By now a well-known Japanese fetish, based on the injured Rei Ayanami character from Neon Genesis: Evangelion with a dash of Southeast Asian bird flu chic, I find I can’t get behind this one. Perhaps it’s meant to inspire sympathy, a desire to care for — nurse a potential mate back to health and reap the benefits, but I’m always reminded of the line from William Gibson’s Neuromancer: “Beyond them, at another table, three Japanese wives in Hiroshima sackcloth awaited sarariman husbands, their oval faces covered with artificial bruises; it was, he knew, an extremely conservative style, one he’d seldom seen in Chiba.”