‘ONRYOU’ IN ‘J – HORROR’ : A PORTAL TO THE POST WORLD-WAR SOCIOCULTURAL CONDITION OF WOMEN IN JAPAN. Part 5: Ringu by Hideo Nakata

This is the fifth part of the six-part blog post about "Onryou in J-Horror". In this part we will discuss about the 1998 film, Ringu by Hideo Nakata. We will not consider any Hollywood remake, prequel or sequel.

Nakata’s Ringu (1998) shares many similar elements with his ‘Dark Water’. Both tell the tales of ‘Onryou’ – the vengeful spirit. In both the stories, water is an important icon, symbolizing isolation, abandonment and finally death (Mitsuko and Sadako both died due to drowning). Both the story revolves around isolation and abandonment. In Ringu, Sadako’s (the vengeful spirit) mother, Samara died, abandoning her and soon Sadako was murdered. She was thrown inside a well. Here the similarities with previously discussed ‘Dark Water’ are quite evident. In both the stories, the protagonist is a single mother living with their child, again representing the Japanese nuclear family.

In Ringu, the protagonist was a journalist named Reiko who lived with her son. She watched a surrealistic video that put a curse on her (and later on her ex-husband and son). Anyone who watched the video is cursed to die within a week. Both these films are culturally-coded text that presents the anxieties related to social transformation.

To quote Jay McRoy, Ringu can be considered as a “thinly disguised postmodern fable about the cultural impact of emerging communication technologies…” Ringu also presents the patriarchal fear of women empowerment and gender equality. Again to quote Jay McRoy from his work, 'Nightmare Japan', "the scene in Ringu in which a roomful of exclusively male journalists’ vehemently reject Samara’s uncanny psychic abilities and apocalyptic predictions. The men are threatened by more than Samara’s possession of a knowledge that exceeds that of the patriarchal scientific community; it is her ability to vocalize this knowledge and, thereby, insert herself into the realm of public discourse that evokes a virulent fear from the male audience. It is this incredulity turned into fear and anger over Samara’s skills that evokes Sadako’s demonstration of her even more powerful, and consequently more threatening, mental acumen: her ability to kill with a single thought… it is finally the investigative journalist, Reiko, who uncovers the simulacral secret of the young Sadako’s technologically inscribed vengeance – the cursed videocassettes representing a mode of mass communication that the psychic mother’s and daughter’s male persecutors, given their violent rejection of the very notion of a woman’s will made at once increasingly present and increasingly pervasive (and increasingly abject), would have found too terrifying to even imagine."

Thus, Nakata’s film stands for the acknowledgement of the repressed women. Their voice must be recognized and listened to rather than ignored. ‘Sadako’ is a figure that stands against oppressive Patriarchy that still dominates Japanese society. We can also read the film as a reaction against the technological advancement of Japan. The fear and anxiety of losing the essence of tradition in face of the developing technology and globalization has been presented through the cursed Cassette (a modern object of technology) that ultimately kills the viewers. The deformed bodies of the victim reflect the deforming Japanese society under the pressure of modernization.

In the next post we will talk about, the film Ju-on: Grudge by Takashi Shimizu.

To be continued...

Let's give credit where it is due. The books I referred to :

Cherry, Brigid. ‘Horror’, Routledge Taylor and Francis Group, New York, (2009)

‘Horror to the extreme’, Hong Kong University Press, Hong Kong, (2009).

McRoy, Jay, ‘Nightmare Japan’, Rodopi, New York, (2008).

Balmain, Colette, ‘Introduction to Japanese Horror films’. Edinburgh University Press, Great Britain, (2008)