Keywords

Introduction

In the West, vampires are ubiquitous; the father of the modern vampire is Dracula whom Bram Stoker gave life to in the book of the same name in 1897. However, the vampire was already part of Western mythology although its precise origin is difficult to locate. Concisely, the attributes of the vampire are thought to originate from Eastern Europe in the early seventeenth century, specifically as a mechanism through which to understand widespread diseases including rabies and pellagra (Hampl and Hampl 1997, p. 636). The word vampire first appears in English in 1734. There are, however, key differences between the folkloric and the modern vampire which Hampl and Hampl describe as follows: “In general, a single attack by the folkloric vampire was not fatal. Instead, vampires were seen as absorbing the vitality of family members and neighbours over a long period by repeated assaults” (p. 637).

In many ways, this definition accords with the female ghost, a key figure in East and South East Asian folklore. In her book on the ghost as phantom heroine in Chinese culture, Judith Zeitlin remarks: “Even today the hypersexual female ghost remains a source of fascination in East Asian media, including movies, TV, and novels, much as the vampire does in American and European popular culture” (2017, p. 3). Like the Western folkloric vampire, such ghosts kill their [male] prey over time. Here, the female ghosts need male life energy in order to sustain their own. The ghost in Chinese belief systems represents the idea that when people die, their ghosts return to their “true” home, though doing so only if their relatives tend to the needs of the dead. If the ghost has nowhere to return to, then they become a vengeful ghost. Such ghosts are rendered as pure yin, the opposite to their male victims yang, gendering the difference between them. While an overabundance of yang is seen in positive terms, an overabundance of yin is seen in negative ones. Writing about Japanese bogies (evil spirits), in 1885, Lang contends that Japanese ghosts are derived from Chinese ones or as he puts it “The Japanese have borrowed most things, including apparitions and awesome spirits and grisly fiends from the Chinese, and then have improved on the original model” (pp. 15–16). While this is a matter of dispute, Lang calls such ghosts “simulacrum vulgare” in that they are able to counterfeit mortality as well as noting that “every man has his own ghost, every place has its peculiar haunting field, every natural phenomena has its informing spirit” (p. 18). The vampire is one of the “bogies” that Lang identifies, but it only warrants a description as its appearance is too hideous to be visually depicted. He writes, “The most awful Japanese vampire , caught red-handed in the act, a hideous, bestial incarnation of ghoulishness, we have carefully refrained from reproducing” (p. 20). However, most critics would accord with the fact that vampires are not indigenous to Japan, or indeed to Asia in general, so that Lang’s vampire, that is too awful to be reproduced, is possibly not in fact a vampire at all. And while Japan already had bloodsucking creatures including demonic cats and ferocious kappa, the iconography of the Western vampire did not catch on until the 1950s with the publication of a translation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula by Hirai Teiichi and as can be seen is still a key influence in Japanese vampire tales and films, albeit fused with other Western monsters, e.g., Vampire Clay which fuses the myth of The Golem with the shintoistic belief that everything is inhabited by a spirit, even inanimate objects. These days, vampires have become naturalized citizens, foreign additions to Japan’s monsterology, coexisting with vengeful yang sucking ghosts, sometimes within the same space, sometimes within the same figure.

Contemporary outings of the vampire in Japanese cinema include Toho’s so-called The Bloodthirsty Trilogy (1970–1974) where the visual and thematic similarities with Hammer’s vampires, in particular, is notable. Such imported monsters represent an attempt to build on the popularity of the Western vampire film by fusing together traditional folklore with the modern bloodsucker. Other more recent outings include Vampire Girl versus Frankenstein Girl (Yoshihiro Nishimura and Naoyuki Tomomatsu 2010), Higanjima: Escape from Vampire Island (2009), its sequel Higanjima: Deluxe (2016), and Koisuru Vampire or Vampire in Love (Mai Suzuk 2015). The most famous of these is the anime Blood: The Last Vampire (Hiroyuki Kitakubo 2000), which boasts possibly the most infamous and ill-advised live action remake, directed by Chris Nahon (2009). While the aforementioned films present a Westernized vampire, Takashi Miike’s hybrid yakuza/vampire film, Yakuza Apocalypse (2015) and Vampire Clay (Sôichi Umezawa 2017) and its 2019 sequel, Vampire Clay 2, offer a more typically Japanese iteration. Cult director Sion Sono has also reinterpreted the bloodsucker in Tokyo Vampire Hotel, which is both a TV series (2017) and a film (2018), albeit replete with misogyny.

