Kwaidan means ghost story and was directed by Masaki Kobayashi.\u00a0 This movie is a collection of four stories that I guess could be called supernatural tales.\u00a0 They are based on stories written by Patrick Lefcadio Hearn, an ex-patriot of Irish\/Greek extraction who settled in Japan in 1890.\u00a0 Each of the stories deals in an unrelated supernatural event.\u00a0 The stories are based on old Japanese folktales.<\/p>\n
(Spoiler Alert \u2013 Skip down to last paragraph to avoid spoilers and read recommendation)<\/strong><\/p>\n In the first story (The Black Hair) a samurai decides to divorce his wife who is a weaver of cloth.\u00a0 He is tired of poverty and has orchestrated a marriage to the daughter of a nobleman.\u00a0 But when he goes through with his plan his new marriage is a disaster.\u00a0 His new wife is selfish and spoiled.\u00a0 He misses the good-hearted weaver and after a few years he leaves his new wife and heads home to Kyoto for his old life.<\/p>\n When he gets there his old house is strangely changed but the samurai finds his wife overjoyed to see him.\u00a0 She looks completely unaged and comforts her ex-husband not to blame himself for his actions.\u00a0 She mysteriously mentions that they have only a short time together.\u00a0 When he wakes up the next morning his wife is a shriveled corpse on the bed next to him. He tries to flee but her hair pursues him and while we watch he grows visibly much older as it attacks him.<\/p>\n In the second story (The Woman of the Snow) a young woodcutter and his older partner become trapped in a heavy snowstorm and seek shelter in a hut.\u00a0 During the night a Yuki-onna, a female snow vampire freezes the older woodcutter and steals his life-force.\u00a0 She tells the younger woodcutter that she had planned to kill both of them but because he was young and attractive, she decided to spare his life but on condition that he never tell anyone what happened that night.\u00a0 If he does tell anyone she will know and then come to him and kill him.<\/p>\n Out of fear he tells no one including his mother with whom he lives.\u00a0 Shortly after, a young and beautiful woman travels through their town and the young man invites her to stay at his house.\u00a0 Both the young man and his mother are impressed with her qualities.\u00a0 Eventually they marry and she bears him three children.\u00a0 But one day as she is talking to him, he notices that she bears a resemblance to the snow vampire and he tells her the story.\u00a0 His wife then reveals to him that she is the snow vampire.\u00a0 Because they have children that she loves she will not kill her husband but instead will leave him forever.\u00a0 But she warns him that if he is ever a bad father she will return and kill him.\u00a0 After she leaves, he puts a present outside his house for her.\u00a0 Later she takes the gift thereby signifying an abatement of her anger.<\/p>\n In the third story (Hoichi the Earless) Hoichi, a blind singer of heroic songs who lives at a monastery is visited by a samurai at night who brings him to a noble house lost in the fogs of the night.\u00a0 There he sings The Tale of the Heike about the Battle of Dan-no-ura, a sea battle fought between the Taira and Minamoto clans during the last phase of the Genpei War.<\/p>\n Eventually his brother monks go looking for him and find him in a cemetery.\u00a0 It seems that the ghosts of the defeated Taira leaders want to hear the story of their heroic defeat sung by a great artist.\u00a0 The monks tell Hoichi that the ghosts will come back to claim his soul permanently so to protect him they cover his whole body including his face with the text of the \u201cHeart Sutra.\u201d \u00a0But they forgot to write it on his ears.\u00a0 When the ghost of the samurai reappears, he can only see Hoichi\u2019s ears.\u00a0 To obey his master\u2019s order to retrieve Hoichi he rips off the ears and takes them away.\u00a0 Hoichi survives this injury and recovers. \u00a0When the rumor of this ghostly action spreads, rich patrons of music pays great sums to have Hoichi sing the tale of the battle.\u00a0 And Hoichi becomes famous and very rich.<\/p>\n In the fourth story (In a Cup of Tea) a writer of old tales (sort of like Patrick Lefcadio Hearn) relates a folk story to his wife that he is planning to sell to a publisher.\u00a0 The story is about a samurai who is part of the escort for a great lord who is travelling home.\u00a0 The samurai goes to drink a cup of tea and sees the face of a man staring up at him from the tea.\u00a0 He is shocked and angered by the occurrence but drinks the tea anyway.\u00a0 When he arrives back home a man appears in the great house with the same face as the man in the tea.\u00a0 The samurai attacks him with his sword but the man disappears.\u00a0 Later that night the samurai is accosted by three men who say they work for the man from the tea cup whom he has injured.\u00a0 The samurai battles all three men.\u00a0 Now the writer tells his wife that this is where the story ends uncompleted.<\/p>\n That night the publisher arrives to see the writer but when the wife and publisher look for him, they see his image in a large pail of water just as in the story and they run away screaming.<\/p>\n As you can tell these are very unusual stories.\u00a0 They don\u2019t fit the category of western horror stories.\u00a0 They\u2019re reminiscent of European fairy tales or folk tales.\u00a0 I wouldn\u2019t describe them as frightening but instead odd.\u00a0 I can\u2019t say that I highly recommend them to a general audience. \u00a0They\u2019ve been praised for the artistry that they display as visual cinema.\u00a0 But I think that for a Western audience they might lack immediacy.\u00a0 So, let\u2019s call these a curiosity that probably only would interest connoisseurs of Japanese folklore or Japanese cinema.\u00a0 I thought they were interesting and some scenes, specifically the sea battle portions were well crafted.\u00a0 Your milage may vary.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Kwaidan means ghost story and was directed by Masaki Kobayashi.\u00a0 This movie is a collection of four stories that I guess could be called supernatural<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[239,237,4,243],"tags":[354,43,38,1355,1176],"class_list":["post-20690","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-movie-reviews","category-reviews","category-sff","category-sff-movie-reviews","tag-horror","tag-movie-review","tag-review","tag-reviews","tag-science-fiction-and-fantasy"],"yoast_head":"\n