We needed blood.

My brother began to hit himself on the bridge of his nose, a petite “ow” accompanying each blow. I turned away as he threw alternating fists at his face, our two neighbors waiting patiently until a thick, shiny bead of red bubbled out of his right nostril and drew a smooth line into his mouth. His lips spread into a wide, toothy smile, painting the row of white a shade more cinematic.

Our neighbor squealed with approval. We were ready to film.

*

The Japanese dystopian film Battle Royale (2000) opens with a press crew pushing through armed military personnel to catch a glimpse of the winner of an unexplained contest. One reporter screams over the rumble of the rescue helicopter and other frenzied journalists. Managing only a peek through the row of armed guards, she excitedly announces that a winner has been determined. The camera switches angles to reveal a middle school girl, clutching a raggedy doll to her bloodstained school uniform. “Look, she is smiling. That is clearly a smile!” declares the reporter.

In the forest behind his house in rural Virginia, our neighbor Harry shot many of the following at my brother: typical teen boy expletives, plastic bullets from an airsoft gun, and the word “jap.”

I didn’t know what the word meant, but it held the power to produce an alchemical change in the air. The recoil of reality in my body tugging upon the walls of fantasy we built in that forest, the secure bounds of a game. Harry’s dark brown curls shook with his laughter, his cheeks made rosy with each iteration. My brother always seemed unchanged by these shifts. Perhaps unthreatened by the collapse of fiction or unaware of it, his laughter never stopped weaving through the trees.

My brothers and I spent every weekday after school from elementary school through middle school at our neighbor’s house, waiting until our parents returned from work. The youngest and only “girl,” the forest games for me remained a spectator sport.

When they weren’t reenacting World War II, my brother played a range of other characters: orcs and samurai and ninjas. I imagined it was something about his spindly legs and pointy black eyebrows that made him the perfect candidate for evil. He played each role with subtle difference: jerky monstrous movements as an orc, long proud strides as a samurai, and quick feet and quicker throws of rubber shuriken as a ninja.

One day, we decided to film a zombie movie. Clark, Harry’s brother, was the director, and Harry assumed his usual role of gun-wielding protagonist. Clark, the oldest member of the production team, had a serene maturity about him. He preferred to remain a soft smile behind the clunky early-2000s handheld camcorder.

Limited by our amateur technology, my brother landed on the idea to hit himself until he bled, adding some realism to our film. We had to act quickly, filming in a single shot before the blood dried on his upper lip. I stood behind Clark to watch the scene unfold through the camera lens. My brother laughed, eyes crossed, arms outstretched, lips spread to reveal our one truly special effect.

*

The same neighbors introduced me to the cult classic Battle Royale (2000), based off a 1999 novel of the same name. In the film, faced with a major recession, rampant crime and teen delinquency, the Japanese government passes what is known as the BR Act, a bill that sends a random class of ninth grade students to a desert island each year where they have three days to battle to the death until only one is left standing. The students hop on a bus, thinking they are headed to their annual class trip, and wake up with collars around their necks surrounded by armed military. The collars, which monitor their vital signs, will detonate if the students do not follow the rules, end up in a danger zone or if more than one survives after three days. The film started a whole genre, “battle royale,” referring to any situation where a group of people must fight until only one remains.

The film, nearly banned by the Japanese Diet because of its depiction of teen violence, was barred from commercial distribution in the United States until 2010. Despite its contested release, it was the third highest grossing film in Japan in 2001 after Spirted Away and Pokémon 4ever.

Clark had a thing for underground films and managed to screen a torrented copy right there in rural Virginia, years before its commercial release in the US. The five of us, my two brothers, two neighbors and I gathered in our neighbor’s living room to watch those two hours of coveted violence. No older than ten, I watched with my hands on my face, my fingers serving as quick-release curtains.

At the time, it was the film’s gore that most impressed me, covering dozens of deaths by gun, poison, knife, and axe. Only later, after spending four months attending public school in Japan and revisiting the film as an adult, did I understand its larger critique. The savage measures students take to survive mimic the competitive Japanese schooling system, training youth for the cutthroat college entrance exams while doing little to prepare them for the real world. Out of context, the blood buries even the most readily available social commentary.