There can be little doubt that the appearance of the Western vampire in Japanese and other East Asian cinemas is a cynical marketing ploy designed with the global marketplace in mind. Having said this, this reinterpretation does not suddenly happen in the 1970s with the Toho trilogy but can be traced back earlier. Nobuo Nakagawa’s Vampire Moth (1956) is widely considered to be the first Japanese vampire film and was followed by Lady Vampire in 1959. However, as Scanlon points out, they are more aligned with detective fiction than vampire fiction (2022). An early example of this is Edogawa Ranpo’s literary tale The Lipless Man: From the casebook of Akechi Kogoro (also known as The Vampire, 1930), which, despite the alternative title, does not feature a vampire. Indeed, the Western vampire was first introduced into Japan in the 1930s. Seishi Yokomizo’s Dokuro-Kengyo (The Death’s-Head Stranger, 1939) is a Japanese adaptation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula , wherein the vampire is shorthand for anxiety about the encroaching of foreign culture and in particular Westernization (Monaghan 2011). The word Vampire was first translated as Kyūketsuki which means “bloodsucking ogre” in Japanese: the “ki” standing for Oni (Kotani 1997, p. 193). However, the oni has little in common with the vampire with the exception of not being able to withstand the sunlight and in fact, many Japanese vampires suffer from no such weakness and can freely roam during the day. The term Kyūketsuki was first used in 1915 in an article on anthropology by Minakata Kumagusu (1867–1941) (Shimokusu 2015). In 1926 before the publication of The Lipless Man, Ranpo wrote a short essay titled “Kyūketsuki” for the Taishū Bungei, (Popular Literature). In 1931, Tod Browning’s Dracula was released in Osaka, which as Shimokusu states “show[s] how quickly cinematic works globally circulated at the time” (2015). However, the word for vampire was not used for Dracula, and instead, the title was Majin Dorakyura (meaning Dracula, the demonic man), but was used for the translation of Byron’s The Vampyre in the following year (Shimokusu 2015). However, the translator of The Vampyre did not use the term Kyūketsuki, preferring to use jikketsugaki “a Buddhist term for a blood-sucking ghoul” instead (2015). Hirai Teichii (1902–1975) translated Stoker’s Dracula in 1956 and his subsequent 1971 edition is considered to be the definitive one in Japan. In his translation, Hirai points out that the jikketsugaki is different from a Western vampire (Shimokusu 2015). In fact, in the first edition of Dracula, Hirai avoided the use of Kyūketsuki but this was changed for the 1963 edition. Shimokusu points out that in the first translation, Hirai clarified that the “Japanese were not familiar with vampiric legends even in the middle of the twentieth century; in fact, they were not familiar with the textual legends, but many had seen the movie” (2015). Shimokusu argues that “It can be said, in the second decade of the twenty-first century, that most Japanese readers know their Count Dracula through Hirai’s translation and not Stoker’s text” (2015).

The Yang Sucking [Female] Ghost

In his analysis of A Chinese Ghost Story , Moskowitz contends that understanding the construction of cosmological bodies as made up of yin and yang is key to understanding Chinese ghosts. He writes: “Yin represents women, darkness, passivity, and often sickness and death. Yang, in turn stands for men, light, activity and life force” (2004, pp. 206–207). While ghosts are conceptualized as more yin, humans are more yang. Zeitlin’s quotation from New Tales Told by Lamplight (Jiandeng xinhua) captures this distinction succinctly: “Man is the fullest flowering of pure yang, a ghost the noxious fifth of deathly yin” (2017, p. 16). When one is emptied of yang, death ensues. This is the equivalent to the Western vampire’s drinking of human blood. In both cases, bodily fluids are exchanged between subject and object, leading to death. This symbiotic connection between the two is demonstrated in two of the short stories of Lafcadio Hearn, a US immigrant, who was naturalized as a Japanese citizen in 1895. Born in Ireland, Hearn immigrated to the USA when he was 19 and eventually settled in Cincinnati where he was a reporter, translator, and writer. In 1890, Hearn visited Japan as a reporter for Harper’s, falling in love with the country and marrying a Japanese woman in 1891. He became a schoolteacher and eventually took up a post as Professor of English literature at the Imperial University of Tokyo, during which time Hearn wrote a number of collections of stories based upon customs, rituals, and folklores of his adopted nation. Two of his short stories help to elucidate the similarity and differences between the Western vampire and the Eastern ghost, that of Chūgōrō and O’Kamé, therefore it is worth discussing them in some detail.

