Insular Rites - The cultural heritage at the heart of Siren's darkness
A vicennium of dim disquiet
The long, rich history of Japanese horror encompasses a prolific era of fascinating creations emerging at the turn of the millennium, spanning from global best-selling novels to blockbuster movies. The video game medium, too, partook in this fertile creative phenomenon with developers and publishers seizing the potential of rapidly evolving technologies to introduce ever more disturbing experiences to a growing audience, producing results that were altogether unimaginable a mere decade before.
Among the most laudable digital experiments of the time, ‘Siren’ was the remarkable act that followed Keiichiro Toyama’s immensely successful venture into the nebulous recesses of survival horror, ‘Silent Hill’. As any careful study of the games will reveal, both productions share a variety of core elements despite occupying significantly different latitudes within the genre’s atlas. And yet ‘Siren’ openly departs from the previously established survival horror norms by setting its action at the heart of rural Japan. Whereas the majority of genre-defining titles found their primary references in North American B movies and supernatural paperbacks, the team at Sony sought to diversify its 2003 production with an abundance of domestically sourced folk stories and cultural inspirations.
The innovative horror currents of the 1970s
I believe that the occult boom that took place in Japan in the 1970s had a great influence on my own production techniques and other aspects of my work. - Keiichiro Toyama
Though the economic growth miracle of 1960s Japan could not be sustained into the 1970s and 1980s, the monetary situation was still predominantly favourable. The average Japanese person enjoyed one of the world’s highest disposable income percentages, causing consumerism to skyrocket in a society previously defined by an ingrained culture of frugality. Different segments of the country’s entertainment industry flourished during this opportune moment, importing overseas content as well as bolstering internal content production. This environment was also propitious to greenlighting riskier and more experimental projects, helping to shape a unique artistic identity that epitomized the era.
The 1977 cult film ‘Hausu’, directed by Nobuhiko Obayashi, stands as possibly the most illustrative and outlandish testament to how the Japanese horror genre diversified from the classic Kaidan ghost story tradition, courageously embodying a more visceral and surrealist facet that bewildered moviegoing audiences with its unparalleled eccentricity. Similarly, comic strips were undergoing a moment of maturation as a portion of the target audience came of age, allowing for modern themes and genres directed at a perceptibly more cosmopolitan and receptive society. In 1972, ‘Hyōryū Kyōshitsu’ (The Drifting Classroom) by Kazuo Umezo blended science fiction time-traveling with post-apocalyptic dread. Shinichi Koga’s ‘Eko Eko Azarak’, appearing in 1976, first introduced the core tenets of Wiccan paganism to many Japanese readers.
Among the most prominent examples of this shift are the works of master mangaka Daijiro Moroshi, author of the seminal ‘Yokai Hunter’ (1974), his first serialized work published by Weekly Shonen Jump. Behind a vastly misleading and brazenly commercial title lies the story of unconventional archaeologist and field researcher Reijiro Hieda, who travels to the farthest recesses of the Japanese archipelago to further his knowledge of folk tales, often grappling with extradimensional beings first-hand - a premise reminiscent of M. R. James’ classic ghost story template. The author’s impacting artworks and disquieting narratives are rooted in first and second-hand influences obtained from novelist, translator, and literary researcher Tatsuhiko Shibusawa, whose body of work is often regarded as the great unifier of classic Japanese myth and western dark folk traditions.
On the other hand, most of Moroshi’s creations make no effort to conceal their deep-seated elements of Lovecraftian cosmic horror and pseudo-history whose origin, direct or otherwise, cannot be precisely traced. It is known that a handful of his short stories found their way into Japanese periodicals as early as the 1940s, such as ‘The Statement of Randolph Carter’ from 1920. The earliest known Japanese translation of a major work could date to 1956, when Hayakawa Shobō published its ‘Fantasy And Mystery’ anthology, including his 1928 novella ‘The Dunnich Horror’. It would be safe to presume, however, that the inclusion of ‘The Whisperer in Darkness’ in the September 1972 special issue of SF Magazine single-handedly introduced thousands of Japanese readers to the writings of the Rhode Island penman. It is believed that it generated so much interest that a fully translated complete works volume was published only two years later, consolidating his brand of horror as a staple in this country; possibly before his style of writing earned a consistent following in the United States through the advent of affordable paperbacks.
By Toyama’s own admission, Moroshi’s strips supplied the author with a vast cache of intellectual provisions from which to build the pivotal themes sustaining the entire Siren series; in particular, the idea that modern man exists in a state of permanent severance from the perturbing nature of reality and that only by immersing himself in the traditions of old, preserved uniquely by faraway communities of agrestic customs and sylvan surroundings, can a sense of higher enlightenment be attained. The umbilical cord tethering manga and game is further evidenced by the Siren character Tamon Takeuchi, a folklorist deliberately designed to resemble professor Hieda in both countenance and occupation.
