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The Pre in the Postmodern:

The Horror Manga of Hino
Hideshi
Rajyashree Pandey
Published online: 04 Aug 2010.
To cite this article: Rajyashree Pandey (2001) The Pre in the Postmodern:
The Horror Manga of Hino Hideshi, Japanese Studies, 21:3, 261-274, DOI:
10.1080/10371390120101452
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Japanese Studies, Vol. 21, No. 3, 2001
The Pre in the Postmodern: The Horror Manga of

Hino Hideshi
RAJYASHREE PANDEY, La Trobe University
We are all familiar with what by now has become a common reading of Japan as the site
of the postmodern. In one version of this reading, Japan has always displayed character-
istics of the postmodern. The decentring and dispersal of modern subjectivity, the
absence of logocentrism, and Japan as the empire of signs, all point to a Japan which
is postmodern before the fact.1
In another version of this reading Japan’s postmodernism is seen to be a cultural
correlate of late capitalism and Japan is seen as satisfying many of the conditions that
are symptomatic of the postmodern world—the complete commodi cation of culture in
which the distinction between high and low variants collapses, the proliferation of
hybrid forms which lack depth, historicity, speci city or narrative closure, the fragmen-
tation and decentring of the subject and so on. In this reading there is nothing
speci cally Japanese about postmodernism in Japan because it is a feature of postmod-
ernism precisely to efface or eradicate national speci city and myths of national origin
and uniqueness. In other words, the reason Tokyo, Hong Kong and New York can all
be postmodern cities is because they have ceased to be distinctively Japanese, Chinese
or American.
Those who see Japan as postmodern before the fact, on the other hand, point to
something speci c and unique in Japanese culture which makes it postmodern. They
turn to Japan’s deconstructivist tradition which, they claim, is born out of a Buddhist
and more speci cally Zen philosophical framework. Buddhist thought is seen to have
practised a form of radical deconstruction for centuries before its appearance in the
West. This leads the eminent literary critic Karatani Kōjin to go so far as to argue that
in Japan there is no deconstruction as there is nothing to deconstruct, Japan never
having had any logocentric structure in the rst place.2
Robert Magliola argues that the Buddhist notion of sunyata, as expressed in Mad-
hyamika philosophy, constitutes a Middle Way between the ‘it is’ of eternalism and ‘it
is not’ of nihilism and hence that Nagarjuna’s sunyata (‘devoidness’) is Derrida’s
différance. Both represent a critical deconstruction of the principle of self-identity.3 In
1
Roland Barthes, The Empire of Signs, Richard Howard (Trans.) (New York: Hill and Wang, 1983). The
issue of whether or not Japan had a native deconstructive tradition before the fact became the subject of
debate between Asada Akira, Karatani Kōjin and Jacques Derrida. See Asahi Jānaru, 25 May 1984,
pp. 6–14. It is noteworthy that it is precisely at a time when the West underwent a crisis of modernity that
Japan came to be seen as emblematic of the postmodern. Once again Japan came to be constructed as
radically ‘Other’, as the antithesis of the West. However, this time it was no longer backward and
premodern.
2
Marilyn Ivy, ‘Critical Texts, Mass Artifacts: The Consumption of Knowledge in Postmodern Japan’,
in Masao Miyoshi and H. D. Harootunian (Eds), Postmodernism and Japan (Durham: Duke University
Press, 1989), p. 40.
3
Robert Magliola, Derrida on the Mend (Indiana: Purdue University Press, 1984), pp. 88–89.
