Week Three: Japanese Horror

This week we were asked to read Japanese horror.  Before taking this class I didn’t know that there was a Japanese horror category, I thought that it would go altogether under the category of horror. For the reading selection we were asked to read Haruki Murakami's A Wild Sheep Chase.

A Wild Sheep Chase is about a mock-detective tale that follows an unnamed Japanese man through Tokyo and Hokkaidō in 1978. The passive, chain-smoking main character gets swept away on an adventure that leads him on a hunt for a sheep that has not been seen for years. The apathetic protagonist meets a woman with magically seductive ears and a strange man who dresses as a sheep and talks in slurs.

I found this reading to be difficult because I found it dry and the events within the story escalate slowly. From what I read of the story and what we talked about in class Japanese horror wasn’t what I expected it to be. I thought it was going to be a lot of blood and things that would be scary. Instead Japanese horror tends to focus on psychological horror and tension building suspense, particularly involving ghosts and poltergeists, while many contain themes of folk religion such as: possession, exorcism, shamanism, precognition, and yōkai. From my experience after reading and or watching a Japanese horror, you have to kind of sit there and contemplate what just happened in the storyline. In addition I find in some parts it is hard to understand what is going on. I did however enjoy the use of mystic characters. I find that unique to this category in addition to its other characteristics. Overall I did find Japanese horror interesting and extremely different