By Kimberly Chun

RINGU RATTLED YOUR nerves, Ichi the Killer shot your equilibrium to hell, and Battle Royale declared war on your psyche. Now the trauma has faded, and you have to ask, "Where have all the Japanese cinematic scares gone?" The answer: the dis-ease can clearly, subtly be found in the lives of young Japanese women struggling for defined identities amid fluctuating gender roles, designer fashion, and the protracted recession of the past decade. The Pacific Film Archive's "Neo-Eiga: New Japanese Cinema" series goes to those sometimes homey, sometimes chilly, and rarely kawaii (cute) places, delving into less-overtly sexy genres than horror, such as family and women's dramas this time around. Some films are wrought with a gritty anthropologist's eye seldom seen since Shohei Imamura's heyday, others with soundtracks high on the sap quotient.

A syrupy score can't stop the female-centric chaos of Junji Sakamoto's My House (Bokunchi), the 2002 black comedy that opens the series and flirts with sentimental melodrama as well as over-the-top subversion. Little boys Itta and Nita could have been plucked straight out of the crowd of pudgy-cheeked, plucky urchins populating Yasujiro Ozu's 1932 silent classic I Was Born, But ... – apart from the fact that Itta is getting slapped around as the low dog in various penny-ante yakuza schemes and that Nita hangs out with the hobo 'n the hood, "Scrap Gramps"; the friendly local child-snatcher; and a sweet little girl with a future as an ace gold digger. Perpetually gussied up in "going-away clothes," Mother is prone to disappearing for months at a time. Big sister Kanoko cooks for the boys when she isn't bringing home the nabemono by working at local "pink salon," or brothel.

When the title house is sold from under the boys' feet, that anti-Ozu world is thoroughly destabilized, reverting to a thoroughly feminized island realm where women drop litters of kids but would rather rear cats and all you have to do is say "I'm poor" to get a bowl of hot, "super-bad" ramen. "There's nothing tasty about life," one character says in response to complaints about the lousy Chinese chow produced by the island's sole restaurant. You just suck it up and make do in this Almodóvar-like community, where even hookers with hearts of gold, such as Kanoko, have equally hard heads. "Crying won't fill your stomach!" she tells Nita, before saving Itta from a beating at the hands of his scumbag boss with the declaration "I'll pay you back for this with my pussy!"

The simplest forms of propriety and signs of motherly guidance, like correctly using chopsticks, fall by the wayside in My House. They take another, more urban – and urbane – incarnation in Kentaro Otani's 2002 comedy of spousal ambitions, A Woman's Work. Pride and confidence are everything for the intense Asami, a professional shogi (Japanese chess) player like her sister Rina. Ever since she married relatively timid salaryman Kazuya (played by Tetsuo director Shinya Tsukamoto), she's been losing games. So when Asami's league standing is threatened, she lashes back at her husband and his expectations of house cleaning, cooking, and wifely behavior, which definitely doesn't include betting on ponies at the track.

Power plays, mind games, and gender roles are at stake in this compelling, almost Shakespearean, and definitely Rohmer-ian look at ambition among Japanese women. And it makes you wonder, when was the last time you saw something similar set in the States?

Directed by Yutaka Tsuchiya and cowritten by Karin Amamiya (the right-wing punk vocalist and subject of Tsuchiya's documentary The New God), Peep "TV" Show pieces together a darker, more morbid side of modern Japan in the grainy video that tends to signify reality nowadays. Androgynous, haunted Hasegawa indulges his voyeuristic tendencies, videotaping passersby in the trendy Shibuya district, peeking at "normals" in their shoe-box apartments, and finally creating a Web site devoted to his obsession with the World Trade Center attack. Writing about his need to "peep at the corpses under the rubble" and harboring a wish that the planes had crashed into Tokyo instead, he attracts a set of similarly disaffected visitors who become involved in his disturbing Web-cam footage and real-time animal torture.

But his biggest fan and eventual partner in WTC-related Net slime is the impassive Moe, decked out in gothic Lolita dirndl. Describing Japanese women as "doll-like" is tired, but Moe is truly a living doll – of the most inured sort. She feels nothing when Hasegawa's Peep "TV" Show catches a fellow G-Lo getting it on with her boyfriend, and nada when Hasegawa reveals the reason he doesn't want to visit the WTC site. "Why?" he asks. "This is where the plane hit us. We can't escape it." Like Peep "TV" Show's sex worker who thinks of her body as a tool and praises a state of nothingness, Moe's ground zero is marked by floating disassociation and a certain soullessness.

'Neo-Eiga: New Japanese Cinema' runs Fri/17-Sun/19, PFA Theater, 2575 Bancroft, Berk. $4-$8. (510) 642-0808. See Rep Clock, in Film listings, for shows and times.