ISSN 1037-1397 print/ISSN 1469-9338 online/01/030261-14 Ó 2001 Japanese Studies Association of Australia
DOI: 10.1080/10371390120101452
262 Rajyashree Pandey
his Empire of Signs, it is to Zen that Barthes turns in order to arrive at his reading of
Japan as an open-ended text, free of a xed centre. Of haiku he writes, ‘the
haiku … articulated around a metaphysics without subject and without god, corre-
sponds to the Buddhist Mu, to the Zen satori, which is not at all the illuminative descent
of God, but “awakening to the fact,” apprehension of the thing as event and not as
substance …’4
The two arguments—namely, Japan as postmodern before the fact and Japan as
postmodern as a consequence of its new postcapitalist economy—pull in different
directions, but both have played an important part in establishing Japan as the site of
the postmodern. As Marilyn Ivy puts it, ‘Perhaps “Japan” describes the uncanny
convergence of a cultural predilection for language dispersal with a postmodern
capitalism whose powers of deterritorialization and differentiation seem to effect the
same kind of dispersal’.5

It is not surprising that it is in Japan’s most popular cultural forms such as manga and
anime or animation lms that some of the elements most emblematic of the postmodern
have come to be located.6 Writing about the anime, Akira, for example, Isolde Standish
argues that the Tokyo portrayed in this anime bears no resemblance to the historical
place we call Tokyo. All speci city be it of time or culture has been effaced and Tokyo
could easily be New York, London or any other city.7 In her view, Akira displays some
of the characteristics of the postmodern as outlined by Fredric Jameson, namely, ‘an
effacement of boundaries, for instance between previously de ned stylistic norms
(Eastern and Western) and between past and present, resulting in pastiche and parody;
and a schizophrenic treatment of time as “perpetual present”’.8
Susan Napier in her discussion on Akira points to its ‘almost total lack of a moral
center’—the celebration of disaster ‘for the fun of it’9—its ‘thoroughgoing denial or
even erasure of the past and of the established order of the collectivity’,10 and its
‘postmodern refusal of traditional narrative closure …’11
Akira appears to t well with the reading of postmodern texts as ones in which the
past functions as pastiche, a mosaic of different cultural styles from different historical
periods but now emptied of all historicity. The references to the past are part of a
playful intertextual game, one in which. ‘… the history of aesthetic styles replaces “real”
history’.12 But there are also other ways of reading this text: the cult of Akira and its
4
Roland Barthes, Empire of Signs, Richard Howard (Trans.) (New York: Hill and Wang, 1983), p. 78.
5
Ivy, ‘Critical Texts …’, p. 39.
6
My argument here is not that all manga and anime produced in Japan lend themselves to a reading that
is postmodern. Of all books and magazines sold in Japan in 1995, manga constituted 40% of the total.
There is a bewildering variety of genres which caters to different age groups and interests. The enduringly
popular domestic comedy, Sazae san, for example, can be viewed as a mirror of Japan’s modernity in the
postwar era, re ecting the changing roles of women and the family in this period.
7
Isolde Standish, ‘Akira, Postmodernism and Resistance’, in D. P. Martinez (Ed.), The Worlds of Japanese
Popular Culture: Gender, Shifting Boundaries and Global Cultures (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1998), p. 66.
8
Ibid., p. 62.
9
Susan Napier, ‘Panic Sites: The Japanese Imagination of Disaster from Godzilla to Akira’, Journal of
Japanese Studies, 19:2 (1993), p. 347.
10
Ibid., p. 346.
11
Ibid., p. 350.
12
Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (London and New York: Verso
Press, 1996), p. 20.
The Pre in the Postmodern 263
leadership have strong resonances with Japan’s ‘new religions’ and many of the
members of the Akira cult use quasi-Buddhist jargon. 13 So too, the music at the
moment when Tetsuo escapes from the torments of this world is ‘decidedly religious in
nature’.14 In this article I argue that Japanese manga and anime can indeed be read as
postmodern texts, but that such a reading is in part enabled by Japan’s religious
tradition, and that understanding how this tradition operates in these texts is critical to
our understanding of the particular ways in which postmodernism is articulated in
Japan.
As Barthes’ reading of ‘Japan’ demonstrates, it is often Zen Buddhism which is made
to bear the weight of the entire Japanese Buddhist tradition. Zen Buddhism, removed
from the framework of Mahayana philosophy within which it is located, too often
emerges as an unchanging and essentialist aesthetic. The binary distinction often made
within Western thought between aesthetics and ethics is itself a false one and serves to
reinforce the view of Zen as pre-eminently aesthetic. Here I would like to restore both
the ethical and aesthetic dimensions of Buddhism in my readings of Japanese manga.
