Female Prisoner # 701: Scorpion boasts the production values of a Japanese studio film, but like the work of Seijun Suzuki (Tokyo Drifter, Branded To Kill etc.) it manages to transcend the formulaic limitations of production-line cinema. Nonetheless, the essential characteristics of Matsu the Scorpion will be familiar to anyone who has seen more than one ‘revenge’ film. There is no need for Matsu to exist as a fully formed ‘character’ because her motivation and superhuman strength are a product of her burning desire for revenge.
Stewart Home on Female Prisoner #701: Scorpion and the trope of ‘revenge’.
In broken English and through a translator he goes on to tell how he felt disturbed by the repetitive cycle of observing chicks arriving to the scene, enticed by the appeal of darker life, slipping into a world of wrist-cutting, drugs, prostitution, debauchery and occasional degradation. From his bar he assembled a team of groupies who spilt their stories to him. He emerged as a writer making notes on his phone about the new faces’ demise.
Since his first novel, Hear the Wind Sing, was published three decades ago, the author has been an outsider in his native land, shunning the local press and literary establishment, and declining all but one domestic request for a public appearance. He has been seen, and to some degree positioned himself, as a literary pariah in Japan, in part because of its tepid-to-negative critical reception of his work: “I was called a punk, a con man. Some kind of swindler. Being different is difficult in Japan. They hated me. So I left.”
Barber’s finely tuned historico-sanatorium mentality presents a chemical formula for the city whose three constituent particles are ‘… the digital city, the banal city of well-functioning, corporate mundanity, and the never-built city of looted grandeur and genocidal power that had been designed to form the pivotal site of Europe.’ It is from Hitler’s room in Linz’s Wolfinger Hotel that Barber returns again and again to the urgent hysteria of the hallucinatory panic that is the ethical and aesthetic spinal column of all his work. Which city is the real city? Which history is the more truthful? Which dream is the city’s? Who is the city? Where is the city? Where do they go?
Contemporary Japan takes up a similarly glamorous mental space in the minds of western experimental writers and artists to that occupied by American high-schools in the brain-pans of European teenagers. Both have the allure of alien exoticism: alternate universes where everything’s the same yet crucially skewed, positioned sideways to our own. Of course the advantage that Japan has over Degrassi Junior High is that everyone’s a Ninja and it looks like Bladerunner. Obviously.
In the first 50+ pages of this short novel, Ryu Murakami subtly builds tension through personal history and familial responsibility, interspersing the narrative with thoughts on post-war Japan, consumerism, the changing face of Japanese youth culture, and the sex industry. There are some memorable lines, including: “He’d also proposed a theory: that the legs of young Japanese women epitomized the best of the changes that had occurred in the decades since World War II. Aoyama was inclined to agree.”
The original, drink-fuelled idea was to write something with the sensorial and corporeal impact, and with the sparse and headlong style, that Bataille’s Story of the Eye carries, but set in an engulfing, contemporary digitized megalopolis in technological meltdown: Tokyo, which I know well from having lived there — all of the locations in the three novels are real places, such as the Shinjuku Park Tower Hotel, the Koma Ballroom and the bars of Shinjuku, where there’s an Artaud Bar as well as a Genet Bar, though those locations get psychogeographically mutated and scrambled in the novels.
I see Dr. Bradley, looking even more sociopathically tall than expected, looming over the bar, holding what I presume to be a book — though I can’t be sure. Any tome, even the 677-page Killing Bryce, looks like a pamphlet in that gorilla mitt. He’s alternating high octane espressos with some sort of tawny distilled spirit, and yelling at the possessor of that Leipzig lilt. But it’s nice yelling, not mean.
A steaming noodle stall draped in refugee tents. Surprisingly savory and expensive. The five other stools held cognoscenti; they taught me about what we slurped. It had anti-aging properties, digestive benefits; it would jumpstart potency. I liked it. It was tangy, filling; one’s stomach embraced it, but I couldn’t comprehend the ingredients. We six were caught in a loop—I hadn’t the vocabulary and all their definitions were tautological. I would’ve had to already know the word of the main ingredient to understand the secondary ones. They were derivatives of it.
Although I’m conscious of that problem among Japanese youth in anime, I think it’s more important to show the younger generation how great it is to be successful. I’m not criticizing Hayao Miyazaki, for example, but I wish he would make more of his status. He should have gone to the Academy Awards ceremony [when Spirited Away won best animated feature film], and he should be showing off his winning of the Academy Award, and showing young artists his status, his international wealth and fame.
