Even with the J-horror boom faded, Takashi Shimizu has continued to make J-horror. He has proven, time and time again, that one can still offer interesting narratives within the well-etched contours left by the classics of the past. His love for the genre even led him to agree to collaborate with GENERATIONS for their tenth anniversary and let Sana loose on the world.Thanks to its success, Shimizu was given the chance to further unfold Sana’s narrative in a sequel.

Before delving into Sana: Let Me Hear, it is important to remind the spectator of the logic that Shimizu introduced in Sana, the relational dynamic that animated the film’s denouement. Rather than being introduced as a traumatized subject, Sana is revealed as a traumatizer, as a subject whose frustration of lacking love pushes her to a morbid and violent exploration of death, into the world of jouissance. 

What temporarily pacifies Sana, as onyro, is nothing other than an act that offers her a sign of love – Rin’s embrace and Sana’s smile. What she demands, beyond inviting others into her world, is that the Other provides her a sign of love. Yet, as Shimizu highlights with his ending, one sign of love does not suffice; a mere embrace cannot pacify the onryo (General-note 1).

Sana: Let Me Hear starts off in 1992. Sana (Tomoko Hoshi) finds herself surrounded by three of her classmates on the school’s rooftop – they demand an explanation for the lie she told their teacher A strong wind blows. Shigemi Itoi (-) tries to steady herself but trips over the edge of the roof – she holds on. Sana as well as the two others comes to the rescue, yet just when she is about to be pulled up Sana whispers “Let Me hear it. The last sound …,” and forces Shigemi to splatter to her death, near Yoshie Kawamatsu (-) (Narra-note 1).

Many years later, in 2024, tragedy befalls Yuma (Shota Sometani). While crossing the street to meet his girlfriend Honoka Kimijima (Nagisa Shibuya), a car hits him, catapulting him against a vending machine (Narra-note 2). Suddenly, he is pulled underneath the vending machine, but Honoka, with the help of Hitomi Miura (Ikoi Hayase) and some other bystanders, succeeds in rescuing him. Honoka, perceiving a strange presence, hears a hummed melody. Not much later, Honoka starts working at a nearby high school for the summer – she is in charge of the supplementary class. Much to her surprise, she meets Hiromi again – and also encounters a girl who alternates absence with presence. 

In the opening moments of Sana: Let Me Hear, Shimizu takes the opportunity to establish, in various indirect ways, that the dimension of love is central to the internal dynamic of the narrative – Shimizu reaffirms our reading of Sana’s perverted logic, but also signals that the element of love will be the key signifier to grasp the way the narrative unfolds and concludes.     

Sana’s logic is reaffirmed early in the narrative with the events that lead up to the suicide – the repetition of the splattering body. Hitomi’s kindness towards Sana is contrasted with the vile way Mari (Maya Imamori) dismisses her as a creep. Hiromi, via her kind openness, shows Sana that there is a possibility for her to be accepted for her humming Otherness, while Mari brutally confronts her with the impossibility for Sana to approach the ideal-image valued within the societal field; she verbally attacks her for failing to reflect what can and would arouse love within the other.

While the spectator, in contrast to characters, knows that the two roof-incidents are instigated by Sana, Takashi Shimizu utilizes this connected double drama to introduce the spectator to the entry point of the mystery the characters will be faced with. By revealing, in a rather dramatic way, that the past is linked to the present – the mothers of Hitomi and Takeru Maekawa (Soma Santoki) were friends of Shigemi and tried to rescue her. The spectator also surmises, before any of the characters, that the solution of Sana’s disruptive presence lies in the frustrations in the past. However, by the same virtue, the truth of the past is enacted in the horror of the present.

The house forms, just like in Sana, a space where past and present coexist, reaffirming that the source of Sana’s attack on the Other – or (m)Other – lies in the relational dynamic of the family. The revelation of what happened to Sana after Shigemi’s death is not a causating factor, but a consequence of the way her parental relationship shaped her, of a subtle parental dismissal of Sana as subject – a dismissal that led Sana’s parents to unknowingly become the assistants of her suicide and, by heeding her demand, provide her with the radical sign that love is absent.    

