Only in the late nineties and early 2000’s, Japanese horror succeeded in capturing the imagination of international audiences, yet the directors of these horror classics (e.g. Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Hideo Nakata, Takashi Shimizu, and Takashi Miike) could only deliver such mesmerizing experiences by standing on the shoulders of earlier giants in Japanese cinema. Not only could they rely on Japan’s rich folkloric tradition (minkan denshō) – the rich amalgamation of kitsune, oni, onryō, tengu, yōkai, bakemono, and yūrei, but they were also enlightened by how masters like Kaneto Shindo, Nobuo Nakagawa, and Masaki Kobayashi visualized these old tales and legends.
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Yet, even less renowned directors, like Tokuzo Tanaka, left their mark on the history of Japanese horror cinema – influencing the Japanese horror film in the decades to come. One of Tanaka’s most well-known horror films is The Snow Woman, an adaptation of a short story published in Lafcadio Hearn’s Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things (1904). In this short story, nights of heavy blizzards are haunted by a wandering snow woman, an otherworldly manifestation of the spirit of the snow who murders everyone who catches a glance of her.
The dynamic that inaugurates the filmic adaptation is the same as in the narrative. One night, our ayakashi (Shiho Fujimura) enters a desolate cabin and freezes the old wood-sculptor Shigetomo (Tatsuo Hanabu) to death, but spares his young apprentice Yosaku (Akira Ishihama). Yet, she does not leave before warning him that if he were to speak of what he saw, she’ll have to take his life.
What unfolds after this horrible night follows Hearn’s short story quite faithfully. Some time later, Yosaku has a chance encounter with a young woman called Yuki (Shiho Fujimura). The spectator, who knows the meaning of the Japanese signifier yuki (snow) and sees the snow-woman’s face echo within Yuki’s face, quickly surmises, unlike the smitten Yosaku, the true nature of this beautiful charming female appearance. By structuring The Snow Woman around such contrast of knowledge – the spectator perceives the ominous signs, while the main character, in his romantic bliss, remains ignorant, Tanaka infuses a small quantum of tension and uneasiness within the narrative’s atmosphere and unfolding. The spectator cannot but be suspicious of Yuki and worryingly hope that Yosaku, who unexpectedly entered the field of marital happiness, can keep the promise of secrecy he made on that horrifying night.
Yet, what makes Tanaka’s The Snow Woman so unforgettable is how screenwriter Fuji Yahiro, by introducing narrative changes – e.g. the master and his apprentice are wood-sculptors and not woodcutters – and certain additions, gives Hearn’s rather simple story a surprisingly pleasing thematical depth that heightens the dramatic impact of the finale.
The first important addition Fuji Yahiro makes is ‘religious’ in nature. He resorts to Shinto and its idea of vitalism to create a frame for his horror-romance and allows the spectator to experience the well-known folkloric story in a fresh light. The religious element that is, in our view, central to Tanaka’s narrative is the practice of considering certain natural objects as yorishiro, as mediating bodies that allow the Kami to manifest itself.
The majestic and awe-inspiring tree Shigetomo and Yosaku stumble upon, as is visually implied, must be considered as a Yorishiro. Yet, rather than recognizing the tree for the mediating body it is, Shigetomo wants to cut it down and utilize its wood to carve out a statue of Kannon, the Buddhist goddess of mercy and compassion. Yet, the ghostly snow woman does not materialize because of this transgressive wish, but due to the vile earthly desire that animates this wish. Shigetomo does not wish to cut this Yorishiro to profess his piety to Buddhist teachings, but to acquire fame and carve, quite literally, his name into the history of Buddhist art. Our elderly artist seeks to violate a bodily vessel of an unknown kami to please his own ego – his focus on vanity is the fundamental transgression (Kunitsu-tsumi).
This interpretation also allows the spectator to grasp that the only reason why our snow woman spares Yosaku is because he, in contrast to Shigetomo, is not corrupted by the wish to glorify his own ego – Her enunciation “you are young and beautiful” echoes the most prized virtue of Shinto: akaki kiyoki kokoro, being a pure spirit. The lack of corruption also echoes in the reason why he ultimately accepts to carve the Kannon out of the majestic tree: to honour his master’s wish and fulfill his pious duty to his fatherly figure, the Other. The fact that Yosaku’s subjective logic is determined by filial piety (oya-kōkō) is, moreover, why Yuki falls in love with him – he resists the narcissistic corruption of his ego and remains pure in accordance with Shinto and Confucian ethics.
The second addition Fuji Yahiro is the doubling of threats. Yosaku and Yuki’s marital relationship, which is built upon unvocalized truths, is threatened by Lord Jito (Taketoshi Naitō), the governer. Driven by his lust for Yuki, he does not only convince the head priest in letting Gyokei (Mizuho Suzuki), a renowned sculptor, compete with Yosaku to create a Kannon statue for the local temple, but also frames him for illegally cutting down the majestic tree. This external threat is utilized to show how far Yuki will go to keep her harmonious relationship from being ripped apart by the scheming and thirsting Lord Jito.
Due to Yahiro’s additions and changes, Tanaka’s The Snow Woman comes to juxtapositions and contrast punitive violence towards ‘male’ transgressions (narcissistic preoccupation with fame or sexually possessing women) and compassionate love as a transformative and protective force. While Tanaka utilizes Yosaku and Yuki’s tragic tale to explore which subjective force – revenge or compassion – is strongest, Tanaka also invites the spectator to contextualize Yuki’s acts and answer, for himself, whether she is morally wrong or right. The director, moreover, takes the opportunity to subtly frame Shinto, the ‘religious’ cornerstone of the traditional Japanese symbolic order, as an accomplice in protecting the corrupted hierarchical order and repressing the amoral excesses of the human drive that threaten to upset it (General-note 1).
The composition of The Snow Women offers balanced concatenation of static and dynamic shots, decorated with some shaky shots, dramatic camera-motions, and slowly creeping zoom-in movements.
Yet, what will stay with spectator long after the credits have faded is not so much the composition as such, but the horror-imagery that inaugurates and concludes the narrative. That many of those images unsettle the spectator and visually satisfy him as well is not merely due to Tanaka’s artful shot-composition and the effective visual and practical effects, but also because of the aural framework, the eerie auditive landscape that frames the imagery. Tanaka coalesces sounds (e.g. the howling wind, a ghostly scream, piercing screeches, … etc.) in a highly potent way to create an eerie atmospheric and thoughtfully exploits dramatic musical accompaniment to give less-horrifying sequences their emotional impact (Sound-note 1).
Tokuzo Tanaka’s The Snow Woman remains, up until this day, an incredibly satisfying tragic romance-horror. This film does not merely offer the spectator a glance at the past of Japanese horror cinema, but signals to the spectator that this past is full of horror classics waiting to be re-discovered and fully appreciated.
Notes
General-note 1: Readers should not be surprised to read this as religions have been utilized as tools of social control – the opium of the people – for many centuries.
Sound-note 1: In a few instances, the atmospheric intermingling of sounds is decorated with a sound-technique – two rectangular wooden clappers clapping together (ki) – commonly used in Japanese traditional theatre (i.e. Noh and Kabuki). This sudden intrusion heightens the dramatic impact of certain visual moments and further elevate the unsettling quality of the atmosphere.