The most powerful manifestation of the Cthulhu mythos in Siren is, without question, that of the ancient deity Datatsushi; an entity said to have descended from a comet in the sky who unleashed a curse after being mistaken for a fish and consumed by famished villagers. Concurrently, this fable is punctuated by elements that approximate it to the ancient Asian tradition of Gozu Tennō, depicted in some accounts as an ox-like beast that wanders into a village ravaged by hunger, who became cursed after slaying the beast and eating it. This is but one among a myriad of instances proving the creators’ ability to expertly coalesce local lore with imported fiction in their attempt to grant substance and complexity to the game’s universe, as well as to stimulate and intrigue Eastern and Western players alike.
I think it is common in game development to develop the ups and downs of the main character’s sole experience. But in my case, I build on the backbone of a character, the relationships between several people, and discover the events that would have occurred between them and the path the characters would have taken in the process.
A great part of what Siren is remembered for to date stems from its unusual approach to storytelling, in that it weaves multiple stories in a non-sequential manner to incite a more thoughtful and contemplative interpretation of its message. And yet its true completion is not possible without the strenuous retrieval of its hundred archive items, a mechanism designed to expand its thematic boundaries beyond the timeline and offer a privileged insight into the sophisticated amalgam of paranormal subject citations, religious iconography, and fables carried through time by oral tradition.
Just as the game extends an invitation for the player to piece together its intricate timeline, it requires a careful examination of these scattered documents, fully illustrated, bearing small missives that collectively constitute the backbone of its inscrutable lore. Some are more easily understood as they relate directly to events relating to the characters’ own timeline; while others serve only to inform the player of the voluminous research work conducted by the team, with mentions to subjects as diversified as the Voynich Manuscript (archive number 016), the Honduran raining of fish phenomenon (049), the spirit-summoning Ouija board (012), or the purported Kyōwa era UFO encounters named ‘Utsuro Bune’. In fact, the more attentive spectators who watched the 2015 Siren live cast session hosted by Keiichiro Toyama, Siren scenario writer Naoko Sato, and SCE PR Yasuhiro Kitao are bound to have spotted a dry erase marker rendition of these elliptical vessels over the whiteboard background.
The prevalence of Japanese cults in the last half of the twentieth century is a complex and delicate subject whose research is far from complete. Though accurately regarded as a profoundly reverent country, Japan has one of the lowest degrees of religious affiliation among Asian nations. Following the late 19th century edicts of the Meiji Restoration, the 1947 constitution severed what existing ties between government and religion there remained, heralding an age of near-absolute liberty in a territory with an already long history of syncretism. This is regarded as one of the determining factors behind the emergence of numerous new religious communities, some resulting from succession, others compounding the teachings from an assortment of traditions, regional and foreign.
The misdeeds of one such organization in particular, Shoko Asahara’s Aum Shinrikiyo, made headlines across the world in 1995 after a sarin gas attack in the Tokyo subway provoking dozens of fatalities and leaving thousands injured, many of whom for life. In a sense, the entire nation was debilitated and scarred by the news, precipitating a collective, indelible trauma. By far the most dangerous, Aum was by no means the only sizable death cult thriving among this highly educated, intelligent, skilled, and prosperous society.
Other organizations whose origins can be traced to the new age eschatological current of the 1970s, as is the case of The Panawave Laboratory, have also been the frequent object of news coverage for motives that, though less harmful by comparison, were possibly more obscure in their nature. Enlisting new members with pledges of miraculous healing, fulfillment through cooperative lifestyles, or a mission to rescue the planet from impending doom, several of these combines were the target of police investigations and prosecution for fraud, social unrest, theft, and homicide; constituting grounds for the international community at large to address it as Japan’s cult problem.
Toyama’s horror games appear to be profoundly shaped by both the Japanese tradition of theological unification, in tandem with the relevant role played by these pervading factions in the years preceding their creation. To wit, one of Silent Hill’s most enduring features was the progressive unveiling of a cult’s presence at the heart of its chilling events. Named The Order, the occultic organization idolizes a deity in many ways reminiscent of Baphomet, the recondite symbol of order revered by the knights Templar in the medieval ages.
In similar fashion, Siren’s story revolves around the actions of the Mana Religion, a parochial sect whose creeds and rites are performed in veneration of Datatsushi, whose ancestral curse afflicts and nurtures the secluded region. The style and tradition of Mana appear to conjoin principles of human sacrifice rituals that are common to Paganism, with the animistic deification of the elements and of natural disasters such as water or earthquakes that are characteristic of Shintoism; in addition to the recurring imagery of Jōmon sculpture found in the Uryen earth figurines and the striking resemblances of Datatsushi’s head with that of prehistoric Dogū effigies.
