Spoiler warning: This article discusses the film’s central revelations and ending.
The telephone rings, and Asami Yamazaki waits before answering. On the floor of her almost empty apartment, a large sack lurches. Shigeharu Aoyama, the man calling her, cannot see any of this. He knows Asami as the beautiful, reserved young woman he picked at an audition. We now know something he does not, although the film will not say for some time what is moving inside the sack.
It is one of the most unnerving images in Takashi Miike’s Audition (Ōdishon, 1999), and it holds the whole film in miniature: a man who believes he has chosen a woman, and a woman living in a room he will never be shown.
The film was adapted from a 1997 novel by Japanese writer and filmmaker Ryu Murakami, who died at his home on October 17, 2026, aged 74. His death was announced by his publisher, Gentosha, on October 23.
Murakami tested the limits of Japanese literary respectability from the moment Almost Transparent Blue, his 1976 debut, won the Akutagawa Prize. His fiction confronted readers with people living amid exploitation, isolation, and violence, often in the supposedly ordinary spaces of contemporary life. In In the Miso Soup (1997), a young guide takes an American customer through Tokyo’s sex industry and finds himself accompanying a man whose appetite for violence becomes increasingly apparent. The encounter begins as a commercial arrangement, with one man paying another to satisfy his desires.
Audition approaches similar territory through the conventions of a romantic drama. Its central deception is almost comically simple. A lonely widower wants to meet a woman. His friend suggests that they hold an audition for a film they have no intention of making.
A casting call for a wife
Seven years after his wife’s death, Aoyama (Ryo Ishibashi) has settled into a life with his teenage son, Shigehiko. He works as a video producer, maintains a comfortable home, and appears to be a considerate father. His son thinks he should remarry. His friend, film producer Yasuhisa Yoshikawa (Jun Kunimura), believes he knows an efficient way to arrange it.
The women who answer their casting call believe they are competing for an acting role. They submit photographs, professional information, and personal histories. The two men sit behind a table, conduct interviews, and assess the applicants. Only Aoyama and Yoshikawa know that the part being offered is imaginary. Aoyama is looking for a wife.
Miike presents the scheme with remarkably little fuss. There is paperwork to sort, a room to arrange, and a succession of women to interview. The procedure looks professional enough. Its dishonesty is contained in the one detail the applicants have been denied.
Aoyama can learn a great deal about the women before they meet him. He can compare their appearances, study their backgrounds, and decide which qualities he finds attractive. The candidates, meanwhile, have come prepared to impress a casting panel. None has agreed to be evaluated as a possible wife.
What makes the sequence harder to dismiss is Aoyama himself. He seems genuinely lonely, and Ishibashi plays him with enough warmth to make his predicament sympathetic. His interest in finding a companion is understandable. His willingness to use a fraudulent audition to do so is considerably harder to defend.
The woman who catches his attention is Asami (Eihi Shiina), a former ballet student whose dancing career ended after an injury. She is graceful, reserved, and seemingly vulnerable. Aoyama has described his ideal woman in terms of beauty, refinement, and obedience. Asami appears to possess everything he wants.
Shiina gives the character an extraordinary stillness. She speaks quietly, listens attentively, and seems almost apologetic about occupying the interviewers’ time. Her restraint encourages Aoyama to believe that he has discovered someone unusually sensitive. He begins imagining a future with her before he knows much about her present.
Miike gives these scenes the unhurried rhythm of a domestic drama. Cinematographer Hideo Yamamoto’s restrained framing keeps the ordinary environments recognizable: offices, restaurants, and apartments. Conversations are allowed to develop without the visual punctuation that usually announces an approaching threat.
For much of the opening hour, the film seems interested in whether two people can find happiness after painful experiences. We have been given a view remarkably close to Aoyama’s. We watch Asami, notice her beauty, and wonder what sort of woman she might be.
The audition has worked on us, too.
The room he cannot see
The telephone scene changes the terms of that relationship.
Asami sits alone in a bare apartment. Her posture is rigid, her head lowered, her long hair hanging around her face. The telephone and the sack occupy a room almost entirely devoid of furniture. She waits for Aoyama to call.
