1992,” animecons.com, July 1992.
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the new law may be, the popularity of anime and manga all over the world shows no sign
of diminishing.
The last ten years have also seen a flourishing of academic interest in anime and
manga. Susan Napier’s groundbreaking Anime: From Akira to Howl’s Moving Castle was
arguably the first collection of essays to combine analysis of anime with psychoanalytic
and post-structural theory. Kotani Mari’s Seibo evangelion (Evangelion as the
Immaculate Virgin) provided a feminist critique of the wildly popular Shin seiki
evangerion (Neon Genesis Evangelion) series. Much early work on anime analyzed it in
the same manner that one would analyze a live-action film or a book. I am inclined to
agree with scholar Tom Lamarre that many studies of anime, while well-researched, tend
too often toward the plot summary / movie review format and “see anime as a direct
reflection or representation of the social problems of, say, postmodern Japan” (Lamarre,
Anime Machine, xxxi). At the same time, in the past five years the study of anime and
manga has moved beyond studies of plot and character into analysis that examines the
medium as a product of postmodernity, invoking Heidegger, Foucault, Freud, and
theories of visual culture to look at anime films and television series via the unique status
of the anime medium itself. Lamarre’s work, as well as work published in the journal
Mechademia since 2006 by Otsuka Eiji, Christopher Bolton, Frenchy Lunning, Takayuki
Tatsumi, and Kotani Mari, posits anime as an ideal medium for discussions of technology,

2
“Tokyo bans sales of explicit comics to minors,” Los Angeles Times, December 16, 2010; “Tokyo tries to
ban ‘harmful’ anime and manga,” Japan Probe, Dec. 12, 2010.
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globalization, and capitalism.
3
It is these theorists and their work that serve as the
inspiration for my own analysis of The Sky Crawlers.
Anime is often described as an anti-mimetic, non-referential medium, or at least
as a medium unconcerned with the representation of reality.
4
Oshii Mamoru himself has
stated that he realizes “that some directors are only interested in real life, but the opposite
is true for me” (Oshii, qtd. in Brown 20). Given that anime and the animation medium in
general present images derived from drawings, whether computer generated or hand-
drawn, it is not so farfetched to argue that the people and places presented in anime do
not approximate, or make any effort to approximate, “real” spaces. But I would argue that
much of anime is, in fact, deeply concerned with accurately representing real spaces.
Miyazaki Hayao’s Mimi wo sumaseba, for example, pays meticulous attention to detail in
its depiction of a Tokyo suburb, from the layouts and door designs of cramped apartment
buildings to the colors of street signs. The famous opening shot of Ōtomo Katsuhiro’s
Akira pans over an incredibly detailed rendering of Tokyo, showing a jumble of boxy
buildings flanking a long expanse of highway that seems to stretch all the way to the
horizon. This detailed vision of a very real place is set up in contrast to the rest of the film,
which depicts a post-apocalyptic Tokyo where impossibly tall skyscrapers gleam over a
landscape of decay. Oshii Mamoru’s films take place in a variety of alternate universes,

3
See, for example, Otsuka Eiji’s “World and Variation: The Reproduction and Consumption of Narrative”
(Mechademia 5, 2010); Sharalyn Orbaugh’s “Emotional Infectivity: Cyborg Affect and the Limits of the
Human” (Mechademia 3, 2008); Steven T. Brown’s Tokyo Cyberpunk: Posthumanism in Japanese Visual
Culture (2010); Tom Lamarre’s “Born of Trauma: Akira and Capitalist Modes of Destruction” (2008) and
The Anime Machine: A Media Theory of Animation (2009); and essays by Azuma Hiroki, Christopher
Bolton, and Tatsumi Takayuki in Robot Ghosts and Wired Dreams: Japanese Science Fiction from Origins
to Anime (2007).
4
See Napier 2005, p. xii; Cavallaro 2006, p. 38.
143
but the references to real places and things are never far away. Two of his most famous
films, Ghost in the Shell and Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence, clearly take place in a
version of Tokyo, while Avalon, a story of an addictive virtual reality war game,
combines live-action footage of Poland with CGI visions of the online game that
nonetheless clearly models its tanks and landscapes on the real. In the case of The Sky
Crawlers, there is a dramatic contrast between the machines and the landscapes, which at
times seem indistinguishable from live-action imagery, and the very hand-drawn look of
the characters. This realistic vision of places and things is very much in line with an
alternate universe in which staged wars have become entirely real for everyone who
watches and participates in them, and in which childhood itself has become a form of
theater, a state of being that the kildren imitate but can never truly experience or
understand.
In this chapter I will examine the kildren characters of The Sky Crawlers in light
of their connection to the monstrousness of child soldiers, war as spectacle, and the
technological optimization of all things, including human bodies. Unlike the monstrous
children discussed in previous chapters, the kildren are not physically grotesque, vengeful,
ghostly, or filled with an indiscriminate rage and desire to harm. Rather, they are
monstrous because they are part of world in which childhood itself has been
commodified and re-shaped into a tool in a war that is waged for profit and entertainment.
They are trapped, emotionally and physically, in an eternal childhood, but they are forced
to carry out acts of violence with consequences that, in their childlike state, they can
never fully comprehend. In the visual framework of anime, the existence of the kildren
144
and the world they live in is made all the more vivid through contrasts in drawing styles
and the age-ambiguous aesthetic of the kildren’s faces and bodies. Monstrosity is
conveyed not only through narrative, but through the unique visual and stylistic
properties of the anime medium itself.
Kids, Kodomo, and Everything in Between
Though his career spans decades and his films include a wide range of themes,
Oshii Mamoru is perhaps best known for breathing new life into the cyberpunk genre
with Ghost in the Shell and Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence. Along with Miyazaki Hayao
(Spirited Away, My Neighbor Totoro) and Ōtomo Katsuhiro (Akira, Steamboy), Oshii is
an internationally celebrated figure whose work has helped turn anime into a global
phenomenon. Over the past twenty years his films have focused primarily on the question
of what it means to be human in a world where human / machine and real / virtual are
becoming harder and harder to distinguish. Within Oshii’s landscapes of dystopian cities,
cyborg assassins, and virtual war games that can cause real death, however, the question
of the child often lingers. Ghost in the Shell, the story of a female cyborg trying to solve a
mystery involving a virtual serial killer, ends with its heroine’s consciousness transported
into the body of a pre-pubescent girl. Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence depicts something
akin to child sex trafficking, in which young girls are kidnapped so that their “ghosts” can
be downloaded into robotic sex dolls. And in The Sky Crawlers, Oshii depicts a race of
beings who exist in a state of perpetual adolescence and are used by corporations to stage
elaborate aerial battles.
145
Released in 2008, The Sky Crawlers is based on Mori Hiroshi’s novel of the same
name (actually one of a series of five novels about the same characters).
5
It takes place in
an alternate world where war has been completely eradicated. Fearing that the
significance of this peace will be lost if human beings are not regularly exposed to
images of violent conflict, international governments have arrived at a bizarre solution:
major corporations will stage elaborate aerial battles that result in real casualties. Their
soldiers are kildren, children who have been genetically modified to remain in a state of
perpetual adolescence. The reasoning seems to be that as adolescents the kildren live
eternally in the present and are not emotionally mature enough to comprehend the
consequences of their actions. The film follows several of the kildren as they go about
their daily lives and in some cases begin to question the nature of their existence. By the
end of the film it is essentially revealed that all the kildren are clones. When one is shot
down another quickly arrives to take his or her place. The new kildren retains his/her
predecessor’s skill set but possesses a slightly altered set of memories.
The Sky Crawlers touches on many of Oshii’s favorite themes: the idea of
“borderline spaces” (in this case, beings who seem to exist somewhere between
childhood and adulthood, and a war that is real but not), the notion of what it means to be
human when so many of the trappings of humanity are easily replicated or recycled, the
relative meaning / meaninglessness of human relationships, and the question of how

