The Masters of Cinema Series

Catalogue

Shindo’s Kuroneko

by Doug Cummings, 2006

Although Japan’s cinema has long tapped into its rich folklore (an ancient confluence of Shinto spiritism, Chinese demonology, and Indian philosophy), the 1950s and ‘60s hosted a new vogue for movies showcasing monsters and ghosts. Kaneto Shindo’s Onibaba (1964) — an erotic horror thriller with supernatural overtones — was a successful hit overseas, so it was no surprise that he returned to the genre several years later with Kuroneko (1968).

But Kuroneko is far from a simple rehash of its predecessor. In reusing several aspects of character, theme, and setting but adding new elements of history, folklore, and theatre, Shindo fashions a thematic companion piece to his previous film that is less erotic and feverish but more romantic and tragic.

The jidai geki period film opens with a sequence that is shocking in its juxtaposition of stately beauty and savage action. An extended shot of a hut near a bamboo forest begins to register movement as over a dozen samurai slowly emerge from the bushes. Thirstily, they gulp the water source outside the hut and invade the home, wreck the place, gobble up whatever food they can find, gang rape and murder the two inhabitants — a lone mother (Nobuko Otowa) and her daughter-in-law (Kiwako Taichi) — and torch the place before returning to the forest. Shindo intensifies the violence with a stoic representation and selective ellipses that highlights the need for response and establishes the desire for revenge that simmers throughout the picture.

In the smoldering ruins of the hut, the family’s black cat approaches the two bodies and licks the blood from their necks, an image with both social and folkloric connotations. As a lowly and often strayed and neglected animal, the cat immediately resembles the lower classes of medieval Japanese society abused by the nobles and samurai. Much like Shindo’s birds in Onibaba, the cat becomes a mirror of all the discarded denizens of the natural world. “They’re nothing to be afraid of,” a samurai says of the cats. “They’re starving too. At the Kamo River bed crows peck at the bodies of those who starved to death.”

But the cat also carries a long tradition of mythic distrust because of its nocturnal and furtive behaviours; tales abound of shape-shifting cats like the famous dancing geisha Okesa, and bakeneko “monster cats” that exact revenge for their deceased owners. A popular subgenre in Japanese cinema was the kaibyo (“ghost cat” films, like Tokichi Kinoshita’s Ghost Cat of Arima Palace (1953) and Nobuo Nakagawa’s The Mansion of the Ghost Cat (1958). Many ghost films tapped into yurei myths where the (usually female) spirits of those who have met untimely deaths roam locales seeking vengeance until they can be released from their suffering and properly laid to rest.

The rules of supernatural dramaturgy evolved over many years of Japanese theatre, from the minimalist and abstract Noh plays to the gaudy and popular Kabuki productions performed on stages with trap doors and hidden wires for suspending actors in the air. Shindo includes overt elements of both traditions in Kuroneko: the spartan house where the women lure the samurai resembles a Noh stage (complete with a long bamboo-lined walkway that combines indoor and outdoor space) and the mother’s ritualistic dance was specifically modeled on Noh performance; but the film’s atmospheric effects and violence, use of curtains, and aerial acrobatics resemble 18th-century Kabuki theatre (as do the mei posturing and statuesque pauses in the film).

Shindo has also cited two dramatic texts as inspirations: the tale of Watanabe no Tsuna severing the arm of a demoness, and Konjaku monogatari’s story of a robber who meets a mysterious woman at the Rajomon Gate (which also provided the basis for Ryunosuke Akutagawa’s Rashomon). Built in the 8th-century, the gate was the southern barrier to the square city of Kyoto and was renowned for its strength and beauty; by the 12th century, however, it had fallen into disrepair and become a haven for thieves, brigands, and various sordid activities. It is here that Shindo sets the ghost-cat women as they lure the samurai to their doom.