Miike allows the shot to continue beyond the point at which most directors would have cut away. The duration forces attention onto the few objects in the frame. When the sack moves, the effect is immediate and sickening. Asami barely reacts.
Aoyama’s attraction depends on what Asami has chosen to tell him. The moving sack exposes the limits of that knowledge without yet revealing what he has missed.
The uncertainty has already begun to trouble Yoshikawa. As Aoyama pursues Asami, details of her application become difficult to verify. The references she supplied cannot be reached, and the account she gave during the audition grows less convincing. Yoshikawa advises caution. Aoyama, increasingly infatuated, dismisses his concerns.
We have seen the same warning signs, yet Miike has spent enough time constructing the possibility of romance to make the relationship strangely compelling. We want Aoyama to be happy, even as his behavior becomes harder to excuse.
Then the film begins to dismantle the reliability of his experience.
Memories and nightmares interrupt the present. Encounters recur in altered forms. Images from Asami’s childhood appear amid scenes of Aoyama’s increasingly desperate search for her. The continuity that supported the first half of the film starts to fracture, and the distinction between recollection, fantasy, and immediate experience becomes unstable.
In one of these fractured sequences, the sack finally opens, and a man missing both feet, his tongue, an ear, and three fingers crawls out. Asami vomits into a dog bowl and sets it before him. He eats.
Other images return to Asami’s childhood abuse. Her ballet training, which Aoyama found so attractive, becomes bound up with the pain she endured. The film shows her forced to dance for an adult who burns her thighs with heated implements.
The connection is particularly cruel. In these memories, the refinement and discipline Aoyama admired are inseparable from coercion and injury. The graceful woman who presented herself at the audition bears scars that her application could never have disclosed.
Miike returns us to the body Aoyama once appraised, now marked by experiences he failed to imagine.
The novel behind the nightmare
Murakami’s original novel already contains the essential deception. The men invent a film production, invite women to audition, and use the process to find Aoyama a romantic partner. Miike and screenwriter Daisuke Tengan preserve this arrangement while changing important aspects of how Aoyama is presented.
The novel reached English-language readers in Ralph McCarthy’s translation in 2009, a decade after the film’s release. For many international audiences, Miike’s adaptation was therefore their introduction to Murakami’s story.
In a 2009 review for The Japan Times, Steve Finbow identified several telling differences. Murakami’s Aoyama is a documentary maker with a pronounced love of jazz and classical music. His interest in women with musical or ballet training belongs to those personal preferences. The novel also depicts him as comparatively nervous and hesitant, whereas the film gives greater prominence to the questionable nature of his pursuit.
That distinction matters because Miike strips away some of the interests that make Aoyama’s romantic ideal seem individually cultivated. On screen, the selection process appears more directly concerned with the kind of woman a successful middle-aged man believes he deserves.
The film gives that process a visible form. Murakami can describe Aoyama’s reasoning, but Miike places him behind an interview table and lets us watch him appraise the women who appear before him. His private desire becomes a public performance.
Murakami supplies the contradiction everything grows from: Aoyama enters a relationship through a process that lets him hide his intentions while demanding disclosure from someone else. Miike forces us to feel its physical consequences.
When the romance breaks
The final ordeal begins with Aoyama drugged and helpless on the floor of his living room. Asami, previously so quiet and accommodating, now controls his movements entirely.
She takes acupuncture needles and pushes them into his stomach and beneath his eyes. As she works, she chants “kiri kiri kiri,” a line Miike and Shiina improvised during filming.
Her soft, singsong repetition makes the scene harder to endure because it is so utterly at odds with the pain she is inflicting.
Then comes the wire saw.
Miike shows Asami cutting through Aoyama’s leg while he remains unable to stop her. The injury is grotesque, but the scene derives much of its force from Shiina’s performance. Asami appears absorbed in her work, smiling with an expression that might have belonged to an affectionate conversation in another film.
