The first two stories, “The Black Hair” and “The Woman of the Snow,” are precursors to the kinds of horror stories that would fill the pages of EC comics like Tales From the Crypt and The Vault of Horror in the United States in the 1950s. That is, they are primarily about punishment. In “The Black Hair,” a selfish samurai (Rentaro Mikuni) leaves his peasant wife (Michiyo Aratama) in order to marry a rich woman and elevate his station in life. When the samurai finds that he is still unfulfilled, he attempts to return to his first wife, only to find horror and punishment for his selfish acts. The second story, “The Woman of the Snow,” is about a young woodcutter (Tatsuya Nakadai) who is punished when he breaks a promise to a deadly spirit woman not to tell a secret (“Lover’s Vow,” Michael McDowell’s entry in the 1990 anthology film Tales From the Darkside: The Movie, was based on the same story). Both “The Black Hair” and “The Woman of the Snow” focus on male protagonists who are punished because, in one way or another, they betray a woman’s trust. Another thematic element that links them is the aging process, specifically the fact that both stories feature women who, for supernatural reasons, do not age while those around them do.

The third story, “Hoichi the Earless,” is the longest of the four and the most well-known. It involves a humble, blind musician named Hoichi who is so good at playing the biwa and singing the story of the great sea battle between the Heike and Genji samurai clans that the ghosts of the dead warriors visit him at the monastery where he lives and take him to their nearby burial grounds so he can perform for them each night. The sequences that depict Hoichi playing for the ghostly samurai are among the most impressive in the film in terms of scope and composition. Equally impressive are the highly stylized battle sequences between the two samurai clans. They were obviously filmed in a tank on a constructed set, but their theatrical quality and the way Kobayashi cuts between the recreation and an enormous silk painting of the battle fits neatly into Hoichi’s musical retelling.

The fourth and shortest story, “In a Cup of Tea,” also involves ghostly samurai. One in particular haunts a warrior (Kanemon Nakamura) who first sees him reflected in a cup of tea. This story is the most self-reflexive in its narrative in that it is consciously framed by a writer who is telling the story (although each of the stories features an off-screen narrator, thus reflecting the oral tradition from which the stories have been taken). In this way, “In a Cup of Tea” links thematically with both “Hoichi the Earless” and “The Woman of the Snow,” both of which prominently feature storytelling as part of their narratives.

However, the stories in Kwaidan essentially take a backseat to Kobayashi’s incredible visual style, which built substantially on the stylization he had begun to employ in his previous film, Harakiri (1962). He and cinematographer Yoshio Miyajima (with whom he had already collaborated on several films) turn the screen into a painting that moves and flows. The compositions are so carefully crafted and the tone of each scene is so intricately interwoven with color and camera angle that you are constantly tempted to simply pause the film and stare at the screen. Kobayashi’s camera movement is fluid and authorial, often utilizing odd angles and moving in unexpected ways to convey the confusion of various characters when they are faced with the unexplainable (this is especially apparent in the fourth story when the warrior finds himself faced with someone else’s reflection in his tea).

Befitting its aesthetic ambitions and complex production (at the time it was the most expensive film made in Japan), Kwaidan is a difficult film to classify. It is a particularly lucid example of the shortcomings of trying to pigeonhole films into particular genres. Kobayashi was known almost exclusively as a purveyor of realistic contemporary stories with explicit social themes, most notably in his magnum opus The Human Condition (1959). In Kwaidan he shifts gears dramatically in including elements of horror and the paranormal, but the film is also notably romantic, infused with great passion and intense human emotions that emerge out of the characters’ interactions with various ghosts and spirits. Often, these conflicting tones are set against each other. For instance, in the second story, the scenes of the woodcutter and his newfound love, Yuki (Keiko Kishi), running through sun-drenched fields with a luminous orange sky behind them are strikingly contrasted to earlier scenes, shot in cold blue tints, in which the woodcutter watches as a ghostly spirit disappears down a snow-covered forest trail, with a sky in the background that had formed into what appears to be a giant human eye (interestingly, this was Kobayashi’s first color film, although he wields it like a seasoned veteran).

That one film can successfully contain—and is reliant upon—such a complex visual schema is extraordinary. Not since the early days of German expressionism has a filmmaker made set design, lighting, and camera angles speak in such a profound manner (the sets were so huge that they could not be contained in any of Japan’s existing soundstages, so they had to be constructed inside a Nissan warehouse the length of 10 football fields). Kwaidan is certainly a unique film that demands multiple viewings to absorb all it has to offer. And, while some horror aficionados may find themselves restless with its deliberate pacing and lengthy running time (“The Woman in the Snow” was eliminated entirely when it played at Cannes and when it was released in the U.S. in 1965), it is a film that, in the end, rewards the patient viewer with a truly unique, sometimes profoundly unsettling experience.

Copyright ©2015 James Kendrick

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