In The Story of Chūgōrō , Hearn writes about a young man who is enchanted by a beautiful woman, who leads him to an underwater palace where they marry and spend nights together in wedded bliss. Chūgōrō is an ashigaru for a high-ranking Samurai, and the other retainers notice that he has a habit of disappearing for the night, returning pale and wan after these nocturnal visits. When an elderly retainer questions him about these absences, Chūgōrō reveals that he spends his nights with his ghostly wife and has promised to obey her in all things including keeping their marriage a secret, bearing in mind the cautionary tale of Urashima Taro. When he next goes to meet her for their nightly rendezvous, she does not turn up and he suddenly becomes ill, warranting the attention of a physician who declares: “Why, the man has no blood!” [and] after a careful examination; “there is nothing but water in his veins! It will be very difficult to save him… . What maleficence is this?” (Hearn 2017). Unfortunately Chūgōrō cannot be saved and when the physician is told the story of his secret marriage, he reveals that nothing could have been done to save him, and indeed that he is not the first victim. When asked if the woman was a fox or serpent (common female monsters in Japanese mythology), the physician replies: “Simply a Frog, a great and ugly Frog!” (Hearn 2017).

In The Story of O’Kamé, Hachiyemon marries the beautiful O’Kamé, only to be sadly parted after 2 years when his wife succumbs to an unknown illness. Before she dies, O’Kamé asks him to promise that he will never marry again, to which he accedes. However, Hachiyemon seems certain to follow his wife to an early grave as he becomes pale and lethargic, so much so that “he looked more like a ghost than a man” (Hearn 2017). Eventually, he confesses the reason for his ghostliness to his mother, telling her that O’Kamé cannot rest in the other world and instead comes to lie with him nightly. Seeking to free Hachiyemon from his dead wife’s unwanted ministrations, the priest assembles the family at the graveside: “And when the coffin-lid had been removed, all present were startled; for O’Kamé sat before them with a smile upon her face, seeming as comely as before the time of her sickness; and there was not any sign of death upon her. But when the priest told his assistants to lift the dead woman out of the coffin, the astonishment changed to fear; for the corpse was blood-warm to the touch, and still flexible as in life, notwithstanding the squatting posture in which it had remained so long” (Hearn 2017). Appropriate rites being said, O’Kamé is returned to the earth once more, and that being done, Hachiyemon regains his strength.

For Sabine Metzer, the fact that Hearn never labels either of these “monstrous” women as vampires is significant. She comments: “What characterizes these two stories is not so much the figure of a blood-draining ghostly female or their linkage to the protagonists’ loss of blood explicitly with sexual encounters, but the fact that the draining of blood as well as the bloodsuckers themselves are never described in terms familiar to the Western reader, who were acquainted with the dramatization of blood and bite marks …” (Metzer 2016). She explains this is due to the fact that Japan “has no vampire-tradition” citing Stein (2009), arguing that Hearn deliberately avoided translating these monstrous women as vampires in order to conserve the original meaning and context. Gelder also foregrounds the absence of a vampire tradition in his analysis of Irma Vep, Blood: The Last Vampire and Thirst, citing Park’s (the director of Thirst) comment when questioned about the later film: “As far as I’m aware, there is no vampire folklore in Korea. Its only stories imported from the West that constitute the basis of this modern myth” (Gelder 2012). This helps to explain why Park’s protagonist becomes a vampire elsewhere, bringing it into South Korea on his return to his homeland. In these terms, vampirism is seen as connected to the Other, something which is transmitted from the outside, wrecking havoc on the inside. Although there are other tales from Japan which deal with men who are visited by demonic creatures late at night who saps their strength, for example, Yorimasa and The Vampire Cat (see Hadland Davis 2003), these are similar to those of Hearn, despite the second utilizing Vampire in the title. As Shimokusu points out, “Although there are legends in Japanese folklore in which blood is considered to have spiritual power, there are no beings that suck blood and roam the world forever” (2015).

