Introduction

One of the most famous Japanese ghost stories is, without a doubt, Yotsuya Kaidan. It has been adapted to the silver screen and the small screen numerous times. Such popularity, of course, invites the critic to compare the different versions made of the famous Kabuki play.

While, in our previous reviews, we analysed two productions by Shin-Toho – The Ghosts of Yotsuya (1956) and The Ghost of Yotsuya (1959), we put the most famous version Shochiku made under our psychoanalytical magnifying glass. This version was written by Eijiro Hisaita and directed by the somewhat lesser-known director Keisuke Kinoshita.

Review

One afternoon, Yomoshichi (Jukichi Uno) happens to see his friend Kohei (Keiji Sada) wandering the streets of Edo. While, at first, he refuses to speak, he ultimately reveals that he is desperately looking for a woman whom he committed a crime for. When Yomoshichi’s wife Osode (Kinuyo Tanaka) returns, Kohei mistakes her for the woman he is looking for, Oiwa (Kinuyo Tanaka), Osode’s sister. Yomoshichi tells him that Oiwa is now living in Yotsuya and is married to a ronin called Iemon Tamiya (Ken Uehara).

During a festival, Iemon Tamiya intervenes when some small-time criminals try to rob Oume (Hisako Yamane), the only daughter of Ichimonji-ya, a rich rice merchant. Later, at the local inn, Naosuke Gonbei (Osamu Takizawa) tells Iemon that, if they play their cards right, they could gain something out of this. At that moment, Takuetsu (Aizo Tamashima) storms the inn in to inform Iemon that Oiwa had a miscarriage (Narra-note 1).    

Shinshaku Yotsuya Kaidan marks the biggest departure of the original Kabuki play. Rather than faithfully bringing the horror of a woman maddened, Eijiro Hisaita opted to utilize the narrative to explore the perverting impact of poverty on subjective functioning as well as the fracturing effect of unresolved guilt in the ego. This narrative shift allows Hisaita to subvert, on many occasions in the narrative, the spectator’s expectations with great dramatic effect. So, without further ado, let’s delve into Keinosuke’s unique take by traversing the similarities and differences between the narratives.

Like The Ghosts of Yotsuya (1956), Yotsuya Kaidan frames Iemon as someone who is dedicated to his wife Oiwa, a womam who has entrusted her entire existence to him. His dedication is not only underlined by his caring signifiers (e.g. You shouldn’t be out of bed yet.) but also by his promise to utilize the plain wagasa (umbrella) they made to get enough money to pay for the doctor. The good nature of Iemon is further emphasized by narratively erasing his first crime – i.e. the murder of Oiwa’s father, and the way he manipulates Oiwa into marriage (Narra-note 2).

Yet, it does not take long for the mendacious flavour of his signifiers to be revealed. When Osode visits Oiwa, she promptly states that he’ll drink away all the money he got from selling the umbrellas. To put the contradictory dimension of his signifiers into perspective, we need to introduce the social situation of our couple.

In our reading, the impoverished situation short-circuits Iemon’s aspiration to realize and materialize the care he verbally promises her. The monetary lack continually emphasize his castration as samurai and turns it into a festering wound that pushes him to the joys of alcoholic sedation. Iemon’s caring signifiers verbalize the very ideal that he, due to having no monetary support for this phallic phantasm, fears of chasing. He cowers before his own socially emphasized castration and fleetingly avoids said confrontation by constantly drinking Japanese sake (Narra-note 3, General-note 2).

The unerasable gap between Iemon’s current situation and his ideal image of the samurai allows Naosuke to exploit his heroic display – a sign of his desire to chase the samurai ideal, and seduce him with signifiers and manipulative plots into chasing Oume (Narra-note 4). It should be evident that Iemon’s ideal plays a quite contradictory role and forms the seed of his subjective conflict. The ideal image underpins both his reluctance and his willingness to approach Oume. He finds himself caught between the demand to remain loyal (to his wife) and the chance to attain the material support – i.e. coins – that would allow him to satisfy his phallic fantasy, the ideal of a samurai.

The blossoming of this conflict, as instigated by Naosuke’s seductive words, is evident in the shift in Iemon’s treatment of his wife. The crude and irritated signifiers towards her echo the fact that his loyalty towards his wife is wavering and the prospect of marrying Oume is gaining strength within his subject. The narrative takes great care – and this explains its deliberate pace – to stage how this conflict rages in his pre- consciousness and reverberates in his acts and signifiers. 

In contrast to The Ghost of Yotsuya (1956) and The Ghosts of Yotsuya (1959), Yotsuya Kaidan is not a pure ghostly revenge narrative, but a story that explores Iemon’s tragic decompensation after betraying his wife and being unable to work-through his feelings of guilt. It is, in fact, his refusal to deal with his guilt that causes the persecutory ghostly imagery to appear – the refused guilt comes to haunt him, the unerasable imagery of deadly bodies a projected reminder of the way he betrayed his ideal. That the crumbling of Iemon’s ego and the unmooring of his subjective anchor – i.e. his phantasmatic ideal – takes the form of haunting ghostly appearances should not surprise the spectator. The shape of his madness is, quite simply, culturally determined and shaped by the folktales, mythology, and so on.  

