ABSTRACT
The intensifying feeling expressed online and in film and art of the later 1990s and 2000s was that many young women in Japan were disenchanted and openly operated in a different moral universe from the rest of the nation. The drama of female disaffection from men, often portrayed as their abusive or tyrannical fathers, was produced over and again in literature, art, film, and media discussion in the 1990s to 2000s. In this period, the spread of the concepts of “old man hating” (oyajigirai) and “old man stink” (oyaji kusai) reflected the increasingly public display of hostilities between camps divided by age and gender and crystallized around the archetypes of the girl (young/female) versus the oyaji (“old bloke,” old/male). Even a cursory consideration of films and novels originating in Japan but also popular abroad (listed here with dates of their original Japanese release)—from Yoshimoto Banana’s Kitchen (1988) and Tsugumi (1989) to Kirino Natsuo’s Out (1997) and Grotesque (2003), to Miike Takashi’s horror film Audition (1999) based on a novel by Murakami Ryū; Sono Sion’s Suicide Circle (2001~) and Love Exposure (2008); Nakata Hideo’s Ring (1998); Nakashima Tetsuya’s Kamikaze Girls (2004) based on a novel by Takemoto Novala; and Ogigami Naoko’s Seagull Diner (Kamome Shokudō, 2006)—and art by Aoshima Chiho, Takano Aya, Konoike Tomoko, and even Nara Yoshitomo—attest to the deep public fascination with extreme portrayals of female malcontent and refusal.
