Recently saw a threesome of Japanese Suicide Films: Suicide Club (also Suicide Circle), Welcome to the Quiet Room, and Nightmare Detective.

Suicide Club nails the tween copycat nightmare (imagine a suicide fad instead of pokemon or whatever) while throwing in a couple very good WTF moments. The price it pays for such over-the-top sensationalism is a distancing from the audience, where suicide becomes something that other people do. The Nightmare Detective investigates a series of grisly suicides where people killed themselves while they were sleeping (you taking notes, Freddy? you should be ;). Despite the cute lead detective, the cinematography will make you want to kill your TV and fast forward. However, the worst part of both of these films lies in their rationalization of suicide as externally caused by bad people, thereby assuaging society's more timorous twits.

Welcome to the Quiet Room tells the story of a girl who wakes up in the isolation room of a psych hospital, wondering how she got there. For the rest of the film, she's putting the pieces of her memories together in the midst of the general chaos of the crazed, disaffected, and suicidal. Like NorwegianWood, suicide is this thing that occurs and people have to deal with it as best they can. Although in NorwegianWood, suicide seems unnatural, a curiosity; the Quiet Room reclaims suicide as one of those turns you can take in life, or not.

Korea has just surpassed Japan, so we'll see what they have to say on the subject.