5
Tracking the relationships between anime films, TV shows, novels, manga, and even character goods can
be maddening. Sometimes a film is based on a manga series, which then becomes a TV show and / or video
game. Sometimes the film comes first, and sometimes the action figure. There may be dramatic differences
between film / TV and manga or none at all. Sky Crawlers, like many big-budget anime films, is part of a
franchise that includes five novels (these came first), a film, a video game, and a manga series. In this
chapter I will be focusing my analysis on the film.
146
memory shapes who we are. At the same time, the film is something of a departure from
Oshii’s usual territory. There are no cyborgs, no robots, no gritty urban landscapes.
Where Ghost in the Shell and its sequel had a sense of urgency and grim resolve, The Sky
Crawlers seems to exist in a quieter, more resigned world, where the characters are
vaguely aware that they are pawns in a game but have no power (or real desire) to fight
their fates.
For the purposes of this chapter and the focus of this project, one of the first
questions I must ask is: are the kildren actually children? Judging superficially by the
way the characters are drawn, their language, and their mannerisms, the kildren are
clearly meant to be in their late teens. Obviously notions of innocence and accountability
are very different when dealing with a teenager and a pre-adolescent child. At the same
time, as I hope to illustrate, The Sky Crawlers is purposefully vague in revealing the
kildren’s exact ages, if they can even be said to have exact ages. While their ages are
uncertain, it is obvious that the characters exist in a liminal state not unlike that of
childhood, and many of their character traits—immaturity, an inability to think outside of
the present, and an inability to understand the consequences of their actions—are
attributed to that state. Thus, while I concede that the kildren are not “children” in the
biological sense, I argue that the film clearly wants us to see them as young, innocent
entities separate from the world of adults.
At the same time, Oshii clearly enjoys toying with the audience’s perception of
the characters, frequently placing them in adult situations and then reminding the
audience that they are “kids”. As with the director’s most internationally famous films,
147
Ghost in the Shell and Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence, many plot and character details
are left uncertain until the end of The Sky Crawlers, including the nature of the kildren
and the battles they fight in. Initially we meet several kildren who appear to be young
adults, though some of them have a bravado that suggests teenage-ness. Early on in the
film, the newest kildren, Yuichi Kannami, is taken to a brothel, which seems to confirm
that the kildren are at least not pre-pubescent (though anime and manga have long
included storylines involving sex between characters of uncertain ages).
6
We see
Kannami naked in bed with a woman who appears older, and who teases him for using
the familiar “kimi” to refer to her, saying that he sounds like a “kid” (kodomo). And then
the film’s focus lingers on him for a while, and he says, not jokingly, “But I am a kid”
(boku wa kodomo da yo). Cut back to the woman, who gazes at him fondly.
This is the first concrete evidence provided that the kildren are not what they
seem. Until this moment they have been depicted drinking, smoking, and bantering with
one another, and while there is an air of youth about them there was never any concrete
indication that they were “kids”. Oshii will play with this confusion repeatedly in The Sky
Crawlers—just when the audience begins to see the kildren as adults, someone will make
a comment about how “childish” they are, or the fact that they’re “just kids.” The anime
medium serves him well here. Since the 1960s, many Japanese animators have favored a
mukokuseki (“stateless”) style of character design, meaning that their characters have no

6
Incidentally, it is these kinds of storylines that are being targeted by Bill 156, passed in December 2010,
which aims to limit the sale of manga that depicts, among other things, sex between minors. Even in
storylines that feature adults, however, characters are frequently drawn to look young and childlike, which
makes the designation of child pornography difficult to assign.
148
clear nationality.
7
Gender ambiguity is also common in manga, even outside of the genre
known as bishōnen (“beautiful boy”) manga, which often feature effeminate male
characters in homoerotic relationships
8
. In more mainstream manga and anime, long hair
and delicate features are the norm, and while characters’ names and voices tend to mark
their genders in anime, the visual effect is decidedly androgynous.
9
In The Sky Crawlers,
characters are initially difficult to tell apart from one another, especially given that they
wear identical uniforms. All of the kildren are also drawn with smooth, pale faces—again,
not uncommon in anime and manga, but in stark contrast to the film’s adult characters,
who have facial hair, wrinkles, wear makeup, and generally exhibit a variety of physical
difference not seen among the kildren.

Figure 5: Kildren drawn in an ageless, gender-ambiguous style.

7
Koichi Iwabuchi argues that mukokuseki implies “the erasure of racial or ethnic characteristics or a
context, which does not imprint a particular culture or country with these features” (Iwabuchi 28).
8
It should be noted the the male-male relationships featured in bish ōnen manga often take place between
characters who identify as heterosexual—or between a nominally heterosexual aggressor (the seme, taken
from the verb for “attack”) and a more feminine object of seduction (the uke, taken from the verb for
“receive”).
9
In an opening scene of The Sky Crawlers, for example, a character with delicate features and long blond
hair sitting at a table and reading a newspaper is not revealed to be obviously male until he speaks (with a
deep voice).
149
The kildren appear ageless (but definitely young), gender ambiguous, and
undifferentiated from one another, with only slight variations in hairstyle, vocal tone, and
manner to mark each character as unique (Figure 7, 8). They may not be “children” in
terms of age, but they are repeatedly referred to as kodomo, their bodies and minds are
distinct from adult bodies and minds, and they are part of a manufactured version of
childhood that aims to elicit the same primal responses that adults would have to “real”
children.
Affect, Memory, and Manufactured Childhoods
In addition to playing with the audience’s perception of the kildren’s exact ages, Oshii
also repeatedly drops hints about their strange relationship with memory and experience.
Like the replicants of Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, the kildren seem to have no real
memories of their own—only fragmentary images of a childhood that may never have
happened at all. The Sky Crawlers uses the kildren to explore the elusive and deceptive
nature of human (and quasi-human) memory, and the significance of a lack of memory
and experience. In the absence of said memory and experience, can the kildren be called
human? And if they are not human, what does this mean for their status as central figures
in a staged war, as tragic characters in a charade that, for observers, involves “real” life
and death? The kildren’s uncertain relationship to memory and experience drives home
the monstrosity of their existence. Childhood, for the kildren, is not a transitional state
but a perpetual one. And yet even as they are trapped in a realm of innocence and
150
vulnerability, the kildren are forced to kill and be killed, to engage in adult behavior
without any opportunity to grow and reflect on that behavior.
Oshii Mamoru’s Ghost in the Shell, Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence, and even
earlier, seemingly lighthearted works like Urusei Yatsura 2: Beautiful Dreamer touch on
the question of memory and its relationship to humanity. Beautiful Dreamer imagines a
world in which a group of characters become trapped in another character’s dream. Ghost
in the Shell features a character with a cyborg body who wonders if her “ghost”—her
human soul and memory—is in fact real or a fabrication of the company that made her
body. In the second Ghost in the Shell film we are introduced to the idea of “ghost-
dubbing,” in which the souls and memories of children are stolen and implanted into the
bodies of sex doll cyborgs to make them more human. For Oshii, the body’s connection
to selfhood and subjectivity is becoming less and less significant. And memory is no
more effective, given that it can be fabricated. But there is one factor that still separates
human from machine:
To the unidentified interviewer’s question ‘If humans have no memory and no
body, in what sense are they still human?’ Oshii responds with one word: omoi,
which can be translated equally plausibly as “thought” or “feeling/emotion” (29–
30). (I often translate it here as “affect,” which connotes both.) ‘Even if we are
already resigned to the loss of [the body and memory], I believe that affect
remains (omoi ga nokoru). It may be some kind of feeling toward a particular
woman, or toward the dog who lives with you, or toward the body you have lost’
(35). ‘The affect that a person leaves behind is the evidence that they have lived.’
(Orbaugh 36)

