Hiroshi Harada spent five painstaking years penning every single frame of his surrealist manga nightmare, Midori. What does the director get for his laborious adaptation of Suehiro Maruo’s text? His debut feature is, and continues to be, banned by Narita Customs in its native land. What makes the short work (it barely falls short of the fifty-minute mark) so risqué? Perhaps its graphic violence and nudity. However, others might state that such a succinct reply oversimplifies matters. By contrast, there exists various similar Western instances in which the carnality of human nature is unrepentantly presented as it unabatedly forces its audience to contend with a world which has created a monster so that we might better understand the nature of evil.
When Midori’s mother dies a tragic death, the ringleader of a traveling freak show coerces the orphan into his Machiavellian confidences. After witnessing utter depravity at the hand of every cast member, Midori is held captive despite the fact that the show is on the verge of bankruptcy. When an extremely powerful magician–who goes by the title of “Master”–appears, the circus employees become envious of his talents atop the fact that he and Midori have become a couple.
To state that Harada’s work is the Eastern equivalent to Tod Browning’s Freaks crossbred with Marquis de Sade’s 120 Days of Sodom is an unjust abridgement of the situation. However, for a naïve viewer who does not have the resources to experience the director’s treatise firsthand (copies of the work can only be obtained via the Japanese underground because Harada refuses to release the work on video), such an analogy is not an entirely unjust synoptic comparison.
Midori is divided into three chapters, the first undoubtedly being the culprit behind the work’s banishment. Once one suffers the slings and arrows of the Sadian events contained within Midori’s opening segment, Harada turns the thumbscrews with the introduction of the Master. As the depravity within the circus takes a backseat as the shift in power changes from the tyrannical manager to the Master himself due to the latter being the sole act which has, not only salvaged the show, but allowed it to turn a profit virtually overnight, the filmmaker then keeps his audience engaged with the subplots of how the new dynamic within the show will ultimately resolve, the bond between Master and Midori (love becoming a hyper juxtaposition in respect to the surrounding events), and the secret behind the Master’s craft.
Cleverly, Harada refuses to respond to the latter storyline as the moralistic agenda of the former remains his central focus as, all the while, the emotional investment is compounded once the Master befriends–then becomes the lover and protector of–the titular abused orphan in the face of the jealousy and hostilities of the veteran performers.
Like many of the infamous classics of extreme art, Midori is an examination upon ethics. Not unlike Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange, the writings of Marquis de Sade, Hogg and The Mad Man by Samuel Delany, Mary Harron’s American Psycho, or William Burroughs’s Naked Lunch, without the violence and explicit sexuality beforehand, Harada would be unable to instruct us upon why it would be in our vested interests to abhor, thwart, or avoid such at all costs.
Yet, the ultimate question stands, does the ends justify the means? In respect to Eastern art, though what Midori attempts and succeeds in doing has been done before and–arguably–better, the world and mindset from which it came obviously has yet to absorb enough of his neighbor’s artistic history not to be alarmed by the appearance of such a film. As such, yes, Japan needed, and apparently continues to demand, that the more villainous side of human nature to, not only be exposed, but be accepted in order for the culture to better able itself to contend with evil in all its guises.
-Egregious Gurnow
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- Teleconference interview with Mick Garris (Masters of Horror) - January 22, 2015
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- Interview with Writer/Director Nacho Cerda (The Abandoned, Aftermath) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Actress Thora Birch (Dark Corners, The Hole, American Beauty) - January 22, 2015
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