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Suicide Club (film)

2001 film by Sion Sono

Manuscripts, fine bindings, an engraving plate and preserved performance ephemera
Arts and lettersInterpretive dossier study · Crown Archives visual atlas
Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionSep 1, 2026
Entity authorityQ1156769 ↗
Source-derived summary

Suicide Club is a 2001 Japanese independent horror film written and directed by Sion Sono. It stars Ryō Ishibashi, Masatoshi Nagase, Akaji Maro, Saya Hagiwara, Yoko Kamon, Rolly, Hideo Sako, Kimiko Yo, Mika Kikuchi, So Matsumoto, and Takashi Nomura. The film explores a wave of seemingly unconnected suicides across Japan and the efforts of the police to determine the reasons behind them.

Suicide Club premiered at the Tokyo International Film Festival on October 29, 2001, and was released in Japan on March 9, 2002. It was shown at numerous global film festivals and won the Jury Prize for Most Ground-Breaking Film at the 2003 Fantasia Festival. It has since developed a significant cult following.

Plot

On May 27, 54 teenage girls commit a mass suicide in Tokyo by jumping in front of an oncoming train. Shortly after, at a hospital, two nurses jump out of a window. At both locations, rolls of skin are found, matching the skin removed from the bodies of the dead. Detectives Kuroda, Shibusawa, and Murata are notified by a hacker named Kiyoko of a website called Haikyo ("Ruins"), which displays a red circle for each female suicide victim and a white one for each male.

Editorial summary

Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Suicide Club (film)” is 2001 film by Sion Sono. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Suicide, Club and film, not as a finished interpretation.

Editorial reviewBest approached as a cultural-object dossier: authorship and date matter, but circulation and reception often explain the wider significance. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—2001, 2002, 2003—that can be checked directly. The authority record carries competing date values—2002-01-01, 2001-01-01, 2001-10-29, 2002-03-09—which should remain separate until their references and qualifiers are resolved. For this dossier, Suicide, Club and film is the immediate research focus.
Editorial analysis

Why this record matters

The phrase “2001 film by Sion Sono” supplies a clear boundary for inquiry. It also exposes the unanswered questions: who defined that boundary, when it became stable and which sources sit outside it.

Evidence profile

Reception evidence should be dated and situated: later canonical status may differ sharply from the work’s initial circulation. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 1, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1156769. 4 of 4 selected statements include explicit references; 2 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2001, 2002 and 2003.

Critical limits

Later fame can flatten the distinction between original context, subsequent adaptation and institutional collecting history. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.

How to read it

Separate the work, its editions or performances, and its later reception. Catalogue records, publication histories and object files often preserve different parts of that story.

Best used for
  • Identifying works and editions
  • Tracing reception history
  • Finding collection records
Verify next

The original object or edition, catalogue raisonné, performance record, rights file and holding institution.

Three-step research path

  1. Establish the record: confirm the title “Suicide Club (film)”, its source revision and the description used here.
  2. Expand the search: follow Suicide Club (film) primary sources, Suicide Club (film) archive and Suicide research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
  3. Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.

Questions for further research

  1. Which source most directly establishes the central claim about “Suicide Club (film)”?
  2. Where is authorship, date or provenance documented?
  3. Which edition, object, performance or recording is being described?
Subject index

Search terms from this dossier

Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from “Suicide Club (film)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.