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  • Lurkers at the Threshold:Saya and the Nature of Evil
  • Timothy Perper (bio) and Martha Cornog (bio)
Oshii Mamoru . Blood the Last Vampire: Night of the Beasts. Translated by Camellia Nieh. Milwaukie, Ore.: DH Press (a division of Dark Horse Comics), 2005. ISBN 1-59582-029-9. Original Japanese publication, 2000.

Oshii's Night of the Beasts is a novel—not a film—centering on a bloody war involving demons (oni), their human prey, and Saya, a mysterious young Japanese woman who works with American authorities to hunt down and kill oni. The story is set in Tokyo in 1969 amid student uprisings and police riots, three years after the events of the film Blood the Last Vampire. The film was directed by Kitakubo Hiroyuki in 2000, and Oshii is listed as its original creator. The novel represents Oshii's continuing imprimatur on a certain vision of Saya and her world—dark, profoundly visual, and above all ethical.

The novel opens with a prolonged reference to the first scenes of the film Jin-Roh, which also credits Oshii as the original creator: a riot with stone-throwing students, heavily armed police, and dark reflections of flames in water-doused streets. But instead of entering the catacombs of Tokyo (and the mind), Night of the Beasts follows a disaffected young high school activist, Miwa Rei, as he flees tear gas and mayhem and encounters a beautiful young woman standing in front of a blood-soaked wall with a samurai sword in her hand. Dead at her feet is a monster—a demon, a horror, a being that should not exist. In the next weeks of suspension from school and virtual house arrest by his drunken father and crazed mother, Rei tries to deny his vision. But he can no longer retreat from his memory of a threshold between this world of police, riot, and injustice, and a world of demons who lurk in darkness, one lying dead in front of a beautiful young woman. . . .

Oshii situates Rei not as looking into an illuminated world familiar from Japanese or world folklore and reduced to mechanism by psychoanalysis and technology but as seeing darkly (as through a glass, as Oshii put it in Ghost in the Shell) into something far more ancient and more resonant with humanity than modern mental or physical technique can reveal. As the story progresses, Rei and his fellow activists become caught up in a search for Saya and her companions and therefore for an explanation of the monster. Slowly, timidly, they cross the threshold into darkness—from chaos to madness, so to speak, because they have nothing to lose in this world. They encounter Gotoda Hajime, a bedraggled, cigarette-mooching police sergeant who leads them on with opaque clues [End Page 295] and the threat that a friend of theirs is being hunted—either by Saya and her companions, or by the monsters, or by somebody. Gotōda bribes them into collaborating with him—child's play, this—by buying them a huge Korean barbecue, which they gobble happily while listening wide-eyed to his stories of international intrigue. But the image of the dead monster and the beautiful girl with the sword haunts Rei, and he is drawn into the dark world, pulled by the allure of what he has barely glimpsed.

If Night of the Beasts were Western, it could easily move toward an epiphany of grace, where Saya is "really" an angel, the monsters "really" devils, and the resolution a religious stereotype of heroic young women defeating the vampires. But beings who dwell beyond the threshold in darkness are not so easy to see or understand—or defeat. Instead of a westernized vision of light conquering all, Oshii moves the story into further darkness: into those places where liminal twilight reigns, where corpses cannot be destroyed, where vast international conspiracies lurk in collaboration with ecclesiastical factions, governments, geneticists, and oni. Once again, the darkness is itself alluring.

But here we need a digression. The original film was only forty-eight minutes long, and its brevity triggered displeased criticism by American commentators (courtesy requires that we not cite examples). In their view, the film is irretrievably...

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