The way in which human life and death, the relationship between human and
non-human, the notion of the self and the body is articulated in these popular texts—in
other words, the philosophical and ethical bases that underpin these works—are very
different from those that arise out of a Judeo-Christian tradition. Moreover they
continue to animate contemporary popular texts in the most unexpected of places and
in the most unexpected of ways. The presence, in these texts, of a different way of
seeing the self, the body, the animal world, death and so on, a mode of being which
dovetails with our contemporary postmodern moment is a legacy of Japan’s particular
history. In other words, it is Japan’s past which enables the reading of popular texts as
postmodern: history resurfaces in these works in ways deeper than mere pastiche would
allow.
I shall begin by looking at some examples of manga (Japanese comics) in the horror
genre, written by Hino Hideshi, over the last two decades. Depictions of the disinte-
gration of the body or grotesque caricatures are not new to the world of Japanese visual
arts. Medieval picture scrolls dwell on the decaying and putrefying corpse while
seventeenth and eighteenth century wood-block prints revel in the blood, gore and
spilling intestines that mark the samurai’s performance of ritual suicide (seppuku)
through disembowelment. Japan has had a long tradition of monochrome graphic art
which was an important accompaniment to humorous, erotic, grotesque or supernatu-
ral tales. The horror manga I shall consider draw freely on formalistic elements from
traditional Japanese art. As I hope to demonstrate, they go further: available to them are
not only formal elements from the past but also traditional ways of making sense of that
which is threatening and destructive, that which constitutes horror.
In suggesting that such a lineage can be drawn I do not wish to undermine the fact
that the horror manga is very much a product of a ‘modern’ sensibility and that it has
close af nities with horror lms produced in the West. The very notion of a genre
which gives itself the name ‘horror’ and whose purpose, ostensibly, is purely to
entertain is a modern one. In the medieval world images that were horrifying served a
13
My thanks to an anonymous referee for clarifying this point.
14
Frieda Freiberg, ‘Akira and the Postnuclear Sublime’, in M. Broderick (Ed.), Hibakusha Cinema:
Hiroshima, Nagasaki and the Nuclear Image in Japanese Cinema (London: Kegan Paul International, 1996),
p. 102.
clear didactic purpose and were closely tied with religious themes and ideas. What is of
interest to me here is the way in which horror is contained in manga narratives. I argue
that the normative discourse that brings horror to a closure in the Western horror genre
rests upon very different religious and cultural assumptions to those found in Japanese
manga. It is the techniques of incorporation, transformation and uidity in horror
narratives of manga and the very different modes of de ning the self that I wish to
explore in the following sections of this article.
Hatsuka nezumi, or White Mouse, by Hino Hideshi was a very popular horror manga
published in the 1980s for teenage girls and boys.15 It is the story of a mouse,
introduced into his home as a pet by a young boy. The mouse gradually becomes a
monster who lives off animals fed to it by the boy and his sister. It destabilises the
nuclear family and begins to compete for attention with the new-born baby. It begins
to suckle at the mother’s breast together with the baby. After being cruelly treated by
the family (see Figure 2), the monster-mouse destroys the baby and acquires unchal-
lenged, exclusive access to the mother’s breast. The mother (now unhinged) treats the
mouse as her own child and beckons it every day to her bosom (see Figure 1). The
other children resume their ordinary lives and everything returns to ‘normal’. In the last
two pages of the work, however, the story begins again exactly as it had at the
beginning—with the boy arriving at the pet shop for the rst time and discovering that
it is like no ordinary pet shop …
This manga lends itself admirably to a psycho-social reading. It falls within a familiar
trope, that of horror which is introduced from the outside into the home. The home is
a hard-won purchase of an overworked taxi-driver who has at last realised his dream of
mai hōmu (home-ownership). The surroundings are idyllic—fresh air and verdant
forests, a far cry from Japan’s urban sprawl. The monster takes over the lives of the
family members and turns their surroundings into a nightmare landscape.
