Meiji Gakuin Film Workshop on the 25th

[Alex Zahlten]

Dear KineJapaners,

For everyone who is in the Tokyo area, please join us for the next meeting of the Japanese Film Workshop at Meiji Gakuin University on Thursday, November 25th, from 7 to 9 PM at the Shirokane Campus of Meiji Gakuin University. The venue is *room 7418* on the 4th floor of the Hepburn hall (a tall building standing next to the main building). The Japanese Film Workshop is open to all, and directions from stations and the campus map are attached below as a PDF file. The workshop is open to all, and welcomes participants from any discipline.

This time the workshop will feature a presentation by Lindsay Nelson, drawing on her Ph.D. dissertation subject of monstrous children in modern Japanese fiction and cinema. 

Presentation Abstract

My dissertation examines depictions of monstrous children in modern and especially postwar gensô bungaku and cinema. Scholarship on each of the two tropes, children and monsters, has flourished in the fields of modern and early modern literary studies, folklore studies, and cultural history.  In examining each figure separately, scholars have historicized the idea of childhood and linked the study of monsters to conflicted attitudes about modernity.  When brought together, however, the amalgam of these two figures reveals a broader throughline in postwar literature?a series of representations of monstrous children coinciding with periods of historical rupture.   Moreover, it makes visible a historical background not often attributed to such a genre-based literature as gensô bungaku.   In examining how fantastic literature dramatizes a character recognized by its grotesque physical appearance, its supernatural state, and / or its violent nature as a ?monstrous child,?!
  I hope to reveal the similar ways that two seemingly disparate icons are embedded in their specific literary, cultural, and social histories to represent something beyond themselves.

For this presentation I will focus on the depiction of the monstrous child in Nakata Hideo?s film Honogurai mizu no soko kara (Dark Water), with reference to Nakata?s Ringu trilogy.  In reading Dark Water, I will attempt to show the changing ways in which both monsters and children have been depicted in Japanese visual and performing arts, and what those depictions reveal about the relationship of such icons to national fears and hopes.  It is my position that the figure of the monstrous child in Japanese cinema exists in a space of temporal paradox, embodying hopes for a prosperous future that are at the same time tied to notions of an unchanging, idealized past. 


Lindsay Nelson is a fifth-year PhD candidate in comparative literature at the University of Southern California.  She is a 2010 Japan Foundation fellow and is currently conducting research in Tokyo. Her dissertation examines the depiction of monstrous children in modern Japanese fiction and cinema, including Ishikawa Jun's Yakeato no Iesu, Okuizumi Hikaru's Ishi no raireki, and Nakata Hideo's Honogurai mizu no soko kara. 

For more information, please contact: alexzahlten at hotmail.com 

Alex Zahlten
Postdoctoral Scholar
Meiji Gakuin University
Tokyo

-- 
alex at nipponconnection.de

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