Introduction to Focus: Noh Man's Land

Abstract

Introduction to Focus: floh Man's Land K. Malcolm Richards, Focus Editor Aiaericai HBVlBW We Japanese do not think it strange if a dialogue leaves undefined what is really intended, or even restores it back to the keeping ofthe undefinable. —Martin Heidegger In "A Dialogue on Language," Heidegger stages a scene involving "an Inquirer" and, as it was translated into English in 1971, "a Japanese." This conversation, echoing a format most frequently associated with the dialogues of Plato, takes up a problem involving the translation not only of words, but of concepts between East and West. This dialogue is all the more strange, for, at one level, even if inspired partly by the visit of a Japanese scholar conversant in Heidegger's philosophy, it is a fiction taking place between two speakers, who are, at one and the same time, both voices of Heidegger. (Imagine the aging ex-Nazi philosopher alone in his Freiburg home, enacting this conversation with the help of two sock puppets.) This fictive dialogue necessitates a peculiar friction, a friction caused between the meeting of two cultures and the differences of their respective languages, as well as the resultant frictions produced through a conversation that takes place in German, in Heidegger's own language. Indeed, this meeting within a Western language becomes one of the facets to this strange essay that allows Heidegger to explore a difference within Japanese thought, as embodied in his questioning of the Japanese term iki,- a difference that is threatened by the translation of this concept into the language of Western metaphysics. I wish to counter Heidegger's aestheticization of iki with an aesthetics of Ichi. That is to say, the filmic work created by the director ofIchi the Killer (2001), Takashi Miike, seems to offer a way beyond the simple oppositions presumed by Heidegger's dialogue, oppositions between realism and antirealism , Western and Japanese (or, as Heidegger terms it, EastAsian). To put it briefly, Miike's work offers moments where realism and antirealism coexist, breaking down or, dare I say, deconstructing the opposition between realism and antirealism, and pointing to something lurking beneath the very concept of realism in representation, undoing a tradition ofmimesis, even while providing moments of excess that send some of his viewers toward the exit sign in disgust. One can regurgitate everything Derrida has to say on Kant, mimesis, and vomit, at this point. Still, it would be a mistake to homogenize this quality of Miike's work, giving it a stable identity, for if it manifests itself in one instance as a milklike substance spilling out of Ichi, while forming the kanji character for Ichi (simultaneously the film's title, protagonist's name, and the number "one," which is also the number that Ichi's costume bears), this milklike substance also appears in a more maternal form in Visitor Q (2001) or Gozu (2003), almost real, but not quite as real as real can get. In his refusal of a simple either/or logic, Miike pushes aside questions of realism and antirealism, embracing the fictive qualities of film, as well as how film can, at the same time, inscribe itself both within and without reality. Beyond these concerns of Western aesthetics , Miike's work also destabilizes the domestic Japanese, challenging a notion of the Japanese home that situates his work amongst themes from contemporary Japanese literature and culture. This can be seen not only through his collaboration with Japanese authors, as in his adaptation of RyQ Murakami's Audition (1999), but also in his use of Japanese popular culture, as in his adaptations of manga classics, such as Ichi or MPD Psycho (2000). In his engagement with the contemporary, his work flows into many of the cultural currents the reader will discover in this Focus, from the genre crossing to be found in the work of Haruki Murakami to the wealth of experimental music covered in Improvised Musicfrom Japan. The latter can be witnessed in the soundtrack to Ichi provided by Seiichi Yamamoto of the Boredoms or the dissonant acid-folk music of Kazuki Tomokawa in Izo (2004), while the former can be experienced in Miike's destructuring of the yakuza genre (nowhere more spectacularly...