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.

We have already explored one film of the forties – Keisuke Kinoshita’s Shinshaku Yotsuya Kaidan (1949) – and two of the fifties – Masaki Mori’s The Ghosts of Yotsuya (1956)  and Nobuo Nakagawa’s The Ghost of Yotsuya (1959). This time, we make a jump in time to the eighties to analyse how director Yukio Ninagawa and screenwriters Nanboku Tsuruya and Eiichi Uchida brings this classic narrative alive on the silver screen.

Review

One afternoon, while fishing with his wife Iwa (Keiko Takahashi), ronin Iemon (Ken’ichi Hagiwara) is informed that Yomoshichi (Hiroshi Katsuno) is wildly swinging his sword nearby. While both Iemon and Iwa try to convince him to return to his wife, Osode (Masako Natsume), who is lonely, he violently retorts that he will only return when he has exacted revenge. With Yomoshichi ignoring his wife, Naosuke (Kai Ato) sees a chance to approach Osode and make her his.

Not that much later, Iemon rescues Yotsuya Samon (Mizuho Suzuki), Osode and Iwa’s father, from some angry villagers. A bit further away stands Ume (Aiko Morishita) who, due to feeling attracted to his presence, has followed him. Yet, rather than thanking him, he immediately demands that Iemon gives his daughter back and pays back the money he stole from the now defunct Asano clan. Not much later, during a heated discussion about money, Iemon slashes Samon down. When his wife, wandering through the night, discovers her father’s body, Iemon promptly tells her he was slashed down by a samurai of a rival clan. Of course, as duty demands, Iemon has to promise Iwa to exact revenge.  

Summer of Demon succeeds in offering a slightly different and refreshing take on the ghostly narrative by changing various narrative elements, like Samon’s position – a ronin instead of a highly ranked samurai – and Iemon’s initial crime – from murder to ‘double’ theft. By changing Samon’s subjective position in Summer Of Demon, Nanboku Tsuruya and Eiichi Uchida adds a particular revenge element that has not been featured in any of the other films and succeeds in putting some of the other narrative turns – i.e. moments featured in some of the other adaptations – into a fresh perspective (General-note 1).

Yet, that is not all. While, in the other adaptations, evil and good, criminal and innocent, was more clear-cut, the screenwriters have mixed those colours to deliver a palette of grey characters. Samon, who due to the collapse of the Asano clan is but a mere ronin, is revealed as utilized the societal demand for revenge as a pretext to financially drain his lovely daughter Osode (Narra-note 1). Yomoshichi, who is married to Osode, is shown as being consumed by the plight to take revenge, hereby radically neglecting his wife Osode.

Iemon, for that matter, is not staged as someone who slowly gets corrupted by the other, by his materialistic mother like in The Ghosts of Yotsuya (1956) or by Naosuke like in Shinshaku Yotsuya Kaidan (1949) and The Ghost of Yotsuya (1959), but as someone who is already marked by criminal intent.  

While he, at first, appears as clumsy and kind to his wife, it does not take long for Iemon’s darker side to echo in the narrative – i.e. the criminal impulse that he keeps hidden behind his facade, his agreeable ego marked by honour. In his confrontation with Samon, it is not so much his signifiers that reveal his vileness – he states quite sensible things, it is the tone by which he verbalizes these words that echoes the evil that lurks within him.

Ninagawa, in fact, elegantly exploits the contrast between Iemon as castrated (i.e. he is not good at fishing nor flying kites; he is useless) and the phantasmatic phallic element that drives him (i.e. his successful attempt to rescue his wife’s father). While some spectators might read these two elements in a diachronic way, it is more valuable to position them in a synchronic manner. The criminal act – the act fuelled by his phantasmatic belief of possessing it – only arises in the social field when it supports the ideal image of an honourable samurai. This deceptive image, so carefully constructed by Iemon, serves to hide his mistaken belief of phallic possession and the dark criminal reflex – the push to enact his transgressive law in the shadowy areas of society – that results from it.

Yet, what makes this character so compelling is the fact that the incredible Ken’ichi Hagiwara brings Iemon to life in such a way that, irrespective of what kind of signifiers he utters, he gives his own hidden darkness away – the evil that marks him always echoes in his enunciations. The constant reverberation of his corrupt core makes the spectator quite frankly uncomfortable.      

Ume is not staged as merely a passive dedicated lover, but a woman marked by a desire to possess. Watching for prospective husbands with her father (-), the very moment she lays eyes on Iemon’s stern expression (the phallic glister) causes the imprisoning of her desire and erupts the unsilenceable demand to marry him. The father, subjected to this radical demand, has no other choice than to make his daughter’s desire a reality. Yet, spectators thinking that the father will hesitate to couple his daughter with Iemon will come away surprised. In fact, his evilness resides in the transgressions he is willing to make to satisfy his daughter’s order.

