'Corpse Factory' and Philosophical Pessimism
"We're all going to be just dirt in the ground" (Tom Waits)
“Once the facts that repressional mechanisms hide are accessed, they must be excised from our memory—or new repressional mechanisms must replace the old—so that we may continue to be protected by our cocoon of lies. If this is not done, we will be whimpering misereres morning, noon, and night instead of chanting that day by day, in every way, we are getting better and better. Although we may sometimes admit to the guileful means we use to keep us doing what we do, this is only a higher level of self-deception and paradox, not evidence that we stand on the heights of some meta-reality where we are really real. We say we know what is in store for us in this life, and we do. But we do not know. We cannot if we are to survive and multiply.”
(Thomas Ligotti, The Conspiracy against the Human Race, p.69)
A few months back I read the Australian visual novel Corpse Factory and, despite issues with a late-game plot twist, consider myself something of a fan. Listening to an audio recording of Thomas Ligotti’s classic 2010 anti-natalist tract The Conspiracy Against the Human Race (which I have previously read legitimately and would encourage you, good reader, to do so too) and felt that some of the arguments within usefully illuminate the novel’s themes.
The story of Corpse Factory is similar to that of Death Note (Tsugumi Ohba and Takeshi Obata, 2003–2006) with the Light Yagami role here occupied by Noriko Kurosawa. An essential difference, however, is that while Light condemns people to death through the aid of a supernatural book, Noriko’s method is to produce mock-up photos of the corpses of her victims (who are nominated through her ‘Corpse Girl’ website) accompanied by a time of death. This – seemingly at least – induces such a level of existential terror in her victims that they either commit suicide or work themselves into such a frenzy that they inadvertently kill themselves.
Ligotti (p.11) argues that “[c]onsciousness has forced us into the paradoxical position of striving to be unselfconscious of what we are—hunks of spoiling flesh on disintegrating bones”. Noriko’s photos force her victims into occupying this consciousness (an awareness of the concrete inevitability of their death) which previously they have only understood in the abstract. As Ligotti says, in order to survive we must repress the knowledge of our mortality. Unable to do so in the face of a photograph of what appears to be their own decaying corpse, each victim then completes the self-fulfilling prophecy merely earlier than they would otherwise have done.
This is a fairly straightforward recapitulation of Death Note combined with Edgar Allan Poe’s concept of the ‘Imp of the Perverse’ (1850) or Robert Louis Stevenson’s ‘The Suicide Club’ (1878). What elevates Corpse Factory, however, is the presentation of Noriko and the two individuals, Kojiro and Tomoe Watanabe, who assist her in her "work". Kojiro is a morgue attendant and so already has ample experience with corpses; Tomoe is characterised as something of a valley girl or ganguro stereotype at first, though is slowly revealed as the most sympathetic character.
When I did my secondary school work experience at a funeral parlor, it stuck me how much the funeral director, undertaker, morgue assistant and crematorium workers etc. all used dark humour in order to stay mentally healthy in a job in which they were constantly reminded of their own mortality. Jokes were made about the time when a cardboard coffin had gotten soggy in the rain and the corpse had fallen through the bottom. Pranks, such as getting me to climb into a coffin and then putting the lid on it and carrying me inside, were played.
To elucidate such strategies and techniques of repression, Ligotti references (p.31–32) the nihilist philosopher [he defined himself as such, rather than as a pessimist] Peter Wessel Zapffe.
To avoid sitting with the incontrovertible fact of our biological finitude and the concomitant uselessness of life, Zapffe posited that humans employ four principle strategies:
1.) Isolation (aka compartmentalising)
2.) Anchoring (i.e. making recourse to ideologies like religion or justice)
3.) Distraction (focusing on projects and entertainment)
4.) Sublimation (making an open display of our fears in the way that morbid artists or horror films do)
The tragedy of Noriko Kurosawa (and, to an extent, her associates) is her desperate reliance upon the above strategies which believing herself to be above the use of such strategies. To explain:
1.) Isolation:
Noriko continues for a long time in her office job, splitting her life into her role as introverted goth office drone ''Noriko'' and her role as the messianic ''Corpse Girl''.
2.) Anchoring:
Like Light Yagami, Noriko tries to convince herself that there is some kind of justice operating behind the selection of her victims. Like Light, she increasingly positions herself as some kind of God, ultimately anchoring herself to the same religious-moral framework that she believes she has transcended.
3.) Distraction:
Throwing herself into the work of doctoring the photos (and later dressing up corpses with makeup so as to resemble the victims) is as much of a distraction for Noriko as writing is for me or, say, videogaming is for my brother.
4.) Sublimation:
This is the major strategy which Noriko and Kojiro (somewhat witlessly!) fall victim to. They believe they are staring death in the face, but actually through their activities they are seeking to ossify the process of death in the totem-like frozen object of the corpse [notably kept refridgerated to prevent decay].
Indeed, with her use of snarky humour and goth aesthetics, Noriko is engaged in a process of repression more thorough than that of the mother in the visual novel Pumpkin Eater (2021) which is a story about a mother who hides her dead son’s shattered head in a pumpkin in order to pretend he’s still alive. However, that visual novel is so dedicated to a week-by-week description of the process of bodily decay that it ironically makes the mother appear more death-positive than repressed!
As hinted, over half-way through Corpse Factory, a different character takes centre stage. This character effectively believes themselves to be dead already and, as such, is able to largely avoid the strategies above that the more convincingly human Noriko makes recourse to. Personally I felt this was a misstep in the novel’s writing; however, to enjoy Corpse Factory you largely need to suspend your disbelief and treat it as a philosophical (though pulpy!) meditation on mortality. While River Crow Studio’s writing may not yet be at the level of Ligotti’s, I am certainly interested in where they are going next.
Ultimately, Corpse Factory’s vision of the world seems to rhyme with that of Ligotti as expressed in one of his best stories, ‘The Red Tower’:
From a gray and desolate and utterly featureless landscape a dull edifice had been produced, a pale, possibly translucent tower which, over time, began to develop into a factory and to issue, as if in the spirit of the most grotesque belligerence, a line of quite morbid, quite wonderfully disgusting novelty goods. In an expression of defiance, at some point, it reddened with an enigmatic passion for betrayal and perversity [emphasis own].