Affect, it seems, is the only human characteristic that cannot be fabricated. The body and
the memories may be machine-generated, but affect is a reliable trace.
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Affect, memory, and conceptions of the past / future are deeply tied to the concept
of childhood. Lee Edelman’s writings on “reproductive futurism” argue that the
hypothetical child is used to hold the world hostage for the protection of a hypothetical
future, a future that must be shaped with that as yet unborn child in mind. Childhood and
the hypothetical child are tied to notions of a fixed, unchanging past—the idyllic
childhood of the collective imagination—and the future that we must work to infuse with
the same kind of idealism in the name of that mythic past. Children are the future, but
they are also the past. Such ideas of childhood and the child resonate with Marilyn Ivy
and others’ writings on the status of Japan in the world—in particular, the ways in which
Japan has been labeled (and has labeled itself) a “child” in comparison to other countries.
For many politicians and conservative thinkers, Ivy writes, Japan’s national “adulthood”
is inextricably linked to the possibility of military intervention, which the current
constitution does not allow. Ivy’s analysis of artist and writer Murakami Takashi notes
that for the artist’s famous “Little Boy” exhibition, images of
…otaku ("geek") subculture and everyday girl fantasies, the pop and the neopop,
anime and manga, toys and sculpture (and, indeed, much more) were thematically
gathered together under the name of Japan and the reality of war defeat. Little
Boy was about nothing other than trauma, oedipal and historical (and the
impossibility of their separation in Japan): the trauma of war defeat in atomic
explosions and its virtually transparent repetition as the (sexualized) trauma of the
oedipalized (national) subject. Thus "Little Boy," the code name for the atomic
bomb dropped on Hiroshima, was the title of the show: little boy the bomb, little
boy the country (Japan), little boy the boy (Murakami). (Ivy, Trauma, 179)

For Ivy, Japan is akin to the traumatized child who cannot “grow up” because Japan
cannot escape the shadow of the postwar. Rather than “finally, properly coming to terms
with the past,” Japan seems to believe that its only path to adulthood lies through war, or
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at least the ability to engage in armed conflict when it chooses. Childhood is military
impotence, adulthood is military might.
In The Sky Crawlers we see the merging of these ideas of childhood as a temporal
no-man’s land, of the mixing of adulthood and childhood through acts of war, and the
equation of childhood with both a mythic future and a mythic past. The kildren
themselves embody a unique form of monstrosity—hybrid beings who have the
emotional maturity of children but engage in adult activities like sex, drinking, smoking,
and even warfare; children who will never become adults; bodies and minds that are used
up and rebuilt as quickly as the planes that they fly. Throughout the film we get hints that
Kannami, the main character, is essentially a clone of his predecessor, who died under
mysterious circumstances. When Kannami first sees the chief mechanic, he says, “I feel
like I’ve met you somewhere before.” The mechanic doesn’t seem surprised. When
Kannami tells Kusanagi that he doesn’t trust non-smoking officers based on
“experience,” she repeats the word, amused, as if the notion of any of the kildren having
“experience” were comical. Kannami says that he can’t remember where he was
stationed before, and after eating dinner with his new friend Tokino at the local diner, he
comments that the meat pie tasted familiar, even though it was his first time at the diner.
Later, at a brothel, Tokino jokingly asks if Kannami has been here before too, and he says
absently, “Maybe I have.” When one of the pilots is shot down, a new pilot who looks
almost exactly like him—and even folds his newspaper the same way—shows up soon
after. Finally, the pilot Mitsuya says she believes that Kannami is simply a recycled
version of his predecessor, with the same memories (albeit fragmented) and the same
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abilities. He’s too valuable a commodity not to be brought back. In the end, Mitsuya’s
theory seems to be confirmed when Kannami is shot down by an enemy plane and a new
pilot arrives to take his place.
10
The introductory conversation between Kusanagi and the
new pilot is exactly the same as her first conversation with Kannami.
Invoking Heidegger’s conception of technology, Tom Lamarre writes that in the
modern age, “everything—nonhuman and human—is seen in terms of how its usefulness
might be technologically optimized. Such is the modern technological condition: an
understanding of existence in terms of optimization” (The Anime Machine, 52).
11
The
kildren are the epitome of this kind of optimization. They have been bred (created?
developed? cloned?) specifically to fight aerial battles, and they have been endowed not
only with a set of transferable skills but with the emotional and physical trappings of
childhood. They are optimized both for battle and for their role as poignant figures who
can never truly comprehend the nature and consequences of what they do. In a scene in a
bowling alley, Tokino and Kannami both bowl perfect strikes repeatedly, but their
victories feel half-hearted. In a show of rebellion, Kusanagi purposefully bowls badly.
Her only rebellion against the technological optimization of her body and mind, it seems,

10
Interestingly, Oshii leaves this last reveal until after the closing credits, which is in line with the
director’s overall style of never revealing too many details about the nature of his characters and the
dystopian worlds they inhabit.
11
On Heidegger’s conception of technology, Lamarre writes: “…in Heidegger’s view, when we think only
in terms of how technology makes for human loss and gain, we do not arrive at an understanding of what
technology is and how it works—what Heidegger calls the essence of technology. In his opinion, if we
don’t understand the essence of technology, we will either push on blindly with it, or, what amounts to the
same thing, rebel helplessly against it” (The Anime Machine, 50). Quoting Hubert Dreyfus, he adds that
“the threat is not a problem from which there can be a solution but an ontological condition from which we
can be saved” (The Anime Machine, 51).
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is to fail on purpose. We also learn that Kusanagi had a child of her own, another choice
that seems to be a form of rebellion against the optimization of her own childlike state.
What is being recycled in The Sky Crawlers are not only the bodies and memories
of the kildren themselves, but the very idea of childhood, which exists as an eternal
prison for the kildren (for the duration of their short lives, at least), and as a kind of brand
for the corporations that own them. Even though the wars they engage in are meant to
provide the public with an emotional and spiritual outlet by virtue of their being “real,”
the kildren have no real past / childhood, no birth, and no aging. Whether they die is a
more complicated question. To the public, they do, and thus the staged war’s goal of
giving people a necessary dose of real deaths broadcast on TV is achieved. But in reality
their memories are simply downloaded into new bodies again and again. Ironically, the
most important claim of this corporate-sponsored warfare—that it’s REAL, and that it
ensures people will not forget the significance of peace—is essentially meaningless with
the knowledge that the kildren were never really born and never really die.
One of the more fascinating ruminations on the nature of the kildren and their
child / adult status takes place in a scene in the middle of the film. Kildren roommates
Kannami and Tokino have temporarily relocated to another base in preparation for a
large-scale aerial attack. After being welcomed to the base with a sign drawn in childish
crayon scrawl and given popcorn and sweets, they wander outside to a pair of metal toy
planes. Tokino bounces idly on the plane that is clearly too small for him. The two
friends talk, and then there is a close-up on the two of them as they both bounce
determinedly on the planes, their faces expressionless. A female kildren arrives and tells
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them that the planes are “for the kids” (kodomo ga norumon) to which Tokino replies,
“Well, I happen to be a kid” (icchō, ore mo kodomo dakedo).
What takes place in this scene is essentially quasi-children playing at being real
children. As Kannami and Tokino bounce on the planes, which make squeaky metal
sounds reminiscent of the weapons they fire from their real planes, they are imitating
their everyday lives, which consist of flying real planes and shooting down living
enemies (though they are only “enemies” because corporations designate them as such).
At the same time, they are doing this on toys that are designed for actual children, who
would ride the planes in an innocent imitation of the kildren, who they likely see as
larger-than-life superheroes. In Tokino and Kannami’s case, they are not innocent of the
realities of what it means to fly real planes as kildren, and so their brief play-acting has a
sharp edge to it. Unlike Kannami’s “I am a kid,” delivered to the woman he’s just had sex
with, Tokino’s response of “Well, I happen to be a kid” is tinged with irony. They’re not
kids—they’ve seen and done too much, and they’ll never have the same kind of
innocence that the kids the toys were designed for have. But they’re stuck in a limbo of
perpetual childhood, unable to emotionally process what they do and lacking the ability
to truly comprehend past or future.
As imagined by Oshii, childhood in The Sky Crawlers is a state of perpetual limbo,
a temporal no-man’s land where a lack of connection between past, present, and future
means a complete lack of accountability for or emotional connection to death and
destruction. The monstrousness of the kildren lies in the twisted nature of what
“childhood” means for them—it means never growing up but also being forced to kill and
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be killed, it means being shut off from wisdom and knowledge but being used as a
commodity by those with wisdom and knowledge.
The kildren are a new breed of child, embodying a strange mix of innocence and
experience. They are drawn as young adults but with ageless faces. They are separate
from adults (one of the adult commanders comments that Kusanagi is “immature…that’s
the problem with children”), but engage in adult activities like smoking, drinking, and sex.
They kill and can be killed but seem to lack the ability to process what they do. As beings
trapped in a state of perpetual non-adulthood, they elicit exactly the kind of sympathy and
admiration from regular citizens in the world of The Sky Crawlers that the bizarre
practice of corporate-sponsored warfare demands. They are the perfect weapon:
unconcerned with past or future because they have no real childhood memories to cling to
and no future to look toward.
The Deathless Body Re-Imagined
Anime and manga have a long history of separating their mecha (mechanical or machine)
components through dramatic differences in drawing style.
12
Oshii Mamoru took this a
step further with his 2001 film Avalon, a film that juxtaposed human actors and live-
action location shooting with computer-generated depictions of an online game. Dani
Cavallaro argues that Avalon’s seamless merging of anime and live-action “draws
attention to the technological significance of amalgamating disparate styles and media as