The mouse is the ultimate spoilt male child who presumes on his mother’s love even
when his behaviour is most transgressive and anti-social. The destruction of the baby
can be read as the carrying out of the fantasy of dealing with sibling rivalry by literally
removing the source of this rivalry. Much has been written about the concept of amae
or self-indulgent dependence which is seen as central to social relationships and
particularly to the mother–child relationship in Japan. 16Amae allows the child to
presume upon the love of his mother even when he is badly behaved. This is often
offered as an explanation for why Japanese men are able to get drunk with impunity,
secure in the knowledge that society at large, and women in particular, will look upon
their excesses with indulgence.
My interest here lies in the fact that the animal is recuperated within the narrative
rather than excised from the home and the world. What does it tell us about the way
in which the relationship between man and beast is conceived that the monstrous
mouse is at once the object of horror but also allowed to be simply a creature who
yearns for maternal love, a longing that resonates profoundly within the human psyche?
Here I would like to suggest that the Japanese context, unlike that of the Christian
15
Hino Hideshi, ‘Hatsuka nezumi’, in Holy: Horā Komikku Hassakusen Daiisshū (Tokyo: Kadokawa
Shoten, 1995), pp. 115–179. This manga was so popular that it was recently reprinted in an anthology
of horror comics.
16
For the most signi cant work on the concept of amae, see Takeo Doi, The Anatomy of Dependence (Tokyo:
Kodansha International,1973).
FIGURE 1.
West, offers a much greater uidity between man and beast which mitigates against the
monstrous animal as being seen as pure alterity. This uidity owes much to a Buddhist
understanding of the world and our place in it. It is to this paradigm that I now turn
in order to ‘read’ the mouse in the closing scenes of the manga.
Understanding the universe in terms of a taxonomy called rokudō (six realms) is
universally accepted by all schools of Buddhism. These six realms, in hierarchical order,
are the world of the gods, the world of humans, the world of asuras, the world of
animals, the world of the hungry ghosts and the world of the creatures of hell. In
Buddhist doctrine, a human is doomed to the cycle of births and deaths which causes
him/her to be reborn in one of these six realms until he/she achieves enlightenment.
Through karmic reward for deeds performed he/she can be pushed up and down this
ladder. While this taxonomy is not totally different from the one accepted in medieval
Europe, one major difference is that there is greater uidity, a constant movement, ‘the
possibility of either progress or slippage to another location in the taxonomy’.17 These
worlds themselves are not inescapable: there is always the possibility of escaping from
the cycles of births and deaths and breaking out of the con nes of the six realms.
Animals in this order are part of a continuum, interchangeable with humans at
particular moments along the wheel of births and deaths. In the Pali text the Jatakas,
for example, the Buddha explains his past births and identi es the particular animal
that he was born as in a previous life. The Jataka stories serve a purpose, namely, to
teach human beings a moral lesson. In this context they are not unlike the didactic tales
found in the Bestiary or book of beasts as it evolved in medieval Europe. The Bestiary
is written with the assumption that the creator created animals with a purpose—this
purpose is the edi cation and instruction of sinful man. Each creature is therefore a
moral entity, but not in its own right. It is simply the bearer of a message for the human
reader, merely serving as an example for man to redeem himself. In the Buddhist world,
on the other hand, what is striking is the absence of a clear separation between animal
and human worlds. Not only do they occupy the same space, but at times they are each
other, as the stories of the Buddha’s past lives testify.
In the manga about the mouse, nowhere is the human privileged over the animal.
When the family has a chance to destroy the creature whom they have rendered
unconscious with sake, they choose instead to in ict the most cruel punishments on it.
We have scenes in which the girl spears his eye, the boy cuts off his tail and the mother
exults over having snipped off his ear. The mouse cannot be the site of monstrous
‘other’; the humans in the narrative incorporate many of the monstrous features that
are to be found in the beast (see Figure 2).
