Have you ever walked down a corridor or into a room in the dead of night with your heart beating and your skin crawling? Something spooks you, for reasons have to nothing to do with the real world in the clear light of day. Or do they?
Real estate agents do not commonly proclaim that a property has recently been the site of a suicide, murder or lonely, undiscovered death, even after renovation that leaves no trace of the previous inhabitant. The reality of their business is that such places give off bad vibes, and not only to the superstitious. Discretion is advised.
In The Inerasable (Zan’e – Sundewa Ikenai Heya), Nakamura Yoshihiro’s engrossing, goose-pimple-raising adaptation of Ono Fuyumi’s best-selling horror novel, a college student named Kubo (Hashimoto Ai) hears strange sounds in her apartment’s tatami room and describes them in an email to a horror novelist (Takeuchi Yuko) who has asked readers to send her stories of their scary experiences.
When Kubo writes again to say she has glimpsed an obi (kimono sash) being dragged across the tatami, the novelist, who is known only as “I” (“Watashi”), recalls that she received a similar letter from another resident in the same apartment building. A coincidence? The novelist, being a novelist, imagines a woman in kimono hanging herself and her obi brushing the floor as her body swings back and forth.
Then Kubo discovers that an earlier building resident committed suicide, but after moving to a different apartment. Could there be a connection between his death and what she has been hearing and seeing? Kubo and the novelist, who is now fascinated by the case – and not a little creeped out – join forces to investigate.
A simple-enough setup, but as the story wends its labyrinthine way through the murky past, it extends far beyond the earnest Kubo and the nerdy novelist. Along the way the two women acquire sources and allies. They also discover a curse that reaches across time and distance to seek out fresh victims.
Nakamura, who got his professional start as a scriptwriter and director of horror films, returns to the genre after a decade’s absence a different filmmaker. In contrast to the snappy pace of Booth, his 2005 shocker about a midnight radio DJ who finds himself talking to a revenge-bent ghost in a haunted broadcasting booth, The Inerasable builds slowly as its investigators sift through old land records, interview witnesses and uncover long-hidden – or unsuspected – connections.
This sort of multi-layered story-telling can also be seen in Nakamura’s best film to date, the 2009 Fish Story, which stunningly tied together five plot threads to show how a proto-punk song saves the world. The Inerasable, however, is more reminiscent of a ghost-hunter reality show, if one more deliberately crafted than the norm, with the spooky plot reveals used more to build atmosphere than jolt the audience.
The Inerasable has sort of surprise, reveal-all climax familiar from other Nakamura films, but uses none of jack-in-the-box scares found in so much J-horror.
Instead the creepiness comes from an implacable malevolence born of an ancient injustice. And to attract its fatal attention, you only have to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Even if it’s the place you call home, since in Japan long-dead others have probably been there before you.
And in The Inerasable they have left a presence that, like an ancient stain, cannot be wiped away. A presence that forces itself on our attention, that not only haunts, but pursues. Call it “The Inescapable.”
Mark Schilling