12
For a detailed account of the varied human / mecha drawing styles in manga, see Tom Lamarre’s
“Manga Bomb: Between the Lines of Barefoot Gen” and Otsuka Eiji’s “Disarming Atom: Tezuka Osamu’s
Manga at War and Peace.”
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a cinematographical correlative for the types of human-nonhuman fusions tackled by
means of themes and imagery” (Cavallaro 174). In other words, the meaning of cyborgs
and other human-machine hybrid characters that are common in anime are further
spotlighted by the contrasting drawing styles used to depict mechanical and organic
objects. In its dramatic contrast between line-drawn humans and three-dimensional
mecha, The Sky Crawlers provides a constant visual reminder of the human-machine
question. As in Avalon, Oshii and the design team of The Sky Crawlers pay remarkable
attention to the detail of weapons and fighting craft. Though Avalon was a live-action
film and The Sky Crawlers is anime, the fighter planes in the latter would not look out of
place in the former.

Figure 6. Hand-drawn human character and hyper-realistic mecha

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The juxtaposition of Kannami and Tokino, drawn to look almost like delicate dolls, with
the harsh angles and shiny metal surfaces of their fighter planes, at times makes it seem
as if two separate films have been layered on top of one another (Figure 9).
Scholar Ōtsuka Eiji has written of the ways that anime and manga differentiate
between human and mecha, a practice that Ōtsuka connects to the ideology of the 1930s
and 1940s related to children’s reading materials. Realism, particularly realistic
depictions of “scientific” objects like tanks, weapons, fighter planes, and factories, was
the style of manga promoted by the government.
13
Extremely realistic drawings of
mechanical objects were juxtaposed with Disney-esque, anti-realistic line drawings of
human characters. Additionally, the human characters, like their Disney counterparts who
fell from great heights with a splat only to reappear unharmed in the next panel, displayed
an “undying” physicality, their line-drawn forms always bouncing back to life. Ōtsuka
writes:
A contradiction arises between the realistic depiction of industrial machinery,
trains, and weaponry, and the world of “undying” Mickey-style characters,
characters without physical substance. Tezuka betrays a certain anxiety about this
contradiction, presenting an apparently deathless young man who receives a direct
hit from the machine-gun bullets fired by Mickey’s realistically rendered fighter
plane. The techniques of representation are such that the actual body of the youth,
head slumped and gushing blood, remains anime-like. In this system of
representation, I detect a symbolic turning point in the history of manga in terms
of how it will depict “life” and “death” and “sex”—the inevitable mortality of the
living body appears fundamentally at odds with Disney-esque antirealism. This is
how postwar manga could, on the one hand, internalize the topics of life and death
in a literary” manner and, on the other hand, move in the direction of pornography
associated with the moe style of anime drawing. (Ōtsuka 121-122)

13
Otsuka Eiji, “Disarming Atom: Tezuka Osamu’s Manga at War and Peace.”
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According to Ōtsuka, the work of Tezuka Osamu managed to combine the anti-
realist styles of Disney and the hyper-real style demanded by the Japanese government,
but the combination was not without tension. Though characters were drawn in a style
similar to Disney’s “deathless” heroes, they did not always survive the fall from the cliff
or the shots from the gun. In an analysis of the manga Barefoot Gen that contrasts the
“plastic line” character drawings with more realistic depictions of mecha, Tom Lamarre
writes: “In Tezuka’s manga, a question thus arises: what happens when deadly weapons
turn against the cartoon hero? Can a cartoon hero really die, and what kind of death is it?
In other words, within war manga itself, questions emerge precisely because of the basic
contrast between drawing styles…” (Lamarre, Manga Bomb, 296). The hyper-realistic
drawing style used to depict tanks and weaponry, coupled with a much less realistic,
“plastic” drawing style for human characters, was much more than an aesthetic choice.
The effect produced was subversive—manga that adhered to rules set by a nationalist
government but that nonetheless allowed seemingly deathless heroes to suffer and die.
The Sky Crawlers has taken many of the tropes of the war manga that Ōtsuka and
Lamarre describe—invincible boy heroes, a fascination with and passion for combat, and
a sense of fatalism in the face of death—and twisted them almost to the point of parody
and satire. The kildren are youthful, but they lack the joy and determination seen in the
faces and bodies of the boy characters in war manga. Rather than making them appear
“deathless,” the hand-drawn style in which the kildren are depicted makes them appear
more vulnerable and childlike, especially when contrasted with the hyper-real planes that
they fly. On a visual level, the fighter planes are presented with such vivid three-
160
dimensional detail that they seem poised to jump off the screen. Their propellers spin in
perfect imitation of actual propeller patterns. Their metal surfaces and painted emblems
gleam. When they are shot down, their wings fill with ragged, smoking holes. The
machines are drawn so clearly and lingered over so much as to take on personalities of
their own. The contrast between human and mecha makes mecha seem more threatening
and human / kildren more vulnerable.
In light of Tom Lamarre’s question about whether a cartoon character can really
die, though, how vulnerable are the kildren? Are they, in a way, “deathless”? The film
opens with one of them being shot down over the ocean, and others die during the course
of the film (though it is interesting to note that we never see any details of their bodily
deaths, only images of the smoking planes and, in one case, a body bag being carried
away). But with the exception of Kusanagi, who we learn has (perhaps cruelly) lived
longer than most of the other kildren, the kildren don’t seem to know how to react to each
other’s deaths. At one point, after an adult commander has expressed irritation at the
immaturity of “children,” Kannami comments matter-of-factly, “But do people who may
die tomorrow really have any need to grow up?” Added to this is the knowledge, not
openly discussed but constantly hinted at, that all the kildren are clones—they were never
“born” and did not “grow up”. If after their deaths their abilities will simply be
implanted into another body, can they really be said to “die”?
Within the context of The Sky Crawlers’ narrative, the real-seeming deaths of the
kildren are key to the entire corporate-sponsored warfare project. For the human
spectators, at least, the kildren die, and their deaths are the poignant reminders of the
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significance of peace. And the kildren themselves strive to keep themselves alive, even
though they seem to know that they will eventually be shot down in battle, regardless of
their skills as pilots. The result is a kind of doublethink—the kildren are aware that they
are not born, don’t grow up, and don’t die in the same manner as humans. But for their
audiences they play the role of innocent heroes whose deaths make a peaceful world
possible.
In The Sky Crawlers, then, two tropes are being manipulated: the deathless child
hero and childhood itself. The contrast of the line-drawn kildren and hyper-realistic
mecha builds on manga / anime traditions to create a new kind of war manga hero: a
quasi-immortal, recyclable character trapped in a state of perpetual childhood. Childhood
itself has been twisted into something monstrous, a commodity that allows the kildren to
live in the present and not contemplate the consequences of their actions, and that makes
them more powerful tools in the paradoxical war to maintain peace. In the eyes of their
audience they are children whose deaths have meaning, but in reality they are
government-manufactured weapons whose status as “child” is simply part of the
corporate warfare brand—as much of an asset as a tank or a fighter plane.
Familiar Absurdity: Children as Wartime Commodities and Brands
The narrative of The Sky Crawlers is premised on an idea that seems farfetched, but is not
unheard of in science fiction narratives. In an alternate future in which “real” war has
been completely eradicated, corporations sponsor wars and use the kildren as their
soldiers. As Kusanagi explains near the end of the film,
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War has never been completely eradicated in history because its sense of reality is
essential to humans. Having wars going on out there somewhere sustains the
illusion of peace in our society. And it has to be real, with no charades. Reading
about wars in history books isn’t enough. That’s too much like a fairy tale. If
people don’t get to see actual deaths on the news, if misery isn’t displayed, peace
can’t be maintained. The significance of peace will be forgotten. People need
wars to feel alive…