In a similar vein, another horror manga by Hino Hideshi entitled Kyōfu Jigoku Shōjo
(Hell Baby) blurs the boundaries between human and non-human other.18 Twin sisters
are born on a dark and stormy night. One is beautiful while the other is a demon child
with a grotesque appearance and a taste for blood. Abandoned in a garbage dump the
‘hell baby’ re-emerges and keeps herself alive by feeding on live animals (see Figure
3(a)). There is nothing in her to suggest that she is human. However, an encounter with
a discarded mannequin in the rubbish dump arouses in her inexplicable and only dimly
understood feelings of desire and longing. An unaccountable instinct drives her to scour
the streets of Tokyo in search of her family. When she succeeds in nding it her quest
seems complete, but the story does not end there. She is shot by the police and dies
‘alone’. Her death, however, takes on a redemptive quality: she crawls into a dark,
warm hole—clearly an image of the mother’s womb—where she is able to die, secure
and content (see Figure 3(b)). Both the mouse and the monstrous child constitute
17
William R. LaFleur, The Karma of Words: Buddhism and the Literary Arts in Medieval Japan (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1986), p. 29.
18
Hiroo Yamagata (Trans.), Hell Baby (New York: Blast Books, 1995).
FIGURE 2.
horror in Hino’s manga. However, what unites the mouse and the child is not only the
violence and destruction that they wreak but also that which ultimately salvages them
in the narrative, namely, their craving for maternal love and recognition.
Available to these horror manga are narratives from Japan’s past which envisage the
world of non-humans as being not radically different from our own. Of particular
interest in this regard are the twelfth century picture scrolls of hungry ghosts (gaki
zōshi).19 Human beings who were lled with insatiable greed and lust in former lives are
reborn in the realm of the hungry ghosts, where they are doomed to experience
intolerable hunger and thirst which can never be satis ed. Gaki are depicted as
grotesque, skeletal gures with enormous bellies and needle-thin throats. They are
driven to eating excrement and carrion and are tortured by demons and vultures. At
19
See Komatsu Shigemi (Ed.), Gaki zōshi, Jigoku zōshi, Yamai zōshi, Kusō shi emaki, in Nihon no emaki,
7 (Tokyo: Chūō kōronsha, 1994), pp. 2–37.
268
Rajyashree Pandey
FIGURE 3(a). Figure 3(b).

FIGURE 4.
one level, they are the very embodiment of grotesque horror. They arouse fear in the
viewer and serve as a moral lesson against avarice and greed.
At the same time the way in which they in ltrate our world, quietly consuming
excrement whilst people are defecating, begging food from monks, mingling with the
crowds in a busy marketplace, licking water that is offered to the statue of the Buddha
and so on prevents them from being rendered pure other. Their presence within our
world is normalised: indeed they are not dissimilar to the starving beggars who once
populated medieval towns and cities—at once pariahs and yet part of the community.20
The ultimate redemption of gaki in these scrolls is assured with the appearance of the
compassionate Buddha who has vowed to save all creatures (see Figure 4). It is no
surprise then that one of the stories that has captured the imagination of Buddhists for
centuries is about a disciple of the Buddha, Maudgalyayana, and his journey to the
world of the hungry ghosts to save his mother who, as a result of her deeds in her
former life, has fallen into this realm.
Without a doubt then, there is a uidity in the hierarchy of the six realms which
preempts any notion of being forever condemned to a particular realm. Indeed the
Tendai school of Buddhism goes further. Espousing a doctrine of radical non-duality,
it argues that the various realms thoroughly interpenetrate one another: each world
includes the other within it. ‘This means not only that there are Buddhas in hell but
also there is something of hell in the Buddha’.21 Non-dualism is fundamental to
Mahayana dialectics and offers a radical challenge to a world seen in terms of binary
oppositions. Human and beast, good and evil, samsara (this deluded world) and nirvana
(the world of enlightenment) and life and death are not seen as absolute opposites but
rather as mutually dependent and inextricably intertwined.
