Kaidan (1964)

!! SPOILER WARNING !!

This excellent supernatural fantasy is composed of four ghostly tales adapted for the screen by Yoko Mizuki, quite suprisingly, from a quartet of short stories by US journalist and author Lafcadio Hearn, who lived in Japan for some time. Perhaps it's the cultural filter of the Orient viewed through American eyes that made this film so accesible and popular in the West. It was reportedly a failure in Japan. Hearn is an interesting figure of the late nineteenth century. His parents were Greek and Anglo-Irish, but he was born in the Ionian islands in 1850. A noted scholar of the foreign, and interpreter of Oriental culture, he was dedicated to "the worship of the old, the queer, the strange, the exotic, the monstrous", and it was his quest for such weirdness that led him to Japan in 1890 - where he finally settled, married, and became a Japanese citizen, in their customary way, by taking the name Koizumi Yakumo. He wrote extensively about his adopted nation, including poetry and several novels, seeking to popularise Eastern culture abroad. His best work is reportedly Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan (1894). The fantasist collection from which the stories of Kaidan are drawn was published the same year he died, 1904.

Receiving acclaim at a mid-sixties Cannes festival alongside Kaneto Shindo's Onibaba (1964), Kobayashi's Kwaidan was later released in Europe cut to 125 minutes, missing the Yuki-onna episode. This atmospheric tale was released on its own as a short film, a move obviously intended to ensure a measure of box-office appeal to audiences who get restless after ninety
minutes, and would doubtless lose interest in a two and three-quarter hour marathon, however sublime its imagery. This did fracture the original form though, as Kaidan's episodes were intended to evoke the four seasons.

1. KUROKAMI (BLACK HAIR)
Despite only the merest hint of necrophilia (such an encounter was given a rather more graphic treatment in Kubrick's The
Shining (1980)), the moment when the samurai hero realises that he's spent the night with the body of his long-dead wife still retains a certain shock value due to the manner of its quite suspenseless presentation. We do not see the woman's almost rotted body until after the husband's reaction to it. There is clearly something very wrong with the morning scene, as the man's face on waking is pasty as in death - is he diseased, perhaps? But the viewer isn't fully aware of the situation until after the warrior stares death in the face. The timing is perfect. Although the woman's flesh is all but gone, her long jet-black trail of hair seems as lustrous as in life. Then, absurdly, the mane begins to twitch like a cobra and it attacks the terrified man coiling around his neck. He clumsily flees the bed chamber, blundering through the dilapidated house pursued by the tilted camera so familiar to fans of TV's Batman (1966 - 1968). Stumbling, he falls by the property's old well, and his freeze-framed shock reflection in the still water is of a man frightened to death, seemingly poisoned by his guilt.

All this is simply photographed on sparsely decorated sets. But the lighting arrangements are occassionally impressive, if maybe over theatrical too at times. While it seems as though the production of this particular episode didn't stretch to synchronised sound (the narration, though fitting for such a formal style, is a little too intrusive) there is some creative use of post-production sound effects, especially in the mostly silent closing scenes.

2. YUKI-ONNA (SNOW WOMAN)
The film's most intensely stylised segment, Snow Woman, is based on Hearn's Yuki-Onna, and shot on a huge indoor landscape with a series of painted backdrops, the most striking of which features dark eyes amongst patchy clouds. The lavish production values far outstrip the relative tackiness of the first episode, and differs from all of Kaidan's other tales in that the main protagonist is female.

This eerie and compelling episode is undoubtedly an improvement on the opening story. A broader scope than just a simple ghost story, it has the distinctive wonder of a fully-fledged legend. Photographed with a grandly epic sweep belying its often theatrical staginess by Yoshio Miyajima, there is dramatic use of emotive colours. A fluttering red pennant marks the position of a river crossing amidst the icy whiteness of a snowstorm. The demonic woman casts a warm glow over her victims at odds with the chilling effects of her vampire attack. While the spectrum of natural light is grossly exaggerated in many scenes; such as lava red sunsets on pink and yellow painted skylines. It's an extravagant show of bold primary colours used skillfully to enhance the shifting moods.

3. MIMINASHI HOICHI NO HANASHI (HOICHI THE EARLESS)
One of the early highlights of this third story is the epic samurai battle around which the story revolves. The battle is fought in eerie silence, but for Hoichi's commentary and musical enhancement, and like much of the earlier stories, the drama is played out on studio sets; in this case, an artificial shore-line with the, by now, ubiquitous decor of painted skies. In one particularly startling scene, the suicidal Heike women hurl themselves into the bloody waters to escape death at the sword-hands of the opposing, victorious clan. Hoichi's lament for the tragic loss tells us the Strait is now haunted, and there are curious 'Heike' crabs often found on the beaches with tortured human faces on their backs (an apparently real phenomenon this, which adds much credibility to what follows).