War as entertainment and the idea of corporate-sponsored bloodshed is hardly a new
trope in fiction or cinema.
14
But novelist Mori Hiroshi’s decision to call his war game
participants kildren, and to imbue them with certain childlike qualities, adds a new level
of meaning (and potential poignancy) to the war-as-entertainment motif. In The Sky
Crawlers, the childlike soldiers are automatically associated with innocence and
vulnerability, but at the same time, the “childhood” that they are a part of is a fabrication,
a simulacrum that, for the spectacle-war’s spectators, can no longer be distinguished from
the real thing.
In “Simulacra and Science Fiction,” Jean Baudrillard illustrates the gradually
eroding distinction between reality and simulacra by describing certain “West German
simulacra-factories, factories which rehire unemployed people in all the roles and all the
positions of the traditional manufacturing process, but who produce nothing, whose only
activity involves chain-of-command games, competition, memos, account sheets, etc., all
within a huge network” (Baudrillard 1991). Such factories, Baudrillard argues, are not
fake—they are hyperreal, and their hyperreal status “(sends) all ‘real’ production, that of

14
Some film / novel titles that immediately come to mind are The Running Man (1987), Starship Troopers
(with its heavily commercialized militarism) (1997), Gantz (2010), and the previously mentioned Battle
Royale (2000) and The Hunger Games (2008). Tsutui Yasutaka’s 1967 novel Betonamu kank ō k ōsha
(Vietnam Travel Agency) imagines a future in which the Vietnam War has continued for hundreds of years
and serves as a tourism draw.
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‘serious’ factories, into the same hyperreality” (Baudrillard 1991). The most compelling
aspect of this situation is not the contrast between real / fake factories, but “the
indistinction between the two” (Baudrillard 1991). Simulacrum and simulation have
become such a feature of everyday life that it is no longer possible to distinguish real /
fake. Beyond copies of the real, we are now faced with copies that have no referent in the
real world. Such phenomena achieve the status of the hyperreal, the “more real than real.”
In this context, a German factory that produces nothing can still be thought of as a “real”
factory, if only because the distinction between real and copy has become so eroded.
This question of the distinction between real / copy and real / virtual is at the
center of many of Oshii Mamoru’s films, including Ghost in the Shell, Ghost in the Shell
2, Avalon, and The Sky Crawlers. The director himself admits that he is primarily
interested in “borderline spaces” and the characters who inhabit them: “My motivation as
a director is rooted in these imaginary space-time continuums—somewhere that is not
here, sometime that is not now [koko ja nai dokoka, ima de nai itsuka]” (Oshii, qtd. in
Brown 20). Oshii often speaks in contradictions in interviews about the filmmaking
process for The Sky Crawlers: he tells the sound designers that the sound of the planes
should be realistic, but they’re fictional planes, so don’t use a real plane sound; he
describes the setting of the film as an “imaginary Europe,” but stresses the importance of
taking his animators location scouting because he wants them to draw “based on
experience, not pictures” (Oshii 2008, DVD featurette, The Sky Crawlers). Both Ghost in
the Shell films explore borderline spaces and people primarily through examinations of
the cyborg body and the question of what it means to be human in an age when not only
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physical parts but individual thoughts and personalities (“ghosts”) can be downloaded
and transferred as easily as computer files. Avalon looks at the real / virtual distinction
through an online game that, for many players, is more “real” than their flesh-bound lives.
In The Sky Crawlers, Oshii examines the borders between real and fake by imagining not
only “fake” wars, but a government-manufactured version of childhood and everything
that the child signifies.
In the same way that The Sky Crawlers presents a hyperreal vision of fighter
planes and quasi-European landscapes, it also presents a hyperreal vision of a world in
which war is staged and the players live in a fabricated state of innocence. As with both
Ghost in the Shell films, Oshii does not explain his premise immediately to the viewer,
and a detailed explanation comes only in the last half-hour of the film, when Kusanagi
wonders at length about the nature of who and what the kildren are fighting. Until that
moment, the audience knows only that the kildren are involved in a war that seems to be
attached to no clear purpose or nation, with a vague connection to corporations and rules
that seem somewhat arbitrary. Ultimately, though, we learn that the kildren are hired to
fight in battles sponsored by “contractor warfare companies” which arose when actual
war had been eradicated. These fake wars, according to Kusanagi, developed out of the
perception that without a regular dose of war-related deaths in the media, the significance
of peace would be forgotten. The kildren are employed by one corporation to fly planes
and shoot down the planes of another corporation, all while an eager public watches in
anticipation and mourns the real deaths of the participants. The only thing missing is a
cause and a nation.
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In an age when, as described by Baudrillard, the line between real, copy, and non-
referential simulacra has become blurred, staged war seems like the next logical step in
an increasingly absurd timeline of events. As documented by Baudrillard and others, we
live in an era in which war has become theater and corporate investment in its outcomes
is taken for granted.
15
In The Sky Crawlers, this notion of war as theater / corporate
offshoot is simply taken to the next level. Instead of a situation in which wars are fought
in the name of ideals but aim primarily to secure corporate interests,
16
wars are staged by
corporations in the name of maintaining the significance of peace. The immediate
threat—the fear of an attack by a real enemy—has been replaced with the more nebulous
threat of losing the significance of peace. And in the absence of nation, what remains are
the cinematic trappings of war: friends and colleagues watching mournfully as planes
take off, civilians weeping over the body of a soldier and watching intently as battles play
out on a TV screen. For the wars to be effective it would seem that their fakeness would
need to be hidden from the public, but apparently that is not the case. Rostock, the same
“contractor warfare company” that the protagonists belong to, broadcasts the aerial
battles on its Rostock News Network, never hiding the fact that these are corporations
battling other corporations. For the spectators, the gap between the reality of war and the
spectacle played out on television has become so small as to be meaningless.

