Asami from Audition: The Twisted, Evil Sadist With Whom I Am Infatuated and Repelled
Reviewing Ryu Murakami's "Audition" and interpreting the film against the novel.
When I started reading Ryu Murakami's novel Audition (1999), I was prepared for a book chock-full of scenes of depraved torture and satisfying sadism. I'd seen the movie first. Directed by Takashi Miike, it was visually stunning sadism as art. However disturbing the torture scenes were, a viewer could not look away.
It, too, was a well-told story that brought you into the world of 1980’s Japan and transitioned from rom-com into horror halfway through. (The movie has such a reputation now that viewers know well what is to come, but the melodrama/comedy scenes are entertaining on their own merits.)
Watching the film first, then reading the book, you can see the creation in reverse order. In this case, the film seems to have expanded on the book, particularly in the ending.
Both the film and the book are influences on my work The Film Student, which a slow-burning tale of Kyoko, a sadistic university girl out to create an ultra-realistic horror film with her submissive boy toy exchange student Josh. I am writing and publishing the story in short story form on my substack, and you can read it all--including special 500-1,000 word editions--if you become a premium/paid subscriber. You will also receive other perks, including the ability to receive free advanced copies of my novellas.
In the book, Murakami seamlessly blends BDSM references into a standard plot, without being gratuitous. The effect is to give the reader the flavor, setting the mood and foreshadowing what may come. Murakami is a master at coloring his stories with 50 shades of topaz. In Tokyo Decadence, he gives us fifteen tales centered around prostitutes, drug dealers, gangers, and debauched pleasure seekers.
Aoyama (played by Ryo Ishibashi) is looking for a new wife following the early death of his cherished Ryoko, a woman who pushed his career forward and lovingly raised their son, a woman who looked the other way when he cheated and whom he only fully came to appreciate after she was gone. When he tells his friend that he is looking for a new wife trained in a discipline, Yoshikawa misinterprets it: "Discipline? You mean, like, bondage and shit?"
He denied it, but one suspects his subconscious may have been looking for just that. He was looking for someone who could punish him, who could bring him to life again, or, in failing that, one who could end his worldly suffering for good.
From start to finish, all the other men (in both the book and the film), warn Aoyama about Asami (the lovely horror vixen Eihi Shiina), this one woman out of hundreds with whom he had become inexplicably infatuated. Yoshikawa's warning concerned Asami in particular; he had investigated her background.
His son, Shige, goes further, giving voice to male fears of all liberated young women of the new generation:
"I look at the girls in my class, and there's something, like, mercenary about them. I mean, I don't even understand some of the things they're into. There's this girl in the class ahead of me who just got kicked out of school for working at an S&M club. Can you believe that? I've started to think I'll find myself a nice girl from Kazakhstan or somewhere. ... The women there are supposed to be beautiful, with really excellent personalities."
Despite their (reasonable and unreasonable) warnings, Aoyama is strangely attracted not despite, but almost because of, the mysterious edge in Asami. That, and her troubled upbringing and messy present situation. He's attracted to the danger, the thrill, the mystery. An old dog, he wants a young mistress. He's scared of, but secretly attracted to, dominant women.
The one sex scene stays to the gentle side of femdom, but gentle or not, it is clear who is leading the action:
"Then she reached out to press her pink fingernails into his chest and dragged them downward in a lingering, catlike scratch. ... Shameful sounds--a sob, a moan, a sigh--stuck in his throat and threatened to seep out between his lips. Why, he wondered, wasn't he taking control?"
If anything, Asami is dominating his mind more than her body--up until the final chapter.
Even after her unstable personality becomes apparent, Aoyama can't let her go. The vision of Asami he created in his mind after he read her resume is the vision of her he always sees. No matter what she does, he cannot give up this fabrication of a perfect woman. It becomes the only thing he is living for.
In some way, Aoyama idealized Asami in the film version, too. Even the sequences of Aoyama torturing the men of the film may have his hidden fantasies coming to fruition. He feared that modern-day women were capable of such violence and feared that maybe he and other men were deserving of it, but secretly, he truly desired to be the victim. Such an experience would be cathartic, but more a satisfaction of his perversions than of her desire.
He had been loved, and had lived a relatively privileged life, and he wanted to be taken down a peg and to truly feel the harsh reality of the world he had escaped. She had been abused and deprived of love for her entire life. She wanted love and would prefer to have lived in a world where she had no need for revenge.
While his son fears the liberated women of his own generation, Aoyama relishes his own downfall. He is tired and bored of life. The old man knows he is past his prime and has nothing left to offer the world.
He is nothing without his wife, who helped him get his business off the ground and let him fool around without reprimand. He was forced to admit he was weak and powerless without her and wasn't even interested in exploring his new freedom until many years later.
He was crushed by the weight of beautiful memories: "the sledgehammer of despair." Then Asami left him, too--for a time--and, "he remembered with brutal clarity every detail of every date, to say nothing of those last, ecstatic hours in Izu."
That segment reminded me of the lyrics of Zach Bryan's song "I Remember Everything":
I wish I didn't, but I do
Remember every moment on the nights with you
Lucky for us (and for him?), he got one final meeting with Asami. (Here is where the book differs from the movie. In the book, it is brutally clear that this is his final meeting with Asami ever. The movie leaves a lot up to the reader's interpretation.)
I don't want to spoil too much--but, alas, the book and movie are both over two decades old and you already know generally that something horrific is going to take place. I must give you a feeling of how alluring Asami is at the height of her sadism:
And then, from the corner of the living room, came a clear, succinct voice.
"Can't move, can you?"
...
She walked up to him and took hold of his face, squeezing his cheeks together with the thumb and index finger of her left hand. She was wearing rubber surgical gloves.
...
"Go to sleep for a while. I'll let you know when we're ready to start. Your body will be like a corpse, but I'll make sure your nerves are all wide awake. That way the pain will be a hundred times worse."
My dream girl!
Give Ryu Murakami credit for creating this woman who is so deeply twisted--and indeed evil--yet irresistible.
Even as he was being tortured nearly to death, he was resigned to his fate. It was only when he thought about his dog—whom she tortured and left bleeding in front of his eyes—and his son that he fought back. He had consented to play her twisted game. They hadn't.
It is here that the movie and the book diverge. The violence on screen begins when Aoyama is in bed with her--as if he is imagining it--and ends with Asami wrapping her feet for ballet (a return to her youth). The woman and man are making amends on the floor--or perhaps in bed. "Someday you'll feel that life is wonderful," Aoyama said to Asami.
*I read somewhere that director Takashi Miike did not intend for the final torture scenes to be a dream. I didn’t see his direct quote, so I am not sure. But many viewers have so interpreted it. Artist’s intent vs. reader’s interpretation, etc.
Takashi did have this to say about his film’s worldwide popularity:
“[I have] no idea what goes on in the minds of people in the West and I don't pretend to know what their tastes are. And I don't want to start thinking about that. It's nice that they liked my movie, but I'm not going to start deliberately worrying about why or what I can do to make it happen again.”