This helps to explain why Ranpo’s novel The Lipless Man: From the casebook of Akechi Kogoro is not about an actual vampire, despite its alternative title. Instead, Ranpo uses the term metaphorically, stating in the introduction: “The protagonist of my story is a demon of the human realm, one who stands in comparison to those legendary creatures of the Balkans known as the “Vampires”” (2023). Further in his description of the horrors that that the protagonist inflicts on his victims, Ranpo states: “I’ll tell how he extends sickly white tentacles from his secret lair,” conflating Lovecraftian and Vampire lore. Although Ranpo devised his nom-de-plume through transliterating Edgar Allan Poe, The Lipless Man is in many ways reminiscent of Sherlock Holmes’ encounter with the Hound of the Baskerville (Arthur Conan Doyle 1902) in that there are natural solutions for seemingly supernatural events. Ranpo constructs his lipless protagonist as analogous to a bloodsucker whose actions are aided and abetted by black magic. Indeed, he is only called a vampire towards the story’s conclusion.

What this does tell us though is that by the turn of the twentieth century, the mythology of the Western vampire had spread to Asia. This shows that Hearn’s decision not to call either of his life-force sucking women “vampires” was a deliberate one, done to demarcate the boundaries between Japanese and Western mythology. Vampires are not indigenous but are imported into Japan in the 1930s with the publication of Death-Head Stranger in 1939 being a notable example. Kotani writes that “Vampire, in the first place, is a foreign cultural product that never existed in our country before 1930.” (1997, p. 189). In the novel, Yokomizo reworks Stoker’s Dracula, locating the narrative within the Edo period, wherein Shiranui (Dracula) and his beautiful entourage of female vampires turn the Lady Kagero, the daughter of a Shogun, into a vampire. Shiranui is modeled on the real-life 16-year-old Shiro Amakusa, a ronin (masterless Samurai) who was the leader (or figurehead) of the Shimabara Rebellion (1637–1638), which brought together Christians and peasants to challenge the corrupt Tokugawa shogunate. As such the figure of Shiranui is not constructed in simple terms as Other, whose presence is threatening to the status quo and therefore needs to be eliminated, instead Dracula also stands for the revolutionary and rebellious impulse. Shiranui/Dracula is also the embodiment of foreignness as Kotani points out in her nuanced analysis of Techno-gothic: “his deep immersion in foreign culture could not help but transfigure him into a monster” (1997, p. 190). It is also no coincidence that the book was published at the beginning of the World War II which saw a “dramatic emergence of the xenophobic spirit in Japan” (Kotani 1997, p. 190). As Monaghan argues: “The vampire thus came to serve a function impossible for the homegrown Kappa or the Black Cat, embodying a generation’s fears of seditious foreign influence and the dangers of western ideas. From its very introduction, the vampire became inextricably linked with the Western other and the encroachment of foreign culture” (2011).

Enter The Vampire

In 1956, Bram Stoker’s Dracula was translated into Japanese by Teiichi Hirai. This translation was a commercial and critical success, and Shimokusu points out that it encouraged “further publication of Japanese translations of Western fantastic and horror literature” (2015). Further, Hammer films had been received well in Japan, both critically and commercially, including Dracula (1958), so it is little surprise that one of the major studios would turn its attention to providing their own interpretations of the Dracula mythos. In 1956, one of Japan’s most noted directors of the gothic horror genre, Nobuo Nakagawa, directed The Vampire Moth , which was distributed by Toho studios. However, the film was notable for the absence and not the presence of vampires. In the film, a model is stalked by a strange man wearing a hideous mask which is more reminiscent of the Italian giallo films of Mario Bava than those of Hammer.