15
See, for example, Baudrillard’s The Gulf War Did Not Take Place, James der Derian’s Virtuous War:
Mapping the Military-Industrial-Media-Entertainment Network, and Paul Virilio’s War and Cinema.
16
For analyses of the corporate motivations behind and connections to the U.S. invasion of Iraq, see Naomi
Klein’s The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism.
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The Sky Crawlers and Mori Hiroshi’s novel gradually build to the conclusion that
children are suited to the task of fighting in corporate-sponsored wars, ultimately
revealing that the kildren are cloned and recycled specifically for this purpose. As
children—even children with wisdom and experience beyond their years—they are ideal
tools in the war-as-entertainment spectacle. The local prostitutes seem to feel an
attachment to them that goes beyond sex or money—they are protective and view their
clients with a sort of longing. Oshii’s “camera” lingers several times on the gaze of
Kasumi as she looks at the nude figure of Kannami in her bed, asking him if he’ll come
to her again and telling him that she’ll “hold him to it” (kitto). The staff at the diner look
at them with a mixture of admiration and pity. When a waitress tells Kannami to “be
careful” as he is leaving the diner to protect his base, and he answers “Careful of what?”,
the camera lingers yet again on the waitress’s somber expression, highlighting the
difference between the adults and the kildren who seem to have no real consciousness of
what they do, or of what they should fear.
As with the propaganda images of children discussed in chapter 1, within the
context of The Sky Crawlers the kildren represent a valuable corporate and symbolic
commodity. Their vulnerability and seeming innocence to the nature of what they do
make them ideal protagonists in the war-as-entertainment spectacle—they are easy to
mourn and easy to cheer for, giving the public their necessary supply of media-broadcast
deaths and daring escapes. Like the children dressed in soldiers’ uniforms and carrying
toy weapons who were used to sell war bonds and boost overall morale during the Japan-
China conflict of the 1930s and 1940s, the kildren are a potent embodiment of what
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battles are fought for, and of the future that war is waged to secure. But there are, of
course, major differences between the propaganda children of the 1930s / 1940s and the
kildren. First, the kildren actually engage in combat. Second, the kildren are combatants
in a war that, while it results in real deaths, is attached to no particular nation or threat of
genuine destruction. Third, and perhaps most importantly, the kildren never really die—
their memories and abilities are recycled and re-used in new kildren bodies (though this
fact is not advertised to the public). Even with these differences, though, the kildren are
still, like their real historical counterparts, representations of a fictionalized vision of
childhood. Both the propaganda photo-children of the 1930s and the kildren fighter pilots
are caught in a temporal no-man’s land. The photo-children are frozen in an idealized
world where war is a game and victory is certain. The kildren live in an alternate universe
where war has become a corporate game and victory / defeat are arbitrarily determined.
In the 21
st
century, the idea of war is inextricably tied to cinema—most of us
know war through television and film. Paul Virilio writes that “there is no war, then,
without representation, no sophisticated weaponry without psychological mystification”
(Virilio 6). For the spectators in The Sky Crawlers, war is viewed primarily through their
television screens, and through occasional visits to bases where they are able to see
planes and pilots up close—and even, in one case, mourn the death of an actual pilot as
his body is carried away from his crashed plane. In one scene, a massive aerial battle is
depicted with stark realism from the point of view of the pilots, and is also portrayed as a
sepia-toned series of animations on a TV screen in the local diner, where customers and
staff alternate between watching it closely and going about their daily lives. The violence
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and intensity of what the pilots experience contrasts with the detached voice of a news
announcer and bland animation depicting the aerial battle, with an announcement at the
end that there will soon be a full casualty list. The battle in question was a deadly one,
with heavy casualties on both sides, but the spectators are only aware of the death toll
through their television screens, where death becomes abstract.
On the screens, the dead kildren also attain a kind of immortality, their cinematic
lives and deaths broadcast over and over again. Friedrich Kittler has written extensively
on the implications of a media-dominated culture, one in which all meaning is generated
through a combination of sound, image, voice, and text. On the relationship between
moving images and immortality, Kittler writes: “The realm of the dead is as extensive as
the storage and transmission capabilities of a given culture. As Klaus Theweleit noted,
media are always flight apparatuses into the great beyond… In our mediascape,
immortals have come to exist again” (Kittler 13). In both the mediascape and the actual
universe of The Sky Crawlers, the kildren are doubly immortal. They don’t really die, and
even if they did, for most spectators they exist primarily as images on a screen and
casualty lists in a newspaper. The emotion and the mourning on display by the spectators
are genuine, but they are attached to the trappings of tragedy, the pieces of war that don’t
quite make up a whole. Children remain poignant symbols of everything that can be lost
and corrupted, but they die to be reborn again in new bodies. Everything is performed—
the spectacle, the mourning of the dead, the impassioned praise of the pilots, the
melancholy of those close to them. And even, perhaps most importantly, the entire idea
of childhood itself.
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Chapter Conclusion
The Sky Crawlers depicts an alternate world in which the real-world absurdities of war as
spectacle are taken to a logical conclusion: corporate warfare played out for the purposes
of entertainment and a paradoxical desire to maintain peace. As quasi-immortal soldiers
engineered both to be effective fighter pilots and to capture the empathy of spectators, the
kildren are part of a system in which everything is optimized, including their life spans,
their fighting abilities, their bodies, and the vulnerability and innocence that they project
in a commodified version of “childhood.” Their deathless, softly drawn bodies and hyper-
realistic fighting planes are parodies of the bodies and machines depicted in war-themed
comic books. Unlike the feral child of Yakeato no Iesu, the monstrous infants of Kojinteki
na taiken and Sora no kaibutsu Aghwee, and the vengeful child spirits of Japanese horror
films, the kildren are not bloodthirsty or physically abject, and they do not inspire fear or
revulsion. But their very existence is predicated on a series of violent and monstrous
fictions: the use of childhood (and its accompanying emotional immaturity) as a tool of
violence, the commodification of childhood as a tool in a worldwide manipulation of
human emotion and empathy, and the twisting of childhood from a transitional, innocent
state into a perpetual hell of repetition. The kildren are all the more monstrous in that
their world of rationalized, purposeless war has its echoes in modern warfare and
spectacle as we know it. They are monstrous because they are tools of an alien concept,
but also because their world, and the fictionalization / commodification of innocence as a
tool of violence, is not at all unfamiliar.
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C onclusi on