Hino Hideshi plays with this concept of the interpenetration of the various realms
and with the notion that hell is not a different locus but is to be found in our world and
20
For a discussion on gaki, see Barbara Ruch, ‘Coping with Death: Paradigms of Heaven and Hell and
the Six Realms in Early Literature and Painting’, in James Sanford, William LaFleur and Masatoshi
Nagatomi (Eds), Flowing Traces (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), pp. 124–127.
21
LaFleur, p. 53.
within us. In one of his most famous manga, Jigokuhen (Panorama of Hell), he creates
a chilling vision of hell on earth. ‘This world is a living hell, utter chaos terrifying to
behold … the wheel of karma spins round spreading misfortune killing my brothers and
sisters—that is my sin’.22
It is not surprising that in many works the topos of the nuclear bomb dropped on
Hiroshima and Nagasaki serves as the trope for imagining a post-nuclear hell. In
Panorama of Hell, the diabolical artist who destroys everything in order to be inspired
to paint is conceived at the precise moment of the nuclear explosion. He is corrupted
from inception, even before he emerges from his mother’s womb. He subsequently
becomes a devotee of his own painting of the nuclear mushroom which he refers to as
the ‘Emperor of Hell’. What follows is an anarchic celebration of destruction and an
exploration of the various hells on earth. In the end the painter creates the perfect vision
of hell by exploding a nuclear device that brings himself and the world to an end (see
Figure 5).
Death here is not seen as an unhappy experience. In fact the moment of total
annihilation is exhilarating in that it foreshadows the possibility of escape from our
corrupted world, our world which already incorporates within it the various hells. In
this context I would like to reconsider Kristeva’s notion of the abject. She argues that
in the Judeo-Christian tradition the corpse represents a fundamental pollution, ‘a body
without soul, a non-body, disquieting matter’ which is ‘to be excluded from God’s
territory’. If the corpse is waste, she argues, then it is the opposite of spiritual and is
fundamentally ‘accursed of God’.23 It is the potential fragmentation and loss of self or
ego which produces the ultimate horror ‘… the corpse, the most sickening of wastes, is
a border that has encroached upon everything. It is no longer I who expel. “I” is
expelled’.24
The Buddhist view of the world turns this framework on its head. A basic Buddhist
tenet is one which argues that everything is impermanent (Sk. anitya; Japanese mujō)
and forever changing. It follows then that there is no self or ego which can claim for
itself a lasting identity. Indeed, in Buddhism, the body itself comes to serve as a
pedagogical truth of the doctrine of impermanence. The body is essentially foul. Indian
Buddhist texts like the Visuddhimagga by Buddhaghosa spell out at great length the
various categories of the foul body—swollen, discoloured, festering, ssured, mangled,
dismembered, bloody, worm-eaten and so on (see Figure 6).25 Part of the training of a
Buddhist monk involved spending time at the charnel elds in order to observe in
minute detail and meditate upon the putrefaction of the human body. The purpose of
this training is to recognise the true nature of the body and the self and thereby rid
oneself of attachment and desire.26 In this scheme, the disintegration of the body is
22
Hino Hideshi, Panorama of Hell, Screaming Mad George, Charles Schneider and Yoko Umezawa
(Trans.) (New York: Blast Books, 1989), p. 133.
23
Julia Kristeva, Power of Horror: An Essay in Abjection (New York: Columbia University Press 1982),
p. 109.
24
Ibid., pp. 3–4. Although Kristeva does gesture towards other ways of understanding the abject–for
example, in the case of food remainders she recognises in Brahmanism ‘a challenge to our mono-theistic
and mono-logical universes’ (p. 76), there is a sense in which the Western model is implicitly accepted
as the universal, all other systems of thought being mere footnotes to the dominant narrative.
25
Pe Maung Tin (Trans), The Path of Purity, Buddhaghosa’s Visuddhimagga (Pali Text Society, London:
Luzac, 1971), p. 205. For Japanese visual representations of the body as foul, see Kusō shi emaki in Gaki
zōshi, pp. 110–119.