This was followed 3 years later by The Vampire Lady , which did have a vampire, albeit not a female one. Crandol points out that “Vampire refers to the vampire’s dining preferences, not to its gender” and contends that the film is influenced more by the Universal horror cycle of the 1930s and 1940s than by the Hammer treatment (Crandol 2021). The villain is Shiro Sofue (Shigeru Amachi) who suffers from the Matsumura curse, which means that he needs to drink the blood of “pretty” young women in order to sustain himself. In addition, Itsuko (Junko Ikeuchi), who is the object of the villain’s desire – the archetypal damsel-in-distress of the gothic – is the spitting image of his long-lost love, something which is not within the original story or any of the variations thereof at the time and is not introduced into the Western lexicon until the TV film Dracula in 1973. Crandol suggests that this theme of female doubling might be an intertextual reference to Zita Johann’s character in The Mummy (1932), although there is no way of knowing this for sure. At the same time, it is likely that this was influenced closer to home, as it bears some similarities to Yokomizo’s Death-Head Stranger especially as the villain, Shiro Sofue, is from the Amakusa clan and has cursed blood as a result, keeping in mind the centrality of Christianity to the rebellion. While Western iconography associated with the vampire is used, for example, the crucifix and the figure of the Virgin Mary, The Vampire Lady also works within the Buddhist notion of Karma and reincarnation wherein lovers can be reunited during more than one lifetime. Rather than the gothic settings of many Hammer productions, The Vampire Lady is set during the present and indeed emphasizes the trappings of modernity with its vampire living in “a posh Tokyo hotel decorated in of-the-moment late 1950s trappings” (Crandol 2021). It is likely that this provided the inspiration, at least in part, for Sono’s recent TV series and film, Tokyo Vampire Hotel.

The Lady Vampire is a curious mix of Eastern mythology and Western vampire lore. At the same time, the composite figure of the vampire not only collapses distinctions between East and West but it also collapses the boundaries between the vampire and the werewolf which are discrete monsters in the West; Shiro Sofue transforms after being exposed to moonlight, with each transformation causing him to age significantly until he is a decrepit old man in his human form. By having the “vampire” suffer a curse that is aligned with the West (or indeed caused by the West, in that Christianity was brought into Japan by missionaries), The Lady Vampire articulates both a desire for and fear of the “Other,” a desire for the trappings of modernity brought about by enforced modernization post-World War II but a fear that the self might be lost as a result.

Dolls, Damsels, and Demons

Michio Yamamoto’s “The Bloodthirsty Trilogy” (1970–1974) which is comprised of The Vampire Doll, Lake of Dracula, and The Evil of Dracula continued Toho’s attempt to capitalize on the popularity of Dracula and the vampire in Japan. Unlike Nakagawa’s brief flirtation with the genre, The Bloodthirsty Trilogy engages more directly with Western vampire mythology than the films discussed above, or at least the latter two films in the trilogy do. While the first film, The Vampire Doll, does feature a vampire, it does so by conflating vampire and zombie origin stories, as Yûko Nonomura (Yukiko Kobayashi), is hypnotized in order to stop her dying from injuries inflicted in a car accident. Despite her need to consume blood to stay alive, including that of her fiancé, Kazuhiko Sagawa (Atsuo Nakamura), Yûko is not situated as the villain of the story. Instead, it is the family doctor, Dr. Yamaguchi (Jun Usami) who is revealed at the end to be the true villain. In The Vampire Doll, women are situated as the playthings of cruel men, with Yûko and her mother, suffering because Shidu (Yôko Minakaze) failed to reciprocate Dr. Yamaguchi’s affections in the past.

As Kyle Warner’s review points out that while the influence of the Hammer films can be seen in the set design and mood, the overall feelings of the film is more Poe than Stoker (Warner 2018). In addition, The Vampire Doll is arguably influenced by Hitchcock’s Psycho in that the protagonist, Kazuhiko, dies in the first act, his investigative journey is then undertaken by his sister, Keiko (Kayo Matsuo) and her fiancé Hiroshi Takagi (Akira Nakao). Keiko and Takagi are horrified to find that not only is the brother dead but his fiancé has been reanimated as a bloodsucking ghoul. Dressed in flowing white robes, Yûko does resemble the vampire women from a Hammer film. This similarity is emphasized as she is manipulated by an older man, who is symbolic of patriarchal power, although the man is human and not of supernatural origin. However, love cannot save her and instead she is only defeated when she decides to end her own life. In many ways, Yûko has an agency that many women in gothic texts of the time (in both East and West) do not have. Her sacrifice is a refusal to be the object of male manipulation, to accord to her doll-like status. In many ways, she is also the archetypal vengeful ghost who is trapped in the place where she “died” and takes out her anger at her untimely demise at those around her with the white flowing nightdress doubling for traditional funeral dress in Japan. Her dead fiancé sits at her side, sightlessly watching over her while she “sleeps,” a macabre representation of a ghost wedding.

