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  • In Defense of Exoticism:Femme Fatale and Filmed City in Isabel Coixet’s El mapa de los sonidos de Tokio
  • Yeon-Soo Kim (bio)

Isabel Coixet’s El mapa de los sonidos de Tokio (2009) is the type of film that invites a range of questions about Western Orientalism because it is produced by a female Catalan filmmaker and filmed entirely in Japan except for a few final sequences that take place in Barcelona. It is also enticingly Orientalist because it tells the story of a Japanese femme fatale who sacrifices herself to save her Catalan lover whom she is supposed to assassinate. Questions the film raises include how does a European woman envision Asia in the global era and can the uncomfortable marriage between hegemonic Orientalism and anti-hegemonic feminism defy existing Orientalist discourses? In other words, does a feminist reading of Japan innovate how Western knowledge of the East is produced and consumed? Or, does a woman’s vision of Japanese culture signal the end of an exotic reading of the East? With these questions in mind, I will examine the interplay between a feminist rendition of an Asian woman and an impersonal yet intimate construction of Tokyo in the film. Of particular interest is Coixet’s inversion of the conventions of the film noir’s femme fatale and a dystopian vision of the city because it is how she inscribes her reading of Japanese culture with a continued exotic allure in twenty-first century. As I will illustrate, Coixet’s use of references from film noir serves to invent a new prototype of Japanese women detached from stereotypical submissiveness and docility, but fails to produce [End Page 287] a critical insight on any imbalance of power that might exist either in Japanese society or between Japan and the West.

By analyzing the film’s use of film-noir motifs, I will argue that Coixet challenges the very operative Orientalist mechanism while simultaneously defending exoticism. If traditional colonial Orientalism, as theorized by Said, Lewis, and Yegenoglou, among others, stages women from non-Western cultures and foreign territories as objects of desire to be controlled and possessed, Coixet represents both a foreign woman and the city in such a way that they can never be easily grasped and owned. However, despite her revision of Orientalist rhetoric, she never renounces exoticism as an ontological category. In fact, she formulates a new type of exoticism that no longer has an ideological slant but is a necessary sentiment in our time for global, yet existentially isolated souls to feel free and consoled. The type of exotic impulse the film defends is the very appreciation of a foreign place or a culture where one potentially experiences magical encounters that allow for deeper human connections despite, or at times because of, the noticeable cultural, linguistic and racial differences that hinder smooth verbal communications. As much as her new type of exoticism is a promising idea, it does not lead to a serious reflection on why one wishes to be immersed in a culture other than one’s own, how that interaction heals both subjects in a relationship and what this persistent Western fascination with Japanese culture means today. I argue that one reason Coixet’s new exoticism ends up being no more than a proposal is because the film lacks a clear narrative agency from which to represent a foreign culture. To be more precise, in a film where a European female director portrays Japanese culture, the use of film-noir motifs has its limitations because both the femme fatale and the city’s back alleys end up being detached from the socio-economic reality to which they pertain. Due to these decontextualized filmic constructs, Coixet’s defense of exoticism becomes diluted and ends up asserting the idea that a romantic, foreign city like Tokyo is what makes such metaphysical experience possible.

El mapa de los sonidos de Tokio unfolds around the story of an interracial relationship between Ryu and David that ends tragically with the former’s self-sacrificial death. Ryu, played by Rinko Kikuchi, is a reticent, self-isolated employee at the Tsukiji fish market during the day and a contracted assassin...

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