26
There are many verses in both the Therigātha as well as Theragātha, the poems of Buddhist nuns and
monks, respectively, which counsel the necessity of understanding the true nature of the human body.
FIGURE 5.
not a source of anxiety about the dissolution of the self. Indeed if the self itself is
problematised, then the disintegration of the body takes on a radically different
meaning and becomes the means for the attainment of enlightenment and liberation. It
is the a priori assumption of a self and its valorisation that the Buddhist argument
radically calls into question.
In many Western horror lms narrative closure is possible only when the horror
which is totally ‘other’ is excised from the home and the world and the stability and
security of the ‘self’ is reinstated. (When on occasion the monstrous survives it is only
for commercial considerations, to keep the possibility of sequels alive.) In instances
where the ‘good’ human dies it is usually because he/she fails to win against the ‘evil’
force that attacks him/her. Death in such cases is tragic not because dying is the essence
of the human condition but rather because it challenges the way the world should work:
victory of good over evil.
It is in this context that I turn now, brie y, to a very different work, the 1997
animation lm by Miyazaki Hayao entitled Mononoke Hime (Princess Mononoke) which
was such an extraordinary success amongst Japanese audiences. A young Emishi boy,
Ashitaka, kills one of the boar gods of the forest who has become a tatarigami, a
Footnote 26 continued
They recommend meditation on decomposing corpses in cemeteries as a means of achieving this end. See
for example, Psalms of the Early Buddhists: The Sisters, The Brethren, C. A. F. Rhys Davids (Trans)
(London: Pali Text Society, reprinted 1980), pp. 211–212. It is not without signi cance that it is the
female body which becomes the object for meditation and that it functions simply as a pedagogical tool
for the enlightenment of the male monk.
272
Rajyashree Pandey
FIGURE 6.
malevolent and violent spirit, as a result of being shot by humans. Ashitaka saves his
village but now has the curse of the boar in the form of a scar on his arm. He is obliged
to leave the village and discover the secret of the boar’s transformation into a tatarigami.
He discovers a little community headed by an ex-prostitute named Eboshi who,
together with a colony of outcastes, mines for iron ore. This has polluted the surround-
ing forest and angered the animals who lived there.
Princess Mononoke, herself a human who has been brought up by wolves and lives
in the forest, is determined to save the forest and the creatures who live in it. In the end
there is a huge battle between the beast gods and the men who work for Eboshi. An
unscrupulous monk who double-crosses Eboshi makes her shoot the god of the forest,
Shishigami, so that he can carry the head away to present to the Emperor. The angered
god walks the forest, looking for its severed head and destroys everything in his wake.
Finally the head is restored to Shishigami, the villagers decide to amend their ways, and
the forest slowly starts getting rejuvenated.
This story draws upon both Japanese and Western folklore. The idea of a child
brought up by wolves and living with other beasts is reminiscent of the tales of Romulus
and Remus as well as Beauty and the Beast. Miyazaki himself mentions folklore as a
vital source for his work.27 Although set ostensibly in the Muromachi period, Miyazaki
moves freely across different historical periods. The young boy Ashitaka is an Emishi
whilst Mononoke Hime according to him is like a Jomon pottery gure. This period of
Japan’s prehistory is one in which, according to Miyazaki, women had more freedom
and society was less differentiated and more uid.28
Despite its medieval setting, the story speaks directly to our predicament today—our
relationship to nature and a world in which increasingly, the land and oceans have
become polluted. Finishing work on the lm, Miyazaki explained that he could no
longer make a movie ‘without addressing the problem of humanity as part of the
ecosystem’.29 His medieval tale is to be read as an allegory of our own relationship to
nature as we move to the twenty- rst century.
The humanist message of this lm is, however, undermined by its refusal to create
a straightforward opposition between humans and nature, humans and non-humans,
even between man and science. Eboshi does not simply represent the evil forces of
industrialisation, bent on exploiting nature and acquiring wealth. She works for the
well-being of the community she has created—she has rescued hinin or outcastes such
as prostitutes and lepers and provided them with a secure livelihood. The narrative of
science and progress cannot be dismissed out of hand if human beings are at the centre
of our concerns. Equally, nature cannot be seen simply as bountiful and benign. The
spirits that inhabit nature can turn into malevolent beings that destroy everything when
angered or wronged. This animation refuses to let us identify completely with the story
or the characters. Part of this distancing effect is achieved through the medieval setting
and the use of arcane speech far removed from contemporary Japanese.
