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.
eJapanese 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 Bront''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 Bront''s
novel serves as a sign of its generative Gothic apparition
- to such an extent that evoice' 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 Bront''s tale of displaced
souls, windstrewn romance and diminishing vitality, Arashi
ga oka eschews all recourse to estaging' 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 Bront''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
efilm music' as unending echoic strains of Wagnerian clich?s
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 esounding' 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 emusic' 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 evoice' which esounds'
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.
