Floored

Our first section, “National Traumas and Repressions” deals with artistic manifestations of trauma within Japan. Via fragmentation, disorientation, ambiguity and flashbacks, the different chapters speak about how the past (both collective and individual) comes back to haunt, being in the form of ghosts or as a giant fire-breathing atomic lizard. The section opens with Calum Waddell’s take on the international hit Ringu. Following the author, the film reenacts, through a simple ghost story, forgotten memories of war and transnational interventionism. The second chapter, Barbara Greene’s “A Modern Monster: Shin-Godzilla and its Place in the Discourse Concerning 3.11 and National Resilience,” argues that Shin-Godzilla metaphorically reworks and reflects the national trauma produced by the Tsunami tragedy of 2011. The monstrous catastrophe and the ineffectual attitude of national authorities are mirrored by this kaiju film, highlighting the importance of how popular culture and history are interlinked via traumatic experiences. In chapter 3, Bipasha Mandal studies the intersections between Nakata’s Ringu and its American remake, The Ring, to unpack underlying cultural patterns and deep-seated social anxieties which play out on and stem from the body of children and women, while also pointing out a cross-cultural flow of aesthetics and modes of storytelling. Chapter 4 and 5 turn to individual trauma and forms of repression. Daniel Krátký’s close reading of the overlooked Ju-On: Origins (Sho Miyake, 2020) emphasizes ambiguity, flashbacks and mirrors as rhetorical devices fragmenting the story. Complicating the use of flashbacks serves Miyake in his goal to tell about traumatic pasts still haunting the main characters. If, according the author, fragmentation is a common trope of the Ju-On franchise, Miyake’s film takes this ambiguity to new extremes. The section ends with Megan Negrych’s “The Dead Speak: Horror and the Modern Ghost in Eiji Ōtsuka’s The Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service.” Negrych argues that the power of personal tragedy informs both, the ghosts