Ultimately the anime resists a humanist reading because it refuses to privilege human
life. We can locate in the marginal utterances of some of the minor characters this
anime’s sense of the fundamental ephemerality of human existence (mujō) and its
recognition of the fact that true enlightenment goes beyond the struggle between
27
Helen McCarthy, Hayao Miyazaki: Master of Japanese Animation (Berkeley: Stonebridge Press, 1999),
p. 183.
28
Ibid., p. 187.
29
Ibid., p. 185.
human beings and nature and the relationship between science and ecology: ultimately
these struggles belong to the phenomenal world and it is our attachment to this world
which constitutes the real problem.
Thus the leper who helps Eboshi make guns laments the fact that he (and by
implication, all human beings) is foolish enough to be attached to worldly things and
to hold grudges and curse others even when he is on his deathbed. The she-wolf Moro
who raises Mononoke Hime refuses to ask the god of the forest to cure her wounds and
save her life. She feels that she has lived long enough and is happy to accept her fate.
Wisdom lies in struggling but at the same time in recognising our insigni cance in the
larger scheme of things. Ultimately the lm leaves us with a sense that the answers to
questions about man and nature, our relationship to the environment, the possibility of
repairing our mistakes and learning to live in harmony with nature are provisional ones
and have only a kind of contingent value. In the ultimate scheme of things, human
beings are transient beings; human endeavour and passion are a form of attachment
and a hindrance to the grasping of the ultimate truth. Our commitment to the
ecological struggle is a form of upaya or expedient means that helps us to grasp the true
nature of the Ultimate Truth and to that extent, a ght worth ghting. This is all we
can do as human beings.
I am suggesting then that the postmodernism that has been detected in Japan’s
popular cultural forms is enabled by certain—to be deliberately provocative—premod-
ern Buddhist sensibilities. Is it possible that a very different understanding of the self
informs horror and sci- narratives in Japan?
In Hino Hideshi’s manga about the mouse it is the more diffuse sense of the
separation between humans and animals that allows for the mouse to be incorporated
into the family. Indeed, at the end of the manga, even this particular reading is called
into question. We are no longer sure whether the whole story happened or whether it
was a gment of the boy’s imagination. In this deluded world it is not possible to tell
the difference between dream and reality. The monstrous child who dies in the closing
sections of Hell Baby nds solace in death, a welcome relief from the tortures of this
world. In Panorama of Hell, it is the vision of a nuclear apocalypse which is the occasion
for the monstrous painter to celebrate his own death as well as the death of the world.
As with Tetsuo in Akira, death is not the end. There are other hells outside of this
world as there are higher realms, all of which remain open as possible futures within
which the shifting self can relocate.
The indeterminancy of the self, the decentred universe in which human beings do not
have primacy of place, the view of life and death as a series of endless transformations
and metamorphoses, the open-endedness of narratives which resist neat closure are all
features of a world informed by a Buddhist sensibility. They are also emblematic of
postmodern culture. That Japanese popular texts can be read as particularly sophisti-
cated articulations of the postmodern position is precisely because they are embedded
in a history shaped by Buddhist values and ideas.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Kadokawa shoten and Chūō Kōronsha for permission to reprint
illustrations, and the journal Postcolonial Studies for permission to reproduce material
that appeared in my earlier article, ‘The Medieval in Manga’, in 3:1 (2000).

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On: 07 January 2015, At: 22:31

The Pre in the Postmodern:

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10371390120101452

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The Pre in the Postmodern: The Horror Manga of

RAJYASHREE PANDEY, La Trobe University

same kind of dispersal’.5

FIGURE 3(a). Figure 3(b).

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