Like my brother’s, my nose bled often as a child. I experienced nose bleeds in class from elementary school through college. Nosebleeds during judo practice and in competition, a piece of toilet paper shoved up my nose and a firm pat sending me back onto the mat. I learned to see my bleeding as a minor disturbance, usually capable of tilting my head back and swallowing the evidence. I could not always manage to maintain this discretion, particularly, it seems, in critical auditions for good straight white cis-girl.

Seven years-old in a Catholic church, huddled in near the priest with other children for our first communion: I wore a new white dress my Japanese mother bought for the occasion. In front of the mostly white congregation, fumbling with the tulle excesses tickling behind my knees, that familiar warmth spread through my nose. I sniffed, pulling a metallic taste to the back of my throat. My hands scrambled to cover what couldn’t be contained. As the priest dismissed us in the name of the holy spirit, I returned to the pews, hands full of blood, doing my best to protect the cascades of white below. My mother welcomed me back into the pew, pushing a handful of tissues to my nose and holding my face in silence as the mass carried on.

Seventeen on a date at the movies, watching some forgettable Hollywood film: Again, the warmth, the sniff, the metallic drip. I whispered to my date that my nose was bleeding only to indicate I wanted to get up. Without a word, he hopped out of his seat and bolted out of the theater. I followed, walking briskly, hands over my nose and mouth. He was already running back towards me, a kite of toilet paper trailing behind him, when I broke out of the pitch black of the theater and saw that blood had started to trickle out of my palms and slip down my forearms. It didn’t take long to stop the bleeding enough that we could return to the film. Still, there was something about breaking that seal, being pulled out of the pitch black, that petri dish of imagination, that made it just a little more difficult to be fully reabsorbed in fiction.

*

After a classmate cuts and threatens to r*pe Takako Chigusa, track star and prettiest girl in the class in Battle Royale, Chigusa stabs him multiple times in the groin until he is left immobile on the forest floor. She flees the scene in her iconic bright yellow track suit as another classmate shoots at her. Shortly after this heroic defense of her life, Chigusa dies from gunshot wounds in the arms of her crush.

*

Casting and characterization are often one and the same. A magnum opus role can strip actors of their own diversity. In the case of minorities, that magnum opus is often only as expansive as their most nuanced typecasting.

*

The actress who played track star Takako Chigusa, Chiaki Kuriyama, caught Quentin Tarantino’s attention, and he cast her for his 2003 film Kill Bill: Volume 1. In her Hollywood debut, Kuriyami plays Gogo Yubari, schoolgirl bodyguard to the head of Yakuza, O-Ren Ishii. While the protagonist of Kill Bill provides backstory on Gogo, explaining “what she lacks in age, she makes up for in madness,” the schoolgirl is shown asking a businessman in a bar if he wants to “do it” with her, 「あたし と やりたいんだ ？」 When he says yes, she immediately disembowels him with her sword.

Gogo is eventually killed by the protagonist, The Bride, who stabs her with a nail-spiked plank while the chain of Gogo’s mace is wrapped around her neck. In the final shot of Gogo, she topples to the ground, blood dripping from her eyes.

Tarantino said of Battle Royale, “If there’s any movie that’s been made since I’ve been making movies that I wish I’d made, it’s that one.”

When you can’t rewrite history, you can pluck your favorite teen killer from one movie and place her in your own as an obstacle in the revenge journey of your yellow-jumpsuit-wearing white protagonist.

I felt a sort of affinity with Gogo Yubari when I saw Kill Bill as a tween. I rarely saw Asian women on screen who did anything but echo the stereotypes: submissive, delicate, unassuming, and innocent. At the time it didn’t matter that she only got to break free of these labels by assuming a new one, “crazy,” nor that her death would become a glorified plot point in someone else’s story.

I started practicing judo, a Japanese martial art, at five, and quickly gained a reputation in elementary school, frequently fielding requests to be thrown by boy classmates during recess. I threw a few of them in comic fun, controlling the landing of their willing bodies onto the grassy field behind our school. In doing so, I imagined I earned my right to hang out with them during recess, minted just-one-of-the-boys.