The ample range of direct symbolic allusions to Christianity, in particular, warrants further inspection as they constitute a probable tie to the author’s own upbringing as well as a veiled form of commentary on the lasting effect of Aum’s own embracing of Christian apocalypticism. Toyama was born in the Miyazaki prefecture on the island of Kyushu, located in the Western part of the archipelago, the place where the first encounter and exchange between the Japanese and Europeans, setting sail from Portuguese shores, took place in 1542. It was also one of the initial locations where conversion took hold, as followers - many of which were affluent and influential members of the population - gathered in secret to attend services. By and large, the Mana religion in Siren is modeled after the precepts of Christian tradition and the history of its tortuous origins in that territory, including persecution from the Tokugawa Shogunate.
The spiritual centre of the village is described as the Irazu Valley Church - accurately translated from the Japanese word kyōkai -, which specifically describes a place of Christian worship. One of the protagonists, guide Hisako Yao, is a habit-wearing nun. The theme of death, resurrection communion with the flesh, and eternal life, too, are inherent to the Mana dogma. The equivalence of Datatsushi to a fish finds a telling parallel in the use of the fish as a secret mark to represent Christ in times of persecution during the Roman empire. The Hoshinogoeika, a Hanuda villager song sung during sacrifice rituals, produces very clear allusions to Christ and the symbol of the holy trinity. The Book of Deliverance, the cult’s holy scriptures, cites a four-headed creature named Kiruden who guards the gates of paradise, an analogy to the tetramorph described in Ezequiel’s visions. Another chapter of these fictional scriptures refers to the Fruit of Vieda, homologous to the forbidden fruit from the Garden of Eden parable.
New media’s revivification of the traditional horror story
When I work on a story or setting, what I value is the sense of discovery.
The horror genre is thought to be as old as fiction itself. What may have begun with well-meaning cautionary tales using terror to captivate the audience’s attention while imparting potentially life-saving wisdom involuntarily created an appetite for the adrenaline-infused tension it provoked; inciting generations to lift the veil and take sight of what lies on the other side. Its antediluvian roots notwithstanding, this type of story has hardly lost its appeal in modern times and has witnessed renewed interest as the exchange mechanism shifted from the spoken word uttered by firelight to the mechanical printing press, now nestled in the hyperboreal expanses of cyberspace.
Japan has a long-standing record of explorations of the preternatural and the supernatural, to the extent that the horror genre has been elevated to a specialty export appreciated and revered world over under the commercial banner of J-Horror. But the origins of the genre itself remain vague to many, even the self-professed aficionados. The modern elements of horror that circumscribe the genre extend past the geography of Japan into the demarcations of the demonic realm, whence vengeful spirits and other grotesque aberrations materialize to prey on the innocent, gullible, and unprepared human.
Konjaku Monogatarishū, meaning Anthology of Tales from the Past, is a compilation of Buddhist folk tales originating from India, China, and Japan, written between the 8th century to the 12th century, referring to the Japanese Heian period. Some of its tales depict what may be considered the earliest traceable presence of supernatural elements. While not meant as horror stories per se, they simplify the principles of Buddhism using examples of otherworldly interference in human affairs as examples of punishment for disobedience of nuclear spiritual principles.
For many centuries, stories of this nature existed outside a defined category. During the Edo period, they began to be compiled under the designation of Kaidan or Kaidan-shū, their popularity reaching its zenith in the mid-eighteen-hundreds. The term is thought to have become a household one as a result of the then-fashionable Buddhist spirit-summoning parlor game Hyakumonogatari Kaidankai, suitably played only at night. In the early twentieth century, Lafcadio Hearn exported them to the rest of the world in a fashion very much his own. Many in the west are certain to recognize the name Kaidan in its alternative transliteration, Kwaidan, the title of the acclaimed 1964 Kobayashi film, a highly influential work that helped usher in the genre’s gilded age some fifty odd years later.
After curiously dabbling in the slasher genre during the late 1970s and 1980s, in its bid to replicate or satirize North-American box office hits from the period, Japanese horror literature and cinema - and, subsequently, manga and anime - circled back to their origins as the psychological terror mainstay was progressively reinstituted. Director Kiyoshi Kurosawa shook the norms with his urban crime thriller Cure. Released in 1997, the film’s working title, Evangelist, was discarded by the studio so as to avoid any association with the Tokyo subway incident occurring only two short years before. In 1998, Fuyumi Ono’s book Shiki brought forward a modern take on vampire fiction set in a small town, protagonised by teen and preteen characters. Adapted to a popular manga series, the book was occasionally cited as a direct source by Toyama.