Kuroneko is a more visually elegant film than Onibaba; the latter film’s constant fluttering reeds have (for the most part) been replaced with a towering bamboo grove, which offers the rustling sounds of leaves but less visceral movement. On the other hand, the camera provides more movement in Kuroneko through its restless and fluid tracking shots and careful framing of wired acrobatics. Shindo’s ability to construct a haunting atmosphere through visual and aural details — a silent, slow-motion leap over a pool of water, unexpected character entrances and exits, offscreen meows, creeping fog and billowing curtains — remains powerfully effective. The ghost women (given a spectral appearance through a consistent high-key lighting that reflects off their white kimonos) are given feline attributes by association—an unexpectedly furry arm, or a tail-like swish of their hair. Instead of giving them a consistent horrifying appearance, Shindo teases the viewer with hints, surprises, and transformations throughout.

The first samurai victim is oafish and pompous and appears half-asleep on his horse. But his scene builds in intensity because he’s completely unaware of the danger he faces; Shindo reserves his haunting cues for the viewer alone and milks the awareness for suspense. The gloating samurai is the ideal victim; significantly, the ghosts lure the samurai by their appetites (comfort, sake, sex) rather than attack them outright, making the same gluttony that brutalized the women now spell their own demise. Laughing repeatedly, the samurai warrior tells the apparitions not to worry, that “it’s a samurai’s world now” and that their long-lost son/husband was lucky to be drafted into war. “I used to be a farmer too,“ he says, licking his fingers with his mouth packed with food, “but since the war, I’ve risen to this!” More laughter. “Wars keep us in food and everything else.” More laughter. “Everything is ours for the taking.” He grabs the young spectre and tries to make love to her — only to have the ghoul devour his neck in vampiric glee.

Always the socially conscious filmmaker, Shindo emphasizes the class struggle between the haves and have-nots, the nobility and the peasants. In one sense, the ghosts are settling a personal score by killing the samurai who killed them, and revenge has been a stock element of Japanese drama for centuries. But in another sense, the ghosts represent the poor who exact justice against those who abuse them. Like the crows of the Kamo River that feast on the cats, Shindo repeatedly shows the local peasantry stripping the dead samurai of their costly garments and armour, echoing the scavenging protagonists of Onibaba (in one shot, he shows a crow perched on a samurai corpse).

Shindo employs an efficient montage that replays key aspects of the ghosts’ appearance, invitation, seduction, and killing of samurai, each mini-narrative seen in fewer and more fragmented pieces, emphasizing the ritualistic and serial nature of the ghosts’ onslaught. At this point, the story would have little more to do, but Shindo provides a dramatic twist. Gintoki (Kichiemon Nakamura), the peasant farmer who lived with his wife and mother until he was drafted into the samurai army, returns to Kyoto as a war hero and is ordered to destroy the ghosts, unaware of who or what they are. Accordingly, the second half of the film addresses the theme of love versus duty (ninjo versus giri) that emotionally deepens the conflict by making both the samurai and the ghosts face this personal conundrum without divulging their inner turmoil in full to one another; once again, the viewer is more aware of the nature of the conflict than the characters themselves.

Gintoki is introduced in a battle scene in the marshes that immediately recalls the setting of Onibaba. Defeating the enemy’s champion, he returns to Kyoto and reports to the self-serving and hypocritical Raiko (played by Onibaba’s Kei Sato). Raiko is visually introduced by the pool of sweat that accumulates under his face as he bows before the Emperor (Hideo Kanze), but immediately thereafter he is presented as a selfish and cynical man who ridicules the Emperor’s “august voice” and accuses the nobility of doing nothing but pampering themselves with luxury — the very thing Raiko is repeatedly shown doing to himself. “Who’s running all over the land fighting?” he asks, but the question implicates himself when he sends the peasant-turned-samurai Gintoki to defeat the city’s threat. “We fight so nobles and the masses can live without worry!” Raiko asserts, offering an archetypical defence for those who use power and violence to protect the interests of an elite. “So how can anyone hate us?” he naively muses.