M on st eri z i ng
t he
N on -‐ E x ist e n t
C h i ld
This project began with the merging of several ideas and research interests: 1) the
realization that a disparate group of Japanese texts included depictions of similar kinds of
monstrous child characters, 2) the idea of the child as a focal point of social, historical,
and literary tensions, and 3) a desire to illustrate the ways in which a diverse group of
monstrous child characters, though quite different in the nature of their monstrosity, all
revealed similar truths about the concept of childhood and the child body / image as it is
portrayed in Japanese literature and film. In narrowing down a group of texts from a very
long list of possibilities, I attempted to choose monstrous children portrayed in novels,
short stories, and films that appeared in moments of historical crisis and rupture. I also
sought out less obvious depictions of monstrosity—in addition to analyzing violent or
physically grotesque child characters, I included characters who were made monstrous
through their commodification / optimization, or whose appearance of hyper-normality
and over-the-top child-ness made them monstrous copies of the archetypal child image.
Beginning with a feral child in a black market of the 1940s and ending with an animated
film depicting child soldiers existing in an alternate universe of corporate warfare, the
characters and settings under discussion also included Japanese propaganda images of
children from the 1930s and 1940s, two children in a novel who are tied to their father’s
violent past, a fictionalized version of an actual child in novels and short stories whose
father sees monstrosity in both the child and the world surrounding him, and vengeful
171
female spirit-children in contemporary films whose rage at their abuse, neglect, and
abandonment haunts the world of the living. In selecting a wide range of media, time
periods, settings, and character types, my aim was to show both the divergent ways in
which monstrous children are depicted and the common themes, historical contexts, and
visual / linguistic motifs that appear again and again across time periods, media, and
genres.
My initial research questions grew out of an analysis of writings on the subject of
both the child and the monster in literature and film, on the scientific / culture-specific /
history-specific concept of both “monster” and “child”, post-structural theory on the ideas
of normativity, othering, and the place of the monster / child in what Foucault calls “the
order of things,” and writings on Japanese history, modern Japanese film, and literature
as a whole. Based on readings of these background materials, my initial questions
included the following: how does the monstrous child speak, in its own voice or through
the voice of the author? When it speaks, what does it communicate to us? What kinds of
historical, ideological, and social crises / ruptures does the monstrous child represent?
How have depictions of the monstrous child character evolved over time in literature and
film? What kinds of paradoxes does the monstrous child embody? What, if anything, is
unique about the status of the monstrous child in Japanese literature and film, as opposed
to monstrous child characters in world literature and film? What can be gained from
examining the monstrous child as a focal point of anxieties and uncertainties?
As my research moved into more specific analyses of the texts under discussion
and what had been written about those texts, their authors, and the genres / media in
172
which they exist, my questions became more pointed. What role do both “real” and
fictional / hypothetical children play in depictions of war and violence, both via
propaganda imagery and filmic / literary depictions of war? How does the monstrous
child character serve as a conduit through which wartime memory can be confronted and
re-imagined, and as an intermediary between worlds? How are children made monstrous
through both their technological optimization and their commodification as tools of
wartime propaganda? What is the meaning of the constant “doubling” of the monstrous
child (the evil vengeful spirit / the good real child, the force of creation / force of
destruction, the thing to be shunned / to embrace, the thing that illuminates / obfuscates)?
As I explored these questions I began to see that in all of the texts under
consideration, an idea that returns again and again is that of the monstrous child as
remnant, specter, and trace. In Yakeato no Iesu, the feral boy in the marketplace is
shunned for his violent impulses and his physically grotesque appearance, but he also
forces the other marketplace dwellers to look within and realize that they are no different.
He is a haunting presence, a ghost-like reminder of the recent wartime past who vanishes
only to return again, ultimately leaving in his wake a market swept clean and white
except for markings that look like the prints of animals. In Ishi no raireki, Tsuyoshi
Manase’s two children are a remnant of the wartime past he has desperately tried to
forget. But through their ghosts—their literal deaths and the ghostliness of their presence
when alive—he is able to confront his memories. In Ōe Kenzaburō’s Kojinteki na taiken,
a monstrous infant represents, to his father, all of his own failings and the failings of
society, in particular the shadow of Hiroshima and the threat of nuclear holocaust. In
173
Sora no kaibutsu Aghwee, the ghostly version of that same infant haunts the father who
let him die. In all of the horror films discussed in chapter 3, the vengeful child spirits are
manifestations of rage and pain, remnants of the violence, neglect, and abandonment that
they faced at the hands of their parents. They haunt the world of the living and serve as
constant reminders / warnings to real-world mothers and their real / hypothetical children.
Finally, in The Sky Crawlers, the kildren are distant echoes of Japanese comic book war
heroes of the 1930s, 40s, and 50s, drawn in their image and surrounded by the spectacle
of war, even though the war itself is a fiction. The kildren haunt the present by keeping
memories of real wars alive and thus maintaining peace. All of these monstrous children
serve as tangible, haunting reminders of violence on the part of adults, illuminating a past
that most would prefer to bury and warning of a future that is equally dark.
All of these characters are also defined by their status as unstable, shifting
signifiers, a tension and uncertainty that mirrors the fears and anxieties of the historical
ruptures / crises in which they were created. They place those around them in a constant
state of attraction and repulsion, inspiring fear one moment and compassion the next.
Their status as children means that even the most violent and grotesque characters can
never be truly condemned or rejected by adults. The feral boy of the black market is
simultaneously a wolf stalking his prey and an image of a suffering Christ figure.
Tsuyoshi Manase’s violent and remorseless son Takaaki is portrayed as more pitiful than
frightening, a product of forces he and his father could not control. “Bird” and “D,” the
fathers of two versions of Ōe Kenzaburō’s monstrous infant, represent contrasting
responses to the monstrous child: the former is repelled and horrified, while the latter
174
lavishes the ghost of his son with affection. In the climactic “woman cradling the
monstrous child” images in Ringu, Honogurai mizu no soko kara, Chakushin ari, and
Shibuya kaidan, the attraction-repulsion dynamic plays out in a pivotal instant as the
mother or quasi-mother figure first pushes the monstrous child away in horror, but
ultimately cradles her tenderly. In The Sky Crawlers, Oshii Mamoru toys with the
audience’s perceptions of the kildren by drawing them in a way that makes their ages
ambiguous, as well as placing them in adult situations but repeatedly referring to them as
kodomo. Viewers recognize them as images of youth and innocence, but their actions
betray that they have been forced into adult roles. The attraction-repulsion, fear-protect,
child-monster dynamic in all of these characters forces both the reader / viewer and the
other characters to constantly question their assumptions about the meaning of childhood
and monstrosity, and what it means when the two are combined.
While the repeating motifs and images in all of the monstrous children under
discussion here are significant, it is also important to note the unique ways in which each
character or group of characters are figured as monstrous, and how that uniqueness
reflects changing ideas about monstrosity, childhood, and the connection between the two.
Essentially, these monstrous children can be divided into three groups: those with abject /
severely deformed bodies, those who exist as ghosts or other supernatural entities, and
those that exist within a fictionalized, commodified, and / or optimized version of
childhood, their childlike status used as a tool of state or corporate propaganda. The first
group includes the feral child in Yakeato no Iesu and the monstrous infant in Kojinteki na
taiken, both of whom are shunned for their physical abnormalities and for the ways in
175
which they remind other characters of wartime violence. These children are tangibly,
physically monstrous, and their bodies are a physical remnant of the violence and
mistakes of adults. The second group includes both the vengeful spirits of chapter 3, the
ghost baby of Sora no kaibutsu Aghwee, and the children of Ishi no raireki, all of whom
exist somewhere between ghost and human. Sora’s ghost baby is a haunting reminder of
his father’s act of violence, a spiritual presence who inhabits the world of the living
enough to eventually kill his father. In the case of Tsuyoshi Manase’s children, they are
portrayed as real, but there are constant hints that they may simply be facets of Manase’s
personality, or that his life with them has been a dream, and it is only through their deaths
and their haunting presences in his life that Manase is able to confront his wartime
memories. In the case of the vengeful child spirits of chapter 3, they exist as ghosts, but
still have the ability to do harm to those in the world of the living. These children straddle
the line between physical and spiritual monstrosity, existing as supernatural entities but
maintaining a foothold in the physical, fleshy world. The third group includes the
wartime propaganda images of children from chapter 1 and the kildren of The Sky
Crawlers. These are the children whose monstrosity is the least obvious, designed as they
are to project an image of wholesomeness, innocence, and vulnerability that serves as a
propaganda mechanism. They are monstrous in their perfection and optimization, in the
way that they inhabit a fictionalized, manufactured imitation of “childhood” that serves to
manipulate a populace into favoring either corporate-sponsored or state-sponsored
warfare.
176
There is, of course, plenty of overlap in these categories—the feral boy of
Yakeato no Iesu also has a ghostly, supernatural quality about him, the vengeful child
spirit of Honogurai mizu no soko kara is also abject, and the kildren of The Sky Crawlers
are not quite human, given their clone / quasi-immortal status. All of these characters can
be monstrous in a variety of ways, but in the unique varieties of their monstrosity, we can
see the ways in which the particular fears and anxieties of certain periods of crisis have
been portrayed in the literature and film of the time. Ishikawa Jun and Ōe Kenzaburo’s
monstrous children are reminders of the decimation of Tokyo and the past reality / future
threat of nuclear holocaust. The vengeful child spirits are specters of fractured families,
child abuse, and the looming fear of a childless society. The kildren are the next logical
step in a system that optimizes everything for the sake of optimization, even the child’s
body and the idea of childhood itself. In a trajectory that begins in the aftermath of the
Pacific War and ends in a world where war is pure spectacle, the monstrous child moves
through embodying fear of real wartime violence, to the threat of nuclear holocaust, to
the threat of a childless society and the breakdown of the family unit, and finally to the
fear of a loss of all meaning in a system where the distinction between reality, spectacle,
copy, and referent has been completely obliterated.
Having moved through this lengthy and winding trajectory, what is next for the
monstrous child character in the second decade of the twenty-first century? As I noted
briefly in chapter 4, the completion of these chapters comes at a time when both real and
imagined children are a constant presence in domestic and international media.
Specifically, two hypothetical child figures are at the center of a debate about censorship,
177
free speech, and the question of what is healthy / harmful for young people. One group of
hypothetical children are so-called “non-existent youths,” the children and adolescents
depicted in manga. The other group are the “real” children who must be protected from
images of young people engaging in certain kinds of sex in manga. Essentially, the battle
over certain kinds of manga content and who should have access to them has become a
battle to protect one imaginary child from another imaginary (monstrous?) child.
Mark McLelland writes:
In February 2010, the Tokyo Metropolitan Government proposed a bill to amend
the ordinance targeting manga, animation and computer games and seeking to
extend the range of the existing ordinance to explicitly cover depictions of ‘non-
existent youth’ (hijitsuzai seishōnen), that is, purely fictional or imaginary
characters who were, looked like or sounded like they were under the age of 18
and who were ‘recklessly’ depicted in a sexual manner that ‘positively affirms
anti-social behavior.’ Officially known as Bill 156, the ordinance was also
referred to as the ‘Non-existent youth bill,’ especially by its opponents.
(McLelland 3-4)