A short year after, Hideo Nakata’s Ringu paved the road for a procession of lucrative and critically acclaimed paranormal thrillers coming out of the land of rising sun, captivating a large enough audience to have enticed the Korean and the Chinese filmmakers to follow suit. Adapted from a 1991 novel series by Koji Suzuki, it proposed the most disconcerting vision of the endurance of age-old evils by way of contemporary media. Vengeful spirits were no longer circumscribed to haunted old dwellings hidden away in remote locations. By means never clearly revealed, they can tap into phone lines, crystallize their messages on magnetic tape, or pierce in corporeal form through the ultimate looking glass of souls, the TV. In Silent Hill, the battery-operated radio screamed white noise at approaching monsters. In Siren, the centrifugal screech of an electromechanical horn causes humans to observe the world from the lifeless eyes of a Shibito the same as a television set tunes into a channel. Technology fell flat in its mission to ward off malevolence. Instead, it only reinvigorated it.
As dial-up modems proliferated, internet forums brought together avid aficionados and mythomaniacs, now the official birthplace of postmodern myths, many of which grounded in a kernel of dreadful truth. One such urban legend was that of Sugisawa Village, and it bears particular importance to an in-depth understanding of how Siren, as a videogame production, was tailored to perfectly fit this stimulating moment in the history of digital media. At the centre of its manifold variations repeated time and again, on and offline, the Sugisawa saga concerns a small and sparsely inhabited town located deep in the mountains in the Aomori prefecture. Driven to absolute madness, a man was said to have slaughtered the entire population before taking his own life. A government cover-up action ensured that the village was isolated and all traces of its existence were removed from existing records. Those who ventured near it were said to be cursed by the evil spirits that dwelled within. One report in particular depicted a boy who searched for its elusive location on a mountain bicycle. The image stuck with Keiichiro Toyama, who followed these developments from afar, such that the character Kyoya Suda finds his way to Hanuda village using precisely this means of transportation.
A new breed of television shows in Japan hurried to keep up the brisk stride at which communications evolved. Horror was, after all, too profitable a brand to remain a captive of the printed page and silver screen. In an episode of Fuji TV’s well-received program Kiseki Taiken! Anbiribabō, the crew set out to discover and capture footage of the fabled town. Unsurprisingly, their efforts yielded little. Yet, the show’s producers introduced an intriguing verse to the evolving yarn by postulating that the town had to necessarily exist in a place outside space and time, manifesting itself at will. This rousing addendum is partly echoed by the volatile nature of reality in Siren, its 1976 and 2003 versions, further expounded with the notion of a real and a false Hanuda in the third and final entry of the series, Siren: Blood Curse.
An alarm blare that yet clamors
There was a fire station near my home when I was growing up. It rang out a volume that echoed throughout the city when a fire broke out, and is etched in my mind as a symbol of a disturbing and extraordinary event. Also, I think that I was greatly influenced by David Lynch films, which I used to watch as a student. In particular, his work ‘Industrial Symphony No. 1’.
Intense and unique, Siren remains a staple of videoludic horror to this day; though still impenetrable and visceral as ever to please the mainstream. Even though it contended with a variety of initial setbacks, namely the cancellation of its television commercials due to the disturbing nature of their imagery, its inarguable qualities and pedigree earned it effusive reviews and accolades. With the full financial backing from Sony’s software division and an ingenious viral marketing campaign, the game performed healthily in the various territories it was published in, generating sufficient excitement for a sequel to follow in 2006 alongside a loosely based film adaptation directed by Yukihiko Tsutsumi.
At present, the game is consensually remembered in light of two defining facets, on the one hand its excruciatingly sombre atmosphere and, on the other, its methodically paced yet uncompromising gameplay. Conceptually, Siren’s use of character vulnerability does not egress from the survival horror canon, although the extremes to which it stretches this particular design choice found vocal detractors among less indulgent players. From the many who owned a copy, only a few are thought to have seen it through, overlooking the very aspect at which Siren excels: its endless thematic abundance.
As the dense mist settled over time, it should be clear to any attentive onlooker that Toyama and his team prevailed in crafting a work of fiction that is identically complex, comprehensive and engrossing to their immensely celebrated first incursion into the category; interfusing references handpicked from all hemispheres of literature, cinema and folklore into a singular corpus that was veritably authentic and untried. Thus, an allowance must be made for an informed reassessment of its merit as a cultural artifact of inestimable worth in the context of the genre’s chronology, reaching far into multiple creative outlets; as well as the acknowledgement that its very existence is owed to a once inspired and visionary corporate management philosophy that has disintegrated piecemeal over the last two and half decades.
(This article was originally published in the limited edition of Lost In Cult’s Lock-On 006. )
