Embracing the demon: the monstrous child in Japanese literature and cinema, 1946-2008

This dissertation examines the depiction of monstrous children in modern Japanese fiction and cinema from 1946 to 2008. My area of focus begins in Japan’s immediate postwar, with an analysis of Ishikawa Jun’s feral boy / Christ figure in Yakeato no Iesu (“The Jesus of the Ruins”) and an examination of Okuizumi Hikaru’s 1994 novel Ishi no raireki (translated by James Westerhoven as The Stones Cry Out), a story of the ways in which a former soldier’s violent past haunts him through the lives and deaths of his two children. My second chapter deals with Ōe Kenzaburō’s depiction of an “idiot son” in stories including Kojinteki na taiken (A Personal Matter) and Sora no kaibutsu Aghwee (Aghwee the Sky Monster). Chapter three focuses on contemporary Japanese horror films, in particular films such as Ringu that feature vengeful child spirit characters. I end my dissertation with an analysis of Oshii Mamoru’s 2008 film The Sky Crawlers, which imagines an alternate future in which child pilots fight staged aerial battles for the entertainment of adults. ❧ Depictions of violent, vengeful, physically mutated, and supernatural children have existed in Japanese literature since the eighth-century Kojiki (The Chronicles of Japan) described the birth of an armless, legless “leech child” to the gods Izanagi and Izanami, the mythical progenitors of the Japanese race (and the islands themselves). Scholarship on each of the two tropes under consideration, 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. In examining how Japanese literature and film dramatizes a character recognized by its grotesque physical appearance, its supernatural state, and / or its violent nature as a “monstrous child,” I reveal the similar ways that two seemingly disparate icons are embedded in their specific literary, cultural, and social histories to represent something beyond themselves, often in contradictory ways. In short, monstrous children in prose fiction, comic books, and film represent transcendental qualities like hope, innocence, and an idealized vision of the past, while at the same time representing a threat to those same transcendental qualities. It is in fact this very contradiction that prose fiction explores and exploits. ❧ As a marker of difference and a transitional figure, existing somewhere between human and monster, child and adult, past and future, the paradoxical figure of the monstrous child seeks to make sense of the symbolic order—of the laws and unwritten agreements that govern the roles, identities, and taboos of human existence—even as it defies that order. In the literature and cinema of certain periods of social, economic, and ideological rupture in Japan, monstrous child characters embody contradiction and confusion, making sense of the nonsensical in their refusal to adhere to boundaries and norms. This dissertation thus seeks to re-define conceptions of monstrous children in literature and cinema as the embodiment of distinct, polarizing forces and sense-making mechanisms, and in doing so offer a re-reading of the cultural, literary, and historical forces that have produced such characters throughout the twentieth century.