The second film in the trilogy, Lake of Dracula , is less story based and more concerned with creating an evocative, gothic atmosphere and while it bears a similarity to English language gothic horror of the same period, does not lose its “Japaneseness.” Here the protagonist is a young woman, Akiko (Midori Fujita), who suffers from nightmares about an old house, a woman playing the piano, and a strange, pale, man (Mori Kishida) whose intentions towards her are not the least bit honorable. When an empty coffin turns up, sent to the local handyman, Kyûsaku (Kaku Takashina), Akiko’s nightmares seem to be coming true. Following this, young women start being admitted to the local hospital where Akiko’s boyfriend works, Takashi Saeki (Chôei Takahashi), having been drained of blood with mysterious bite marks on their necks. The male vampire’s desire for Akiko as a child can be understood in terms of the popularity of Lolicon in Japan, where desire by middle-aged men for children is normalized rather than pathologized. The vampire’s desire for the child-Akiko is only thwarted when his father helps her to escape, the trauma that she repressed as a child. Again vampirism is not situated as something which comes from the inside but is aligned with the outside. We learn that the father was not Japanese and built the house in a remote part of Japan to keep others safe from the virus. At the end, it is the father that defeats his vampiric son, allowing Akiko to escape relatively unscathed.

The final film in the trilogy is the closest to the Western Dracula mythos but in a uniquely Japanese way with the setting being a boarding school for high school girls. In Evil of Dracula , the headmaster of the school is a vampire who originally came to Japan 200 years ago as a missionary. This again situates vampirism is an external disease, something brought to Japan by the Western invader/colonizer. The film begins with Shiraki (Toshio Kurosawa), a psychology teacher, arriving at the remote Seimei School for Girls. He is greeted by the Principal (Shin Kishida) who has just recently lost his wife (Mika Katsuragi) as a result of a car accident. As a consequence of his loss, the Principal tells Shiraki that he will be stepping down from his position and that he wants Shiraki to take on the role of Principal in his place. Soon after, students begin disappearing from their beds at night, reappearing with mysterious bite marks and shortly after, dying. In order to “sex” up the film and compete with the more soft-core erotica of Hammer as well as less soft-core erotica being peddled by other studios, such as Nikkatsu, the bites are on the breast rather than the neck which allows considerably more (female) flesh to be seen than the previous outings. Shiraki begins investigating why his student numbers are dropping, only to discover that the Principal and his wife are both vampires, who are using the school as a cover for their monstrous status and needs, using the bodies of others to ensure their longevity. While Shiraki is identified as the next Principal, this is not a promotion to be desired as it necessitates his death, in order for his body to be possessed by the vampiric Other. As we can see here, Japanese vampires are hybrid creatures, whose ontological status is confirmed through reference to traditional folklore and beliefs. The ability of spirits to body hop has a long history in Japan, although possession by spirits tends to be conceptualized in gendered terms allowing women to “unknowingly manipulate their oppressors” and allow “women to temporarily rule over men” (Bargen 1988, p. 95).