The sound of the sawing makes the action horribly tangible. Aoyama’s body, previously secure behind his professional status and polite manners, has become an object over which another person exercises absolute control.
There is an unmistakable formal connection to the audition. The man who once sat behind a table examining prospective partners is now exposed to an examination he cannot refuse. The power to determine what happens to another person’s body has changed hands.
Yet the reversal is morally unstable. The cruelty of Aoyama’s deception and the physical torture he suffers exist on radically different scales. Reducing the film to a story of deserved revenge would make its most disturbing passages far too comfortable.
Asami is also more than the expression of Aoyama’s guilt.
In a 2024 interview with the BFI, Shiina described Asami as a sad, love-starved woman who grew up never able to conceal how alone she was. It is a revealing interpretation of a performance that holds vulnerability and cruelty in such uncomfortable proximity.
Miike offered an even stranger account of the film. He described Audition as a “love letter,” recalling that he conceived the torture as an experience of pain shared between the two lovers.
His understanding of the relationship is disturbing in its own right. The smiles, the soft voice, and the precise acts of injury turn affection into something nearly impossible to distinguish from possession. Whatever intimacy the characters have sought, the final encounter leaves one of them powerless before the other’s desires.
There is another difficulty with treating Asami as a triumphant avenger. She does not control the film’s ending.
Aoyama’s son, Shigehiko, arrives and intervenes to save his father. The family relationship established at the beginning survives, while Asami’s apparent command of events is abruptly broken.
Film scholar Tsubura Imai offers a provocative reading of this ending in a 2026 article in Eizogaku. Imai argues that the film’s horror can also be understood through the obligations between men. Aoyama repeatedly ignores Yoshikawa’s warnings, placing his private romantic desire above the trust of his friend, and his son ultimately restores the male bond by rescuing him.
The interpretation challenges the familiar account of Audition as feminist revenge. It also raises an uncomfortable possibility: the man who misused a system of male authority survives through the intervention of another man, while the woman subjected to that original deception becomes the monstrous threat from which he must be saved.
Miike offers enough contradictory evidence to keep both readings in play. Aoyama’s conduct remains indefensible, and Asami’s violence remains horrifying. The film’s ending resists the satisfaction of a clean moral verdict.
The horror of waiting
When Audition premiered at the Vancouver International Film Festival in 1999 and screened at Rotterdam the following year, its violence shocked audiences. Reports of walkouts contributed to a reputation that would follow the film for decades.
Miike later recalled an elderly woman confronting him during a festival screening and accusing him of being sick. Her expression, he admitted, frightened him more than his own film, and he was still talking about it 25 years later.
The film’s place in the history of Japanese horror is unusual. Hideo Nakata’s Ring (1998) had demonstrated the international appeal of supernatural terror, and some of the companies behind Audition had been involved in that earlier success. As critic Tom Mes explains in BFI Southbank’s program notes, the project was conceived in relation to that commercial opportunity while taking a markedly different direction.
There is no vengeful ghost waiting to emerge from a television screen. Miike spends the opening portion of his film observing the routines of a widower, the awkwardness of dating, and the seemingly harmless misconduct of two men who believe they have found a clever way to choose a wife.
The pace is crucial. In his 2024 BFI interview, Miike explained that he wanted viewers to spend much of the film wondering why the horror they expected had failed to arrive. The early scenes allow expectations to develop, while the apparently ordinary drama occupies more of the running time than its eventual violence.
On a second viewing, the long telephone shot becomes almost unbearable once we have seen the man crawl out of the sack. Yoshikawa’s warnings sound increasingly urgent, and Aoyama’s easy assurances sound reckless.
It is tempting to remember Audition through its most extreme images. The needles and wire saw have made it famous, and their capacity to shock has scarcely diminished. But the horror of those scenes depends on everything Miike has shown before them: the interview room, the quiet conversations, the confident judgments, and the long stretches in which apparently nothing happens.
The film’s cruelest insight is already in place before the sack moves or the needles appear. Aoyama expects the woman sitting opposite him to reveal something true about herself. He has arranged an interview in which the central question has been concealed from the person required to answer it.
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