Kwaidan

Kwaidan (1965) (meaning "ghost stories") is a 182-minute horror film directed by Masaki Kobayashi. Based on works by Lafcadio Hearn, mostly from his collection Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things, the movie is composed of four independent tales: The Black Hair, The Woman of the Snow, Hoichi the Earless, and In a Cup of Tea.

I've been fascinated by Japanese ghost stories since first coming to Japan in the mid-90s. It was around then that I visited the grave of Oiwa Tamiya in Sugamo, Tokyo, for a magazine article I'd been working on about Yotsuya Kaidan. As the story goes, Oiwa was betrayed by her husband, the ronin Iemon, and after being poisoned to death she seeks revenge as a mournful, hateful ghost. I still have a photograph of her grave, and in the photo a spiral of smoke appears to be rising⁠ out of the stone monument. After I took the picture, I checked to see if any incense was burning. None was.

Around that time, I was also reading Hearn and discovering how different Japanese ghost stories are compared to the haunting tales of the West, particularly so for their deeply melancholic themes and their morose, unyielding female spirits, and the otherworldly ways of depicting the horrific consequences of injustice. How so many of these stories were passed on to instill in us a reverence for the dead, equal to that which we must hold for the living, or else.

Kwaidan is remarkable for its vivid, unsettling sets and also for its soundtrack (frequent long stretches of silence offset by screechy Japanese folk instruments and splintering wood). Roger Ebert described the film as "an assembly of ghost stories that is among the most beautiful films I've seen." The scenes are mesmerizing throughout. They make you feel spellbound and tense, and aware that this preternatural world Kobayashi has created is forever implacable. That its tortured, vindictive souls will be roused with a blood-curdling passion. That the snow woman will freeze the old man with her icy breath. That a wandering spirit will rip the ears off the blind musician.

All four stories entrance, but "The Woman of the Snow" stands out for its patience in allowing the story to unfold at just the right pace. Also for the blizzard and other disturbing weather, like those all-seeing skies with their ever-watchful eyes.

Kwaidan (1965), "The Woman of the Snow"

Kwaidan (1965), "The Woman of the Snow"

Kwaidan (1965), "The Woman of the Snow"

Kwaidan (1965), "Hoichi the Earless"

Nobody Knows

Japanese director Hirokazu Kore-eda (known also for Maborosi (1995) and Our Little Sister (2015)) breaks the viewer's heart with Nobody Knows (2004), a film about the abandonment of four children who do what little they can to survive in a tiny Tokyo apartment, in Ota-ku it seems, as their dreams are slowly suffocated by the neglect and their desperate circumstances.

It begins with a young mother and her eldest son, Akira, arriving at the building they're about to move into, and they seem happy, normal. The two youngest children arrive next, secretly delivered to the apartment in suitcases, and the elder sister, Kyōko, comes separately by train, and we now know something is horribly wrong. Uncomfortably, we also see this family making do with what they have, and so we remain positive and hopeful. The children each have a different father, and they're not allowed to attend school, and only Akira can go outside, since someone has to buy groceries and pay the bills. The mother stays out all night, and often doesn't come back at all. Eventually she disappears for months without a word, leaving the children to fend for themselves.

The film, based on the real-life story of the Sugamo child-abandonment incident, will make you cry. Kore-eda is masterful at using everyday objects to feed the narrative and arouse emotion, such as filling the frame with a filthy toy piano on a broken leg, or dwelling on a struggling plant in a muddy, cracked Cup Noodle container. But the primary reason to watch this is Yūya Yagira's incredible performance. The depth of his expressions and how he communicates a range of feelings with his eyes, as a twelve-year-old actor no less, is extraordinary. Not only was he the first Japanese actor to win the Best Actor award at the Cannes Film Festival, he also became the youngest actor to win it. To sum up, Nobody Knows is a powerful, thought-provoking film with the courage to take on a social problem that's far too often ignored.

The Story of Tomoda and Matsunaga

Junichiro Tanizaki (1886–1965) is considered to be among the greats of modern Japanese literature. The Story of Tomoda and Matsunaga (first published in Japanese in 1926, later in Italian, then in English in 2018 in The Penguin Book of Japanese Short Stories) is a Tanizaki novella which explores the dichotomy between aspects of Eastern culture (specifically Japanese) and Western culture (specifically European) through the use and eyes of a doppelgänger, a Jekyll and Hyde sort who vacillates in his desires and attitudes toward provincial, traditional Asia and a dissolute, gluttonous Europe.

The narrator, F.K., is a celebrated novelist residing in Tokyo. He receives a letter from Shige Matsunaga, from a rural village in south-central Honshu. Shige's husband, Gisuke, has left her, after having told her he'd be taking a long trip, and he is gone for several years without a word to her. After he returns, he slips back into his role of loving husband and content father. Naturally suspicious of her husband, Shige rifles through his personal effects and finds a postcard addressed to a Ginzo Tomoda. Her husband, years later, again leaves, for years more, and she suspects he's living a double life, as Gisuke and as Ginzo. During Gisuke's second "trip" is when she sends the letter to F.K., hoping the novelist can find out if Ginzo (or "Tom" as he's also known) is in fact her husband. This seems unlikely to F.K., who is Ginzo's drinking companion and sees the man for who he appears to be, a devil-may-care libertine with grand appetites for women and food and drink, not one who'd ever be able to settle down in the sleepy countryside.

A stretch of the book reads like a detective story, along with compelling dialogue, scenes with foreign women in Yokohama's bordellos, and all with exceptional pacing on par with what you'd find in Kafka, building up the mystery and suspense, and at last the reveal, which in this case is delectable (presumably more so for anyone who's thought at length about the oft-illusory boundaries between Japan and the West). Through the narrator, we eventually learn if Gisuke and Ginzo are one or two, and the rich accounts and colorful perspectives that fill the final pages are delivered with intensity, painting an unreliable perspective of the West as wild and the East as prosaic and restrained. The ambivalence of Tanizaki, who apparently was fascinated with Western culture and surely would've chewed on what being Eastern and Western meant, comes through these pages, which are sharply written and gratifying to read.