Earlier this week, I noted how I was enjoying reading "Across the Nightingale Floor", a story set in medieval Japan. I also said it would make a good movie.
I have now finished the novel, and I can see the difficulties of making this into a movie. (In fact, in the last 1/3, the whole story becomes very Japanese, in that most major characters want to kill themselves!) I don't want to give the plot away entirely but:
SPOILER WARNING ! SPOILER WARNING !
a pretty crucial plot point happens when a major sympathetic character gets beheaded in a way which was, apparently, not unknown in medieval Japan, but it was quite shocking for me with my Western sensitivities. It's not the technical means of the beheading as such, it's the circumstances.
I have always felt particularly repelled by the idea of watching a beheading, even a fictional one in the movies. The novel was written before the recent spate of Islamic beheadings in Iraq, and this renewed appearance of the activity in the real world is unfortunate timing for someone having the film rights to a book in which this act plays a central role.
This made me wonder whether someone has written about beheadings as a cultural issue, and indeed Wikipedia has a gruesomely interesting entry for "decapitation". (In fact, it is this entry which makes me think that what happens in the novel sounds culturally and historically plausible.)
Maybe it is modern Western urban sensibilities that find it so appalling as an act: I imagine that people who live in countries where the open slaughter of animals by throat cutting is commonplace find the idea of killing people the same way not so extraordinary. (My witnessing the killing of some chickens as a young child hasn't desensitised me, though. I don't clearly remember the chopping, but do remember my mother cleaning out the entrails. The not completely formed eggs were interesting.)
Still, I don't like thinking about the act, and wish all heads to be kept firmly in place in novels and movies.
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