Hamaguchi Ryūsuke's Evil Does Not Exist as degrowth parable

Reading Hamaguchi Ryūsuke's Evil Does Not Exist (Aku wa sonzai shinai, 2023) as a degrowth parable that uses a simple story to illustrate moral and ethical problems, this article analyzes how film parables can explore complex ideological, ecological, and social issues such as those addressed by degrowth discourses with a greater degree of nuance than is possible in the manifesto format or activist provocation. This article proposes understanding Evil Does Not Exist as a visual mode of the “speculative fabulation” that scholars of the Anthropocene have called for. Cinema can offer a mode of audiovisual exploration of contemporary moral problems such as the alienation of humans from our natural environment in the Anthropocene, using the parable form to generate polyvalent meanings that sometimes counteract themselves or act in opposition to one another. Developing a mode of film analysis that the article calls parable as method, the article places a close reading of Hamaguchi's film alongside a short account of popular contemporary discourses on ecological issues in Japan today led by philosopher Saitō Kōhei, in order to evoke a more generative understanding of the film and its ideas through comparison.