In their discussion of spirit possession in The Tale of Genji (Genji monogatari) written in the eleventh century, Kuchta and Malita write: “Spirits were also believed to be able to possess people – both spirits of the living and spirits of the dead. The latter, shiryo (literally, ‘spirit of the dead’ … shi, meaning ‘death’ and … ‘ryo,’ meaning ‘ghost, soul, spirit’).” The former is “ikiryo – literally a ‘living spirit,’ or (or iki meaning ‘living’), a phenomenon unique to Japan, having roots in native beliefs. Ikiryo detaches from a living body in order to haunt and torment other people” (2015, p. 179). This is very different to the Western understanding of possession, especially within a Judo-Christian framework, where innocent souls are possessed by demons. In Evil of Dracula , the “Dracula” of the title and his wife are able to possess the bodies of their victims rather than use their victims for sustenance or to do their unholy bidding. Again, we can see that the vampire is utilized as a repository of external and internal belief systems, articulating both external and internal threats. In an online essay accompanying the release of the Criterion Edition of The Bloodthirsty Trilogy, the author suggests a link between the vampire and the nuclear threat, writing: “but if an ancient and gigantic sea monster can stand in for the threat of nuclear disaster, we don’t know why blank-eyed vampires can’t draw on that legacy to underpin its own scares as well” (2015). The constant close-ups of vampires and their victims eyes suggest that this reading is indeed a possible interpretation. At the same time, as the writer points out, the female ghosts and vampires embody the typical attributes of the vengeful ghost: long dark hair, white costume, and “malevolent smiles” (2015).

Shimizu’s Vampires: Marebito and Howling Village

While Shimizu is still best known, outside of Japan, for the Ju-on films, that introduced the world to the dysfunctional family of Kayako, the wife and mother, Taeko, her husband and father, and Toshio, their son, and the trauma caused by male violence. While Kayako came to be synonymous through the Ju-on franchise, Taeko’s part in the emergence of Kayako as vengeful ghost has almost been forgotten and yet Taeko murders his wife and son, their unquiet spirits remaining tied to the place of their untimely deaths. While the series continues to spread Kayako’s curse, whether in the USA or Japan, Shimizu’s last direct involvement with it was Ju-On The Grudge: Haunted House simulator for the Wii which was released to celebrate Ju-on’s 10-year anniversary in 2009. A prolific director, Shimizu has veered away from the vengeful ghost genre in recent years and has explored other Japanese folktales and urban mythology. In 2004, while Shimizu was still working on the Ju-on films, he found time to direct the low-budget Marebito starring Shinya Tsukamoto, cult filmmaker and actor, as a freelance cameraman who is obsessed with the idea of capturing fear using the camera lens. Marebito can be thought of perhaps as Shimizu’s version of Peeping Tom (Michael Powell, UK: 1960), or Blow Up (Antonioni, UK/Italy: 1956), concerned as it is with the male gaze as harbinger of death. The cameraman’s pursuit leads him to the underground of the city where he encounters strange humanoid creatures and ghosts before he comes across a naked young woman (Tomomi Miyashita) chained to the wall. He unchains her and takes the woman back to his apartment. Convinced that she is not human, the cameraman sets up cameras to capture her every move when he is not at home. By accident he discovers that she takes sustenance from blood, offering his own blood first, then that of animals and finally that of humans. The woman is never identified as a vampire and is not the type of bloodsucking ghoul that we find in typical gothic horror films; there is no origin story and no explanation for her vampirism. Shimizu draws on Lovecraftian ideas and imagery rather than that of Stoker, or contemporaneous vampire films from the West of the time.

Shimizu extends this expansion of the vampire mythos in his recent village trilogy: Howling Village (Inunaki Mura, 2019), Suicide Forest Village (Jukai Mura, 2021), and Ox-Head Village (Nuishou Village, 2022), all of which draw on Japanese tales of “real” haunted villages. The haunted village in Howling Village is Inunaki, about which there are many Japanese legends and ghost stories. Inunaki Village is often referred to as a hidden village and is located in Fukuoka Prefecture, and its origins can be traced back to the seventeenth century. The villagers came to reject the Japanese constitution purportedly because of racism and bullying according to a thread on Reddit by HakuLovesPopCorn (2020). In the film, a sign warns people: “From this point forward, the constitution and laws of Japan do not apply here”; a tunnel connects the village with the outside world but was blocked up by the Japanese government in 2000. The film’s protagonist is Kanae (Ayaka Miyoshi), a clinical psychologist who can see spirits. Her brother, Yuma (Ryota Bando) and his friend, Akina (Rinka Otani) visit Inuaki Village, for a podcast on haunted places. Akina and Yuma are attacked by ghosts and flee the village. Yuma asks Kanae to see Akina as she has become visibly disturbed as a result of the visit to the village; however, when she arrives, Akina commits suicide in front of her. It turns out that the villagers who lived in Inuaki Village were rumored to have mated with wild dogs after the power company left them to try and drive them out of the village. In the end, the company flooded the village so that they could use the land. While the plot is slightly convoluted, what is significant in terms of representation of the vampire is that the ghostly villagers who chase after Kanae and her brother when they return to the village to try and undo the curse are depicted as a hybrid of werewolves and vampires, and not in the conventional manner of werewolves. As Kanae and her brother run from the villagers, Maya reaches towards them, her body shifting from human to nonhuman, recalling similar transformations in Shimizu’s Ju-On films. This is not the type of transformation that we see in most Western werewolf films, when the person infected changes from human to wolf, their transformation shifting them from one state of being to another. What is striking about this and the other films in the trilogy is that they demonstrate the way in which Western monsters have entered into Japan’s monsterology, as well as how they are often conceptualized with reference to indigenous folklore, beliefs, and urban legends .