While in the three other adaptations Osode is reduced to the function of worried sister, Summer of Demon, by integrating less utilized elements of the kabuki-narrative, stages her, first and foremost, as a married prostitute who is wronged by her husband and needs to endure the sexual advances of Naosuke (General-note 2). The finale of the narrative, by relying on the kabuki-narratives, gives her character a dramatic but satisfying conclusion. Naosuke is profoundly marked by his sexual obsession with Osode in Summer Of Demon (General-note 3). However, by reverberating his sense of helplessness and by showing how he mirrors himself to the more confident (liar) Iemon, he is not staged, like in some of the other adaptations, as the perverting root of evil, but as the mirror-image of Iemon (Narra-note 2).   

Thematically speaking, Summer Of Demon puts emphasis neither on corruption nor on the societal environment that pushes a subject to transgress the law for his own desire. One could, instead, argue that the filmshows that the subject, irrespective of the societal fabric and the Other of the law, is marked by evilness – in each desire and thus subject resides a core of vileness and destructivity. 

While the composition of Summer Of Demon appears very static at first glance – a mere concatenation of static shots, the attentive spectator will quickly notice that Ninagawa’s visual fabric is full of subtle movement. In some instances, the dynamism becomes wilder; the camera movement attains a faster pace and the framing becomes shaky. These wilder dynamic shots are elegantly utilized by Ninagawa to emphasize the dramatic nature of certain encounters. The dynamism comes to amplify the dramatic echo of the signifier and the unsaid that speaks through certain acts. While most static shot-composition are quite straightforward, Ninagawa does integrate more visually powerful compositions. What makes these shots more powerful is either the use of geometry or how this dimension is utilized to visually echo the state of Iemon’s relationship with Iwa for example.

The framing of the finale, Iwa’s dramatic revenge, fails to fully impress the spectator. While there are some pleasant horror-images, the reliance on overly-dramatic music to accompany the intrusion of the haunting presence, the restless spirit our for revenge, overpowers Ken’ichi Hagiwara’s performance (Music-note 1). The problem is not so much the stylistic choices, which are common within Japanese cinema of the late seventies and early eighties, but the fact that the style washes away the substance evoked by the performances.

An even bigger problem with the composition of Summer of Demon is that Ninagawa does not find a good pace to support the narrative’s unfolding. The composition, quite frankly, fails to support the dramatic turns and twists that lead to Iemon’s downfall. Certain scenes are too short, some moments are too long or unnecessary. The lack of a pleasant and enticing visual rhythm does not only cause the many pleasant moments to lose or miss its effect, but also makes it difficult for the spectator to invest in the narrative.

Summer Of Demon succeeds to freshen up Iemon’s narrative up by re-introducing some under-utilized elements from the kabuki-play into the narrative and exploiting the spectator’s expectations, but fails to give the film an engaging rhythm. Despite some nice visual compositions and some great performances, Ninagawa’s composition ultimately deflates the drama, leaving this adaptation unable to touch the spectator. 

Notes

General-note 1: There are other changes in the narrative as well, but to delve too deep into them would destroy the spectator’s enjoyment and the way the screenwriters play with the spectator’s expectations.One radical change, to whet the spectator’s appetite, concerns the bag of poison that Iwa consumes.

General-note 2: In The Ghosts of Yotsuya (1956),bOsode (Michiko Ozawa) plays such a small part that we did not even feel necessary to mention her in our review. In other words, she is not an important figure that impacts the flow of the narrative nor has a function in staging the narrative’s message. The Ghost of Yotsuya (1959) frames Osode a someone, who due to her sister’s ghostly intervention, learns the truth about Iemon and joins her husband, who survived his murder-attempt, to enact revenge on this demon-like ronin. In Shinshaku Yotsuya Kaidan (1949), Osode and her husband team up to uncover the truth about Oiwa’s absence.  

General-note 3: In The Ghosts of Yotsuya (1956), Naosuke is framed as a blackmailer in need for money who threatens to reveal Iemon’s dark criminal secrets to the Other.

In Shinshaku Yotsuya Kaidan (1949), he is the one who seduces and forces Iemon to transgress the marital law.In The Ghost of Yotsuya (1959), he has a similar function, seductively inviting Iemon to further pursue his materialistic tendency and, if necessary, transgress the law, to satisfy this want.

Narra-note 1: However, we should be wary of the signifiers Iemon directs to his wife, Iwa. If we carefully analyse Iemon’s speech, we quickly realize that the narrative he create following the encounter with Samon is a refined construction to support his samurai-ego, the facade hiding his criminal intent. He utilizes some truths – he truly did encounter Samon, he did push Osode into prostitution to finance his ‘revenge’, … etc. – to demonize him and to emphasize his righteousness as husband.

Narra-note 2: Naosuke utilizes the same contrast between being castrated (i.e. I was too late to save Yomoshichi from his untimely death) and phallic possession (i.e. I will take revenge for you) to seduce Osode and deceive her into becoming his wife.   

Music-note 1: The musical accompaniment is western in nature – featuring a well-known classical piece and some moody jazzy piano-pieces.