Shindo cleverly uses Gintoki’s character to complicate the division between samurais and ghosts as well as peasants and nobility. Gintoki is a samurai who is also a peasant in the same way that the young apparition is a ghost who is also his wife; thus, they are no longer able to fully unite. Shindo initially presents Gintoki as a standard hero and includes an extended sequence celebrating his return to Kyoto, riding his horse through the landscape accompanied by brassy, celebratory music. Once there, Gintoki is showered (physically and metaphorically) with praises and honours that culminate in Raiko offering him the woman of his choosing once he destroys the ghosts — the irony, of course, is that one of the ghosts is already the woman he loves. As a samurai, Gintoki again races his horse through the landscape in search of his home, but this time the music is more unsettling and atonal and when he attempts to speak to an old farming friend, he is hardly recognized. Increasingly, Gintoki’s elevated social status is seen as a loss rather than a gain. “Who’d respect or think a farmer to be a human being?” Raiko contemptuously asks, thereby invoking what is perhaps the central question posed in both Onibaba and Kuroneko.

The love-making scenes are lyrically filmed, emphasizing the lovers’ ecstasy and attachment through a prevalence of curtains, physical embraces, and romantic music; the scenes are by far the most warm and passionate in the film. Yet the cold theatrical lighting and knowledge that the affair’s resolution has merely been postponed rather than solved underlines the scenes with a significant degree of melancholy. When Gintoki arrives on the eighth day and discovers his wife’s ghost has knowingly sacrificed her life by choosing love over duty and earthly passion over eternal security (not unlike the angel of Wim Wenders’ Wings of Desire), he is devastated, and the finality of her act registers with potent tragedy. Gintoki’s confusion about the precise identity of the mysterious apparitions becomes even more intense.

In an effort to appease both his ninjo and giri, Gintoki agrees to read his mother’s ghost an edifying sutra that will grant her peace. But on the way to the occasion, he spots her reflection in a puddle and it reveals yet a third, demonic, face apart from the ghost and kaibyo faces previously seen. Overcome with uncertainty, he attacks his mother’s apparition and severs her arm, but she still manages to escape. Gintoki offers the arm to Raiko as proof that he killed the monster (an echo of his earlier trophy head), and although Raiko believes it’s the appendage of a natural animal, he suggests Gintoki play up the victory by purifying his spirit for a week in isolation. (“It’s important to make it the talk of the capital,” Raiko says.)

The final confrontation between Gintoki and his demonic kaibyo mother is an aesthetic high point for the film. Shindo makes full use of Gintoki’s candlelit isolation by emphasizing disquieting offscreen sounds and slowly gliding the camera through the enclosed space as if it was stalking the lone warrior. Although there is considerable dialogue between Gintoki and his mother’s apparition, who appears outside of his room, the scene never loses tension through Shindo’s careful atmospheric mediation. A quiet voice claiming to be a medium from the Imperial palace convinces Gintoki to open the door, and a fourth variant of his mother’s visage appears; but it’s only after he notices her lack of an arm that Gintoki recognizes her, and she quickly transforms to the demon face before transforming into her kaibyo appearance, snatches her arm, evades his attacks, and escapes through the roof. The choreography and wirework is superb, with a touch of the macabre when the apparition clutches her arm in her feline jaws.

Shindo’s film ends in a fully tragic mode, with the kaibyo demon re-armed (literally) and refusing to end its samurai vengeance and Gintoki stumbling in emotional anguish through the forest, either disconnected from reality or supernaturally transposed to various locales and moments. Encountering his own lovemaking with his wife in the ghost house transposes him to the charred ruins of their old hut; Shindo brilliantly uses the fog and smoke in both settings as a visual transition. Gintoki, unable to reconcile his samurai or peasant lives, collapses as a heavy blanket of snow begins to fall on the smoldering wreckage, a visual microcosm of suffering, loss, and, ultimately, death.