Hoichi features Kaidan's most obvious special effects sequence. When the spirit of the warrior arrives at the temple for the last time, he appears transparent. He enters the room where Hoichi sits motionlessly waiting, and there is a change of emphasis in the two characters' states, as the samurai becomes solid, and Hoichi almost fades away - but for his still visible ears hovering in mid-air. It's a fabulous image, as the viewer is effortlessly transported into the spirit world, seeing through the ghost's eyes. Similar moments in the Hollywood weepie Ghost (1990) are nowhere near as effective, and have diminished impact by the very act of drawing audience attention to them as 'special effects' in essence, with no subjective value at all. Patrick Swayze is a non-entity anyway. In Kaidan, the non-corporeal state is explored in a number of aspects and guises. Only the period settings allow for any feeling of remoteness from ghost story chills. Spooky tales have universal appeal, cutting across barriers of race and time. It should be possible to identify with at least one of the protagonists in Kaidan's supernatural scenarios. The story of Hoichi the Earless is the prime example; would even the most un-superstitious among us be game for a midnight visit to a graveyard?

4. CHAWAN NO NAKA (IN A CUP OF TEA)
This final story is arguably the strangest of the four ghost stories. A series of bizarre, seemingly unrelated incidents are shown to be part of a whole - connected in weirdly unfathomable fashion. No 'explanation' is provided. The mystery remains; was Shikibu Heinai a demon or an angel?

The samurai risked causing harm or offence by trying to 'drink a soul', but if it's not too absurd a question, what was Heinai doing in the bowl of water in the first place? Was his presence an omen that Kannai chose to ignore? In the final analysis, of course, there can be no 'real' answers, only the enigma of the unknown.

It's been noted by others that Kaidan can be best appreciated when viewed in two halves. The first and second stories, though strongly contrasting in style and approach, are not too dissimilar in theme, and so worthy of comparison; both have principal female characters (unlike stories three and four), but although the women are both wives, their respective marital situations differ greatly.

The abandoned wife of Kurokami seemingly continues to love her husband even when she's dead. So much so, that she comes back for him. But is this just so they can be together in some heavenly 'afterlife', or is there a more sinister reason? It's not clear whether she's returned to carry him off to Heaven or drag him down to Hell. Has she spent the time they were apart mourning her lost love, or is she the proverbial 'woman scorned'? The denoument is purposely left ambiguous. Yuki-onna has a rather more dominant role. Whereas it's obvious that Kurokami is the story of the samurai, this mythically resonant tale centres not on the woodcutter, but on the Yuki-onna herself.

When she first encounters Minokichi in the ferryman's hut and has put an end to the old Mosake, she doesn't kill again. Instead of breathing death upon the young man, she smiles, as if deciding there and then to give up the old predatory vampire lifestyle and get married, settle down and have babies - just like regular mortal folks! She's the demon trying to escape from Hell. In trade for his life, all she asks of Minokuchi is his silence, a pledge that is later broken, unthinkingly, so that in the end she deserts him - exactly the reverse of Kurokami's abandonment, where the husband did the leaving.

In the two final parts of Kaidan, the stories focus on male victims of supernatural threats. The blind Hoichi exploited by evil spirits, and samurai Kannai who suffers a rather more cryptic haunting. As with the two earlier episodes, what distinguishes these stories from each other is their peculiar endings. Although the sightless Hoichi endures the further physical impairment of having his ears torn off, he survives and in a sense has overcome the menace of the Heike ghost-clan. Warrior Kannai, on the other hand, isn't so lucky; it's true his story is incomplete, but at the climax he loses his mind, anguished at his powerlessness against the spirit forces. His acts of violence against ghostly visitors - Heinai and his trio of retainers - have no concrete effect. When Kannai informs his comrades of the intruder and tells of the struggle, he is asked if he killed the trespasser; "Strangely, no" he replies. Clearly his intent was to slay the tormenting Heinai, so maybe it was the sheer force of the warrior's resolve that injured Heinai's astral self. The confrontation though is rendered meaningless; Kannai is defeated.

As intimated by the subtitle of Hearn's original turn-of-the-century collection, these are "stories and studies of strange things". The film tells them with a series of striking tableaux. With a painterly approach to its visuals, the highly artistic Kwaidan is a cinematic tapestry. One that puts the 'night galleries' of today in the shade.
PAUL LEONE