The bill was strongly opposed by manga publishers, who objected to its vague wording
and to the idea of regulating the behavior of “non-existent youths,” which seemed a
throwback to the era of the thought police. The first version of the bill was rejected in
June 2010, but a revised version, which had slightly clearer language and referred to
“non-existent youths” as “depicted youths,” passed in December 2010. It remains unclear
how strict enforcement will be, but an initial group of censored manga has already been
released. They include Okusama wa shogakusei, a work that was something of a poster
child (pun intended) for the new law—it features a 12-year-old girl marrying a 24-year-
old man and was censored for featuring child rape. But one censored work, Hanamizawa
178
Q-taro Jisenshū Hana-Hiyori, was banned simply for featuring “sex in a school.”
1

Already the criteria for material deemed “harmful to minors” seems arbitrary and
confusing.
The language surrounding the bill has also been emotionally charged and at times
seemed designed to inspire a child protection-related panic. Tokyo governor Shintaro
Ishihara called those who would read material censored by the new bill “abnormal” and
“perverts,” immediately relegating a fairly large volume of material and a large group of
readers to the margins of society (Tabuchi). The law already in place to restrict the
depiction of sexual material involving young people claims to restrict anything that might
prove ‘harmful’ to the ‘healthy development of youth.’ Meetings and discussions leading
to the drafting of the new bill also sought to “address the wholesome development of
youth” by restricting the portrayal of “non-existent youth” in “anti-social sexual
situations” (McLelland 5). Publishers objected to the bill’s vague terminology and argued
that, for example, an “anti-social situation” could mean very different things to very
different people. Some argued that the bill was just an attempt to increase surveillance in
Japan as a whole, and that enforcing it would risk a return to an “oyaji (old codger)
Japan,” with a small group of conservative older men attempting to legislate the morality
of the nation (McLelland 5).
Censorship in the name of protecting children is, of course, nothing new. Beyond
Lee Edelman’s writings on the ways in which adults are currently held hostage to the
figure of the Child, in whose name all manner of restrictions are put into place, Walter

1
“First Manga Titles to Be Restricted by Tokyo Youth Ordinance.” anime-expo.org, May 17, 2011.
179
Kendrick writes that pornography is regularly condemned in the name of the Young
Person, the hypothetical pre-pubescent child who must be protected from temptation:
Today’s most popular Young Person, who governs the controversy over the
Internet and television, is not a battered woman but a child. This creature…is of
indefinite age and irrelevant sex; she or he is not so liable to be physically harmed
by electronic pornography as to be led by it down some equally vague primrose
path into unimaginable (at least, unimagined) degradation…As an object of
pathos, hardly anyone can resist an endangered child, and real children should of
course be protected from whatever dangers threaten them. But in the discourse of
‘pornography,’ we are not dealing with real children. Like the Young Person in all
its other guises, ‘the child’ is a rhetorical figure, which lives in the realm of
discourse and nowhere else. (262)

In its desire to limit children’s access to certain kinds of sexually explicit manga, the
Tokyo Metropolitan Government is also dealing with a rhetorical child, one “which lives
in the realm of discourse and nowhere else.” It aims to protect that rhetorical child, whose
“wholesome development” might be impeded by exposure to certain material, from
another “non-existent” child—the child or adolescent engaging in “perverse” sex acts on
the pages of manga. To prevent the rhetorical children of Japan from turning into
monsters, they must be shielded from another kind of monstrous child—the sexualized
child, who, by being made taboo, perverse, and “abnormal,” serves as a warning to the
“real” children and their parents of what the “real” children could become.
Beyond physically abject, violent, vengeful, and optimized children, then, it
seems that in 2012 we must also fear the specter of the hand-drawn child / adolescent
engaging in certain kinds of “anti-social” sex acts, an imaginary child with the power to
corrupt other hypothetical (but arguably real) youth. Given these developments, I would
argue that the next step in this research project would be a survey of manga deemed
“harmful to youth”—specifically, an analysis of the child characters portrayed in those
180
manga and the ways in which they are determined to be a danger. Such an analysis would
necessitate further research into the recent history of Bill 156, the arguments of its
supporters and opponents, and finally a close look at some of the manga already singled
out for censorship because of the actions of their child characters (or because of what
happens to the child characters). As with my analysis of The Sky Crawlers, I would be
curious to see how the anime / manga medium presents the viewer with a unique visual
experience, and how the criteria for determining what is “harmful to minors” are
ostensibly different in manga and, for example, photography and live-action films. An
analysis of both titles that have already been singled out for censorship and other titles
that may contain questionable content but have NOT been censored would provide some
insight into the prevailing attitudes about what is considered “harmful” or “anti-social”
behavior—in other words, what kinds of monsters (and monstrous children) are most
feared.
Given that monstrous child characters, like the texts they inhabit, are media
products, it would also be beneficial to examine monstrous child characters via
technology-specific angles of analysis. Specifically, one could look at the different kinds
of media technology—manga, anime, live-action film, photography, digital art—that
produce monstrous child characters and examine the ways in which the production
process itself impacts the final creation. How, for example, does the process of creating
an animated film differ from the process of creating a live-action film, and what does this
mean for the characters created within each film? What is the connection between
monstrous children in a film like Akira, with its focus on what Tom Lamarre calls
181
“technologies of speed,” and the anime medium in which it is presented? What kinds of
monstrous children are currently being created through media such as YouTube, where
amateur filmmakers are able to create and distribute their work cheaply and quickly? If
the video cassette is long since obsolete, how would a monstrous child like Ringu’s
Sadako transmit her rage in the contemporary world? These are important questions to be
explored regarding the connections between monstrous child characters, the stories that
surround them, and the creation process that surrounds those stories.
Of myths, Marina Warner writes that “they say who we are and what we want,
they tell stories to impose structure and order. Like fiction, they can tell the truth even
while they're making it all up" (Warner 1995). As pastiches of archetypal imagery, folk
legend, and modern anxieties about everything from wartime violence to single
motherhood, monstrous child characters speak truths that define and move beyond the
dark places that birthed them. They are markers of temporal and spatial paradox, bridges
between worlds and time periods who repel and attract in an endless, dichotomous cycle.
Their contradictory natures force us to continue asking questions even as they provide
answers.
182
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Asset Metadata

Creator Nelson, Lindsay Rebecca (author)

Core Title Embracing the demon: the monstrous child in Japanese literature and cinema, 1946-2008

School College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program Comparative Literature

Publication Date 06/20/2014

Defense Date 05/08/2012

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag Children,Comparative Literature,horror films,Japanese film,Japanese literature,Monsters,OAI-PMH Harvest

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Lippit, Akira Mizuta (committee chair), Bialock, David T. (committee member), Díaz, Roberto Ignacio (committee member), McKnight, Anne (committee member)

Creator Email lindsayrebeccanelson@gmail.com,lrnelson@usc.edu

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c3-48249

Unique identifier UC11288889

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Legacy Identifier etd-NelsonLind-898.pdf

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Document Type Dissertation

Rights Nelson, Lindsay Rebecca

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

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