Coda: Best Wishes to All

As we have seen, Japanese vampires have unique features that are not found in their Western counterparts, even within films that are directly influenced by them such as The Bloodthirsty Trilogy . At the same time, there is a discernible trend in Japanese film to bring together different monsters, whose shape and purpose, as well as origin story is different. We saw how this works in The Lady Vampire , Marebito, and Howling Village . Another example would be Vampire Clay which brings together the myth of the Golem, with that of the vampire and situates it within an animistic universe. However, to finish this examination of the Japanese vampire, I want to briefly consider a film that seems at first sight to have little relationship to the vampire film. Kind Regards to All is the debut film by Yuta Shimotsu and is representative of the type of slow-burn, low-key horror cinema that Japan excels at. The setting of the film is a family reunion during which a young woman (Kotone Furukawa), who is training to be a nurse, discovers that happiness can only be had at the expense of others in a literal rather than a metaphorical way (see Balmain 2023). The young woman is horrified to find out that the reason for her grandparent’s longevity is that they are sucking the vitality from a blindfolded and gagged man who is kept in the attic room. Not only this, but her family’s happiness and that of the others in her village is dependent on the sacrifice of another; here, vitality is not only associated with long life but also with happiness. While the woman tries to fight against this familial and societal trait, she eventually gives in to it. Vampirism is used here as a mechanism through which to comment on the narcissistic individualism of contemporary society (not just in Japan but also elsewhere) and the fracture of the family and the socioeconomic structures that surround them and give their identities meaning. This is clearly shown in a scene from the beginning of the film which is repeated at the end but with a significant difference. In the first, the woman helps an old woman cross a busy road, putting the needs of others above her own, while in the second (with which the film concludes), the woman encounters the same old woman crossing the road, but this time refuses to help her. This can be seen as a commentary on the consequences of modernization aligned with Westernization on traditional values and ideals.

In conclusion, as I have argued, the Japanese vampire is not an indigenous monster but rather an imported one, which often displays evidence of that importation by situating the vampiric curse as coming from the West, wherein the occupation of Japan by the USA post-World War II is conflated with missionaries bringing Christianity to Japan in the sixteenth century, situating Japan as a victim of Western aggression and conveniently ignoring Japan’s own status as aggressor and colonizer. In many ways, the traits of the vampire are exported onto the figure of the yang-sucking female ghost, and the difference between the two rendered almost indiscernible. Further in some cases, the boundaries between discrete Western monsters, such as the zombie, the vampire, and the werewolf, are ignored, and instead, the vampire is a composite creature made up of attributes of all three. While there is little doubt that Stoker’s Dracula , whether through imitation or translation, represents an important reference point for the contemporary Japanese vampire, there are discernible influences that are perhaps as important, including that of Edgar Allan Poe and Lovecraft in literature, and that of Hitchcock as well as Hammer in cinema. Shimizu’s Howling Village collapses distinctions between the female ghost, the vampire, and the werewolf, creating a hybrid creature whose origins are unknown, whereas Shimotsu’s directorial debut displaces the mythical vampire for a capitalistic cannibalistic one, suited to embody contemporary anxieties about socioeconomic disparity and inequality. In this most recent reiteration, the vampire is no longer an outcast of society but rather is society itself.

Cross-References