One day, the requests came with a threatening insistence. Two boys who had seen me throw our classmates egged me on, flashing something sinister in the smiles they exchanged with each other. They refused to believe I could do judo without fighting me themselves. They closed in on me as my no’s lost their resonance, trembling more delicately with each utterance. Some words gain power through repetition, others turn to air. I began to walk away, shuffling shaking legs across the soccer field towards the mulch where the girls played “Olympics,” throwing their gangly bodies in circles around metal bars. Back turned, I felt hands grab at my ankles and pull my feet out from underneath me. As they laughed, the taste of blood filled my mouth, my lips torn by my teeth in the jumbled landing. I stood up quickly, as judo had trained me to do, and, without turning around, continued walking.

In high school several years later, I recounted this tale to one of the boys, punctuating my delivery with friendly laughter. He told me he didn’t remember. His certainty challenged my own. There often stands more evidence against our memories and against a coherent image we hold of ourselves than the evidence presented against a protagonist. Reality will adjust itself, bending in favor of some narratives more than others. A white boy can be a playground bully in elementary school and graduate high school captain of the football team and top of his class. The role will be saved for him, unconditional.

*

When I first saw Kill Bill: Volume I, I thought O-ren Ishii was the protagonist. She was a beautiful, assertive woman of mixed heritage. My identification with her was enough to preordain her triumph over the white woman on the movie posters.

The Bride introduces O-ren Ishii while her origin story plays out in animation. The stylized depiction makes the high body count and fountains of spewing blood easier to stomach. O-ren Ishii is born on a U.S. military base in Japan and witnesses her parents’ murder at the hands of the head of the Yakuza as a child. Only nine years old, she begins training to seek revenge. After avenging her parents’ death, she continues her murdering spree and soon becomes the top female assassin in the world and the “Queen of Tokyo’s Underworld.” This visibility, the Bride explains, would be exactly what makes it so easy to find her. Once the world knows you as a fighter, they expect you to fight.

In the final battle of Kill Bill: Volume I, The Bride meets O-ren Ishii in a snowy garden. O-ren Ishii wears a white kimono, a color signifying spiritual purity. Traditionally reserved for brides and corpses, here, the white kimono serves either as a bit of foreshadowing or a nice aesthetic touch. Before the fight begins, O-ren Ishii removes her white zori, stepping with her tabi in the snow before bowing to The Bride and drawing her katana from its sheath.

At first, it appears the Bride has no chance. O-ren Ishii slices her in the back and laughs. “Silly Caucasian girl likes to play with samurai swords,” she says. The Bride rises with the help of her Japanese-made sword, rises from adversity as protagonists do, and manages to cut O-ren Ishii’s leg. As blood stains the white of her kimono, O-ren Ishii apologizes to the Bride for judging her before, suddenly humble and scared. Apology accepted, the Bride slices off the top of O-ren Ishii’s scalp, sending her black hair flying through the air. Brain exposed, she falls to the ground in defeat.

While the battle itself is theatrical, accentuated by flying scalps and spewing blood, once dead, her body lays still, her white kimono hardly a change of texture in the night snow.

*

Femininity was boxed up and waiting for me since before my birth. The costumes chosen before the casting call was published.

The first time I remember wearing a kimono I was six. My mother brought me to Hotel Okura to have our pictures taken together for my Shichigosan 〈七五三〉, a Japanese rite of passage where young children wear kimono in celebration of their growth and well-being. The kimono I wore on that day was a family heirloom, a light shade of pink and orange accented with golden flowers, hand embroidered by my great-grandmother for my mother’s Shichigosan. My obi (belt) a bright green with gold embroidery, the zori (sandals) and headpiece were also part of the family set.

In a back room in the hotel, a woman gelled my hair into a bulbous shape atop my head and powdered my face a ghostly shade of white. I sat across from a large mirror framed in vanity lights and watched as my head morphed into what I could only recognize as resembling the dolls we put out every year for Hinamatsuri, Girl’s Day. It was the first time anyone had ever done my make-up and my nails. My mom usually cut my hair sitting on a step stool in her bathroom. I felt like royalty. There was an ease with which the women around me orchestrated this process, the regality of being shooed into a role.

The director of Battle Royale, Kinji Fukasaku, was a teenager during World War II. He worked at a weapons factory, a frequent target of bombings. Much like in his cult classic film, he remembers a kind of self-centeredness that seized him and his peers when the bombs fell. The teenagers would clamor to use each other as shields against the explosions; the survivors were tasked to clean up the bodies they had used to protect themselves. Fukasaku was inspired to turn the 1999 novel into a film because it reminded him of his own teenage experience.