Even so, the narrative still has some ghostly elements. After Oiwa and Kohei meet their demise, the mundane societal fabric starts getting disturbed. Osode’s door opens itself and Kohei’s mother happens to see a bloody wooden fusama behave strangely in the river. It is this spooky event, which gives rise to a feeling that a tragedy befell Oiwa, and other peculiar discoveries that corroborate the truthfulness of that intuition that compels Yomoshichi and Osode to find out the truth.

Yet, while both The Ghost of Yotsuya (1956) and The Ghosts of Yotsuya (1959) are ghostly revenge narratives, one cannot say that the psychological dimension is completely absent in these narratives. In both narratives, Iwa’s anger functions as a violent return of the repressed (General-note 2). By confronting Iemon with the quantum of guilt that he tries to repress, Iwa violently ruptures Iemon’s ego, the facade of honourable and desirable samurai, and inaugurates his descent into a psychotic-like madness.

The composition of Shinshaku Yotsuya Kaidan relies heavily on static shotsbut also boasts many beautiful fluid dynamic shots. Cinematographer Hiroyuki Kusada, furthermore, fully utilizes the compositional potential of the monochrome photography. Contrasts between light and shadow are exquisitely exploited to emphasize the visual tension created by the positioning of the actors and the geometry of the interiors and exteriors of thoughtful shot-compositions and to add subtle compositional touches that further refine the carefully staged visual tensions. 

The elegant musical pieces by Tadashi Kinoshita richly decorate the unfolding of the narrative and enhances the many dramatic turns and moments of the narrative. Luckily, just like in the other narratives, the emotional flow is dictated by the layered performances and the music merely resounds the emotions the cast so masterfully express. Due to the deliberate flow of the film and careful exploration of the changing relationship of Iemon and Oume, Ken Uehara and Kinuyo Tanada are given the time and space to bring their characters convincingly to life and make the spectator invest himself emotionally in the dramatic turns and exchanges of the narrative. 

Shinshaku Yotsuya Kaidan is an incredible adaptation of the classic kabuki play. While it does not offer the unforgettable performance by Tomisabura Wakayama or boasts a haunting ghostly finale like The Ghost of Yotsuya (1959), it offers incredibly engaging psychological exploration of Iemon’s faltering ego and the dramatic shift this faltering causes in his relationship to Oiwa. In short, with his Yotsuya Kaidan, Keinosuke offers a moving answer to the question of how far frustration can push a subject. 

Notes

Narra-note 1: In this narrative, Takuetsu is a completely innocent character. He does not join Naosuke’s plan to frame Oiwa as an adulteress nor is he framed by Naosuke as someone who has sexual exchanges with Iemon’s wife. Nor is he the one to reveal Iemon’s betrayal to her before she dies.  

Narra-note 2: In contrast to the other narratives,Oiwa is a simple woman who escaped the teahouse/brothel by marrying Iemon. She could, through her marriage, erase the stain of her past and undo the act of bodily exploitation she was, due to her tragic familial situation, forced into doing. The act of being able to marry a samurai is thus of subjective importance for her. That’s why she is able to forgive Iemon’s thirst for alcohol and dutifully accepts their current impoverished situation. 

Another difference with the other two narratives is that she remains in the dark about the destructive nature of Iemon’s acts. She has, in other words, no knowledge of being murdered and Iemon’s desire to become the samurai he wants to be – a samurai with a master and an official post – by marrying into a wealthy and powerful family. 

Narra-note 3: Attentive readers will realize that, within such impoverished situation, the very act of drinking awayone’s castration reinforces the situation and ultimately causes a more radical confrontation with one’s phallic failure. Iemon, thus, finds himself in a vicious cycle of avoidance.

Narra-note 4: In this narrative, Naosuke is the evil subject poisoned by blind materialism. The thirst for wealth underpins his scheming and attempts to taint Iemon’s mind. He elegantly exploits Iemon’s impoverished state and the lack with respect to the samurai-ideal to cause a wish to rise the social ladder to blossom within his subject.     

General-note 1: While the situation of poverty is also present in The Ghosts of Yotsuya (1956) and The Ghost of Yotsuya (1959), it is not utilized to explore the way such situation impacts the acts and signifiers of the subject. Yotsuya Kaidan takes great care in highlighting how continued social frustration – i.e. the impossible-to-escape confrontation with one’s failure to successfully pursue one’s ideal-image within the social field – makes the subject ill and perverts his functioning. 

General-note 2: The Ghosts of Yotsuya (1956) is a bit more psychological than The Ghost of Yotsuya (1959) as the former emphasises Iemon’s inner conflict and shows his reluctance in killing Iwa.