All these ominous revelations point to one central riddle – the riddle that forms the kernel of the narrative’s structure: how to pacify Sana? Or to put it differently, what kind of act can produce a sign of love that breaks the emanating effect of her fixation with death, the otherworldly resonance of her uncontained transgressive enjoyment, and silences her demand for everyone’s sound so she can create a song filled with her subjectivity? And, even more importantly, who can perform such act and to whom?

Once again, Shimizu utilize a shift, a sudden increase of pace by which disturbing twists and threatening and intrusive imagery concatenate, to rise the stakes concerning the riddle of pacifying this otherworldly enjoying instance. While the lead up to the finale might feel a but too unhurried for some, the ensuing ride to bring the narrative to its conclusion plays the spectator’s emotions effectively – dramatic, thrilling, chilling, shockingly good. Shimizu reaffirms, with his finale, that his duology must be read as a critique of the overemphasis on the imaginary in familial bonds, the overemphasis on demands and the refusal and even dismissal of the true aim of the demand – love – and what lingers behind it – the subject and his desire. 

      

Takashi Shimizu’s composition holds not surprises for anyone who is familiar with his work or with J-horror in general. He richly relies on restraint spatial dynamic movement – e.g. crawling movement through the narrative space, zooming in on facial expressions, …) and fluidly interweaves moments of shaky framing, either to strengthen the impact of suspenseful and horrifying moments or emotional resonance of the splurges of relational drama.

Shimizu also proves himself, just like other masters of the genre, to be skilful in appealing to the spectator’s imagination. He often relies on disconcerting sounds (e.g. sound of a splattering body, screams) and vague indirect imagery (e.g. a defuse threatening foreground framing a facial expression in distress) to arouse disturbing imagery in the spectator’s mind (Shigemi’s splattered body, the truth of the moving threat). However, Shimizu thoughtfully alternates this evocative approach with a more direct approach, littering his composition with more explicit imagery to shock the spectator more profoundly (Yuma’s car accident, flash-back to Shigemi’s fall to the ground).

Shimizu approach to sound and music is roughly the same as in Sana. He interweaves fleeting moments of ominous music within his visual fabric to emphasize certain visual disturbances, imagery that ripples the frail mundane, and verbal enunciations, to ominously signal the presence of an Otherworldly threat, the thirst of the onryo’s demand. Just like in Sana, Shimizu also plays with the disturbing effect verbal repetition can have – echoing, quite elegantly, a cassette that is stuck on repeat. Of course, as Shimizu established Sana’s humming melody in the previous film, he can, from the very beginning of the sequel, exploit her humming to signal her lurking presence to the spectator and the unaware characters. 

Once again, the narrative spaces are brought to life withsubdued colour-schemes and a subtle emphasis on unerasable darkness. Despite Sana: Let Me Hear featuring a lot ofday-time sequences, shadows succeed retain a prominent invasive presence within certain areas within the visual frame.

With Sana: Let Me Hear, Shimizu does not only deliver a sequel that improves on his inaugural narrative, but also succeeds in giving his duology a thematically precise yet shocking finale. Shimizu pleases with well-composed moments of horror as well with his thematically driven dramatic denouement that exposes the danger of erasing the subjectivity of the child under parental demand – Let me hear [your love].     

Notes

General-note 1: In both narratives, Shimizu leaves one riddle untouched: what happens when someone is pulled into Sana’s world? Lacking such explanation, one can only view this sucking into, which works well to rise the stakes, as an attempt to confront the Other with failing to respond to her demand for love.  

Narra-note 1: The opening sequence illustrates the conflict that defines Sana well. While the attempt to rescue Shigemi can be read as an attempt at obtaining a sign of love, the confrontation with a body, full of swirling jouissance, clinging to life awakens her fixation on death and compels her to joyously douse Eros to counteract the absence of love – the impossibility of getting a sign that eternally proves the love of the Other.   

Narra-note 2: Let us note that the dimension of love is also evocatively present in the tragedy that befalls Yuuma. Not only was he about to meet the girl he loves, but one of the children at the orphanage where he grew up and works introduces the phantasy of eternal love: If you become a butterfly, you can stay with the one you love forever.