The cuter the victim, the snugglier the bunny, the more depraved the attendant perversion. In contrast, kimo-kawaii and “sex pot revenge” are offshoots of their roots. Senseless violence is visited upon the unsuspecting, for reasons we cannot understand. They are much more interestingly bound up with the phenomena they brutalize than proverbially “senseless” violence, which is senseless because it is random and unrelated to its object. All of these counter-aesthetics bear a clear relation to their origins.
It seems inevitable that such a surfeit of saccharin would eventually make Japan sick-and indeed, Lolita Fashion yielded “sex pot revenge,” a dark, punk-inspired reimagining of the original frilly look the kawaii aesthetic yielded kimo-kawaii, roughly translated as “gross-cute,” which features characters like the cuddly yet homicidal stuffed animal Creepy Bear, who mauls his well-meaning caretaker and moë yielded Puella Magi Madoka Magica, a manga in which slender, wide-eyed heroines are savagely massacred (some are transformed into the very villains they initially set out to combat, which isn’t much better).
Small, stylized girls with disproportionately large busts and eyes gaze vulnerably at the reader on almost every page. Proponents of “Lolita fashion” delight in tea parties, parasols, and lace, while moë, or “budding,” a term that refers especially to the fresh, nubile quality of pre-adolescent girls, crops up again and again in manga and anime. Since the 1980s, kawaii, a cult of cuteness, has overtaken the nation, interring waify girls in layer-cakes of frills. Why has this particular brand of violence, half cupcake and half decapitation, so thoroughly captured the Japanese imagination? In part it is because there are so many delectable Japanese cupcakes to corrupt. A load of laundry, a batch of cupcakes-followed by a child murder, a matricide, and an attempted school bombing, all with a cherry on top. Readers of Battle Royale occupy a parallel position, simultaneously savoring and shuddering at the work’s brutality. And in Battle Royale, Koushun Takami’s wildly popular 1996 prototype of The Hunger Games, school children are forced to participate in a morbid game in which they kill each other off while fascinated spectators watch the proceedings on television. It recalls “Toddler Hunting,” Taeko Kono’s celebrated 1962 story, in which the female protagonist showers affection on little boys-and fantasizes in private about beating them until their innards spill out. Confessions ’ origins are also more straightforwardly literary.
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