For a college class on World War II, I interviewed my great uncle whose father was working at the Japanese embassy in Washington D.C. at the time of Pearl Harbor. My great uncle published a book that speaks broadly of the political context around Pearl Harbor and shares his unique personal experience having been interned at a countryside resort before being deported to back to Tokyo in the midst of the Tokyo fire bombings, a multiple year attack by the U.S. Army Air Forces.

Both of my grandparents fled Tokyo with their families to escape the epicenter, though my grandfather, whose family sought refuge in a small seaside town, later recalled hiding out in caves and hillside bunkers when they received warnings of bombings. These bombings culminated in Operation Meetinghouse in March of 1945, a multiple day attack on Tokyo resulting in around 100,000 civilian deaths and leaving one million homeless, making it the most destructive bombing raid in human history. Six months later, the atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, ending the war.

*

We forget all the nuance that is left out in the construction of a story, how much is edited for the sake of the audience. Or maybe this disavowal of nuance is part of the contract between audience and storyteller, an extension of our willing suspension of disbelief.

Consumption of a story is itself a sacrament of faith.

*

“My book is meant for the public, so I had to make some cosmetics... I wanted a wide audience,” my great uncle explained before recalling the stories left out of his book.

He returned to Tokyo in a time of desperation. Like Director Fukasaku who had to clear the bodies of his peers in the weapons factory, the students of my great uncle’s ninth grade class cleared out ash debris and bodies to plant pumpkins and other vegetables in the burnt ground to combat the widespread famine. One day while cleaning the streets, my great uncle pulled on something that exploded in his hand, leaving him with damage to his hand and arm and unable to continue working in the burnt site. He would later attend the funeral of a fellow student who had made the same mistake, his arm wrapped in a cast by his side while he paid his respects.

*

My first Confession in a Catholic church, I waited in a long line of eight and nine-year-olds to enter that dark booth on the other side of a voice that would bring me closer to God. I had the duration of a few dozen children’s guilty tales to decide which of my own I would offer up for judgement. I decided to start small. I told the priest how I fought with my brother, that a playful tussle ended in the emergency room. I jumped on him from our parents’ bed like we’d seen pro wrestlers do on TV. His retainer caught on the corner of his lip, tearing a deeper smile into his face. We were scheduled to fly to Japan the next morning.

It was easier to speak of this violence, modeled to me as a necessary rite to boyhood, than to admit to sins I had not seen committed with the same open irreverence. It was still cute to be a tomboy, my closet stuffed with hand-me-downs from my brothers, as long as I wore a dress to each holy sacrament. As long as my desire to be a boy was out of admiration and respectful distance. As long as I wasn’t gay.

The priest told me to say thirty Hail Mary’s and my sins would be forgiven.

About halfway through the interview, my great uncle began to speak of another topic untouched in his book, the U.S. occupation of Japan. One day while clearing ash and planting vegetables, he and a classmate saw American soldiers eating candy, something they hadn’t had for years. His classmate, salivating at the sight of chocolate, asked my great uncle if he thought they would spare him some. He told his classmate to approach the soldier and say, “God bless America,” putting the English he remembered to good use. His classmate did as he suggested and, sure enough, received a piece of chocolate in return.

*

After school we learned of abundance and gore served in equal parts. At our neighbor’s house, I filled innumerable bowls with sugar-bombed cereals, eaten immediately upon arrival while sifting through the hundred plus TV channels unavailable at my own home. My cereal options too were endless, all leaving my afterschool milk gritty, gray, and sweet. The milk transformed these treats in even more impressive ways, robbing Cocoa Krispies of their once perky and crackling form.

I relished in this rare moment of alone time after I got out of elementary school and before the boys returned from middle school. For a brief moment, I didn’t have to pretend to like the bloody movies. I could sift freely through cartoons and teen sitcoms, meander through frustrations of friendship and love.

My mom only ever bought sweet cereal in an assortment of small boxes. We ate one at a time, fighting for the Cocoa Puffs and Lucky Charms. Raisin Bran the uncontested last man standing. She bought the fun pack only for our yearly trips to Japan, our teeth too accustomed to an American level of sweet. God bless America.