Quasi-Bodies and Kafka’s Castle in Sion Sono’s Crime Noir Guilty of Romance (2011)

Abstract

Abstract Sion Sono’s Guilty of Romance (Koi no tsumi, 2011) was adapted from an actual crime in Tokyo’s love hotel: an educated woman (a prostitute at night) was found decapitated and her limbs were re-assembled with a sex-doll. Sono renders this through his cinematic narrative blurring the distinction between true crime and fictional sin like Rancière’s idea that everything is a narrative dissipating the opposition between “fact and fiction,” and “quasi-body” becomes a product of human literarity while an imaginary collective body is formed to fill the fracture in-between. In Sono’s story, the victim is a literature professor tormented by an incestuous desire for her father, whose favorite book is Kafka’s Castle. Thus she compares the love-hotel district where she turns loose at night as a castle of lusts. Here the narrative becomes a collective body that puppeteers human “quasi-bodies” in a Kafkaesque spatio-temporal aporia, and time’s spatialized horizontally with the germs of desire spread like a contagion on a Deleuzian “plane of immanence.”