Arashi ga oka
The Sound of the World Turned Inside Out
Published in Japanese Horror Cinema, Edinburugh University Press, Edinburugh, 2004

(Opening excerpt only currently published online)


Speaking Japanese and sounding Gothic

The Gothic is attracted to decay like maggots to a corpse. And like flies carrying airborne disease, the Gothic vaporises. It floats along the global trade winds that breathe death through the fetid national identities which distinguish each country's cinema. The Gothic may be Germanic in its morphological origination; it might be English in its formulation of a literary obesity; it might be American in its slippage toward social decline. Its constancy is its suffixing to any cultural identity as a means of decaying that which it touches.

'Japanese Gothic' is a symptom of this affectation. The mutative outgrowth of European tropes, figures and icons from noticeably Japanese environs, architecture and landscape is a clear demonstration of how the Gothic performs more as worm wood and less as a rhizome. It atrophies from within to create new chimeraesque shapes rather than sprouting forth additional structures. While European and Occidental Gothic expressions are the result of importation, the Gothic in Japanese guise is the result of direct injection and a consequent inability to digest. The spectre of Japan's unnerving isolationism governs Japanese aesthetics to such an extent that transcultural occurrences such as the Gothic are never subsumed, fused or blended: they curdle, pock and mar their reflecting surfaces into micro-terrains of cultural mutation. 1

Yoshida Kiju's Arashi ga oka (1988, also known as Onimaru) announces itself as a contorted duality of Gothic imposition, with opening credits declaring its basis as Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights, and then cutting to an obayashi - the traditional narrational figure in Japanese ghost stories from the medieval period. As she tells the tale of Onimaru to a blind monk, her archetypically rasping voice sucks in the Gothic and expels it through a uniquely Japanese dialect. The Occidental vanishes; the Oriental materialises. The Japanese voice that speaks this versioning of Bronte's novel serves as a sign of its generative Gothic apparition - to such an extent that 'voice' becomes both metaphor and metonym in the play between sound and image that characterises Arashi ga oka as a complex audiovisual text. No mere transposition, interpretation or translation of Bronte's tale of displaced souls, windstrewn romance and diminishing vitality, Arashi ga oka eschews all recourse to 'staging' its para-Gothic literary origins. In place of nominal literary and theatrical strategies employed in cinematic novelizations, Arashi ga oka orchestrates and arranges the thematic levels of Bronte's tale via Takemitsu Toru's musical score.

Collapsing the orchestra into sound

The first point to make about the score to Arashi ga oka is an obvious one: it is performed by an orchestra. This central detail might fall on deaf Western ears who are happy with 'film music' as unending echoic strains of Wagnerian clich³s and gross operatic gestures. But the point is arch: to employ a European orchestra for a Japanese film is a high-relief effect comparable to scoring Schindler's List with koto. Takemitsu amplifies the musicological schisms that arise from his adoption of the orchestra by employing Japanese technique in the performance and 'sounding' of the orchestral elements. Largely bypassing the linguistic strictures of Western harmony which tend to apply a default setting to the harmonic building blocks in orchestral writing and performance, instrumental identity in Arashi ga oka is always blurred, diffused, aerated. Flutes behave like whistling kettles; timpani like rolling boulders; horns like tuned wood resonance. No instrument in Arashi ga oka's score presents itself as recognisable. True to the film's ingestion of the Gothic, Takemitsu's orchestration is the result of the orchestra being transformed from within, at the level of tactile performance. No mere vaudevillian mimicry and spookery blasted from the pit below the screen, the score conjures a spectral being living and breathing upon the stage, spot-lit with make-up melting in the lights.

The tactile timbres and seeping sensory nature of the score is always at the fore, accenting the physicality of the orchestral apparatus. In the conjoined history of Western musical progression, the shift from the musical to the sonic is perceived as either an unwanted aberration, a sign of ineptness, or an act of wilful destruction. The evacuation of controlled musical expression and its collapse into tonal impurity, sonic irritation and harmonic degeneration have long formed critical paradigms which qualify 'music' as a grand and noble pursuit. But to an western ear not exposed to Japanese music, the highly skilled performance of a lute (biwa), flute (shakauhachi) or guitar (shimasen) might sound identical to a three year old western child tearing apart a violin. Arashi ga oka features superb solo performances of all these instruments atop the aforementioned orchestral arrangements. Boldly laid across the splayed fields of European instrumentation that squirm like carpets of maggots on moist earth, these uniquely Japanese signifiers of musicianship and performance are emblematic of the 'voice' which 'sounds' the score, and serve to continually remind the ear that they mix with a lush European string section like oil with water. 2

But Arashi ga oka is a film, not a concert. The score then is affected by and in turn modulates the dramaturgy of the film. And it is precisely here that the power of Arashi ga oka as a Japanese Gothic scenario is discerned. A reading of how the music relates to (a) the interior spatial design and depiction of exterior locations; (b) the psychological development (or deterioration) of the enmeshed characters; and (c) the shimmering and wavering dissolution between sonic atmospheres and temperate musicality, uncovers the musicological map upon which Arashi ga oka is audiovisually staged. Despite the bloody chambara explosiveness and the bodily corruption which posit Arashi ga oka as a dimensional shift beyond the original Wuthering Heights (directed by William Wyler in 1939), the dissolution of the score - its creeping, weeping palpability - is the prime signifier of the Gothic germ that has overtaken this highly mannered Japanese film.