“I’ll never forgive you if you do”.

In 1956, the release of Shintaro Ishihara’s novel Season of The Sun, a novel attacking traditional post-war morality, help give birth to the Sun Tribe (Taiyōzoku) phenomenon. While such attack might seem rebellious, it is important to underline that the emphasis on capitalism, masculinity, pleasure, and individuality forms the seed of his later nationalistic politics – from the elitist refusal to be controlled by the traditional Other to the nationalistic refusal to be controlled by America, from individual self-assertion to national self-assertion.

Yet, while one must consider Ishihara’s post-war nihilistic work as the background upon which he built his nationalistic politics, one should not remain oblivious to the fact that, within his early work, liberation always had a threatening quality. This is maybe most evident in Koreyoshi Kurahara’s adaptation of Shintaro Ishihara’s Fuka Onna (1959) – 鱶女 – a tragic love story blending Sun Tribe cinema, folk horror, and sexual anxiety together (Language-note 1).

We meet Toshio (Tamio Kawachi) at the very moment he loses a musical-chair game for the third time at a party. While he, under pressure of the audience, performs a penalty-performance – he does some handstand walking, he promptly leaves the party as the game enters his next round and sails off.  

The following day, Tsutsumi (Ryohei Uchida), a novelist recovering from a nervous breakdown, encounters Toshio relaxing on a timber deck. Tsutsumi is visibly shaken and tells Toshio, yet not without any reservations, that he saw a woman on Toshio’s boat. Despite Tsutsumi’s emphasize on his nervous imagination, Toshio sets out to check his boat. While, during the night, he only discovers half-eaten fish around his boat, the following morning he encounters a beautiful woman (Hisako Tsubaka) relaxing in his boat.   

They start talking, yet she promptly takes her leave upon hearing the sound of nearing fishing-boat. They call Toshio out and tell him about a trespasser that busts fishing corves to rip fish apart all over the inlet and the unfortunate and tragic drowning of Shinsaku, a young man from a nearby fishing village. In the evening, however, he discovers, much to his surprise, her relaxing on his bed in his room.

Koreyoshi Kurahara opens Woman From The Sea by evoking Toshio’s subjective position. The signifiers uttered by Toshio’s older brother Katsuhiko (Sadao Mizutani), evoke that he is animated by a melancholic solitude – a solitude amplified by the recent loss of his father. The social event, the cocktail of joyous cries and acts of pleasure that swirl around him, does not allow him to momentarily escape his solitude, but singles him out as being radically cut off from mundane pleasures, exposes him as being radically Other. The swirling pleasures of others slowly erode his ego – his sense of self – and exposes, in a rather brutal way, the abyss of his own subjectivity. Toshio flees, in this sense, to protect his own ego from being washed away by the cocktail of twirling pleasures; he secludes himself not to be effaced by his own melancholy as stirred up by the uncontrollable currents of pleasures.    

Some spectators might be surprised by the mundanity that marks his presence the following day – playing an instrument and whistling to indulge in the summery atmosphere. Yet, this sequence subtly re-emphasizes that Toshio can maintain his mundane ego and keep his melancholy in check within a self-imposed space of loneliness. Such solitary space stabilizes, in a certain sense, Toshio’s relation with respect to the Other and his own ego.

The signifiers spun around the presence of the mysterious woman – the allusive signifiers she addresses to Toshio and the signifiers of frustration uttered by the fisherman, do not only reveal that she is from the sea, but heavily implies thar engaging with her (seductive beauty) will only cause one’s own destruction. 

The fact that she is an otherworldly being – an onryo – which spells danger for male others is affirmed by the tale the villagers tell to the police officer, the tale of a supposed tatari (i.e. an ‘otherworldly’ consequence – divine retribution – caused by committing an offence, by breaking of an unwritten rule). The appearance of the female shape is not only linked with the murder of two large sharks a long time ago, but indirectly associated with the male deaths that followed – the decapitation of the sharks’ murderer, the discovery of Yasu’s dismembered body twenty years later, and the discovery of Shinsaku’s ripped shirt and his geta (traditional sandals) on the shore.

The spectator is, in this way, inaugurated in a narrative structure that opposes or contrasts his knowledge of the wandering threat with Toshio’s naivety, his failure to grasp the danger that seductively dances around him. It is by establishing such a contrast that the spectator becomes plagued by a question that generates a subtle quantum of tension: Will Toshio fall victim to her and be meekly led to his own destruction or will he, from his melancholic position from which he falls in love with her, be able to appease and remediate her? However, there is another question that this opposition allows the spectator to formulate, a question that subtly heightens the sense of intrigue: Why did the mysterious woman seek Toshio out? As the narrative unfolds, the spectator is slowly led to assume that the answer lies in Toshio’s flight from the party, in the subjective solitude and melancholy he emanated while yachting.

Kurahara amplifies the tension within Woman From The Sea by re-structuring his narrative around a radical promise – the mysterious woman makes Toshio promise to not tell a soul about her fishing spot. In other words, she sets, much like the otherworldly beauty in the famous short story in Lafcadio Hearn’s Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things (1904)and its filmic adaptation The Snow Woman (1968), a rule that is under threat of being accidently broken; she sets, in other words, the stage for another tarari. However, the spectator should not expect the film to merely thread the well-known path of the beloved horror story.

Shintaro Ishihara and Koreyoshi Kurahara, in fact, turn Woman From The Sea into a critical exploration of the opposition between modern and traditional discourses concerning femininity and the role of exploitation within relational and social structures. This thematical dimension is brought to the fore by the dramatic disappearance of Katsuhiko after he opportunistically approaches Kunio’s otherworldly girlfriend.  

The otherworldly dimension of the narrative allows Kurahara to equate the exploitation of the body of sea by the fishermen to the exploitation of the female body by the male subject. The thoughtless intrusion within nature to ensure one’s livelihood signals the thoughtless sexual approach of the female body to ensure one’s phallic “subsistence”.   

At another level, Kurahara associates the perceived danger of the shark – “We won’t be able to live safely in the inlet until we do something about her” explicitly with the danger that emanates from a sexualized female body – “She’s using you”. The traditional/patriarchal Other, represented by the villagers and its elders, have no other answer to the threat of ‘modern’ sexuality than a murderous one; if she shows her head again, we will kill her.

Woman From The Sea offers a very straightforward compositional combination of fluid dynamism and static moments and inconspicuous monochrome photography. However, there are enough moments of compositional elegance to be noted – moments where the subtle interplay between light and shadows fleetingly elevate the aesthetic impact of the shot-composition. Some under-water shots sort a similar pleasing effect on the spectator by emphasizing the elegance of bodily movement (Cine-note 1).

Spectators mostly familiar with contemporary J-horror might be surprised by the musical accompaniment that accompanies the title sequence. This piece, however, does not merely establish the sultry summery exotic atmospheric frame of the narrative, but also evokes a melancholic moodiness and hints, by interweaving a feminine singing voice into the music, the not-yet manifested presence of otherworldly beauty.

Sultry musical pieces – unperturbed by the otherworldly voice – are utilized to decorate the encounter between Toshio and the mysterious woman and signal the seed of romance established by their unexpected encounter. Music is also utilized to decorate dramatic turns within the narrative and the return of the otherworldly singing in the latter half of the narrative signals that the otherworldly threat has manifested itself.      

Kurahara, however, does not only rely on non-diegetic music to establish the film’s atmospheric frame – the sun-tribe frame of carefree summery pleasures and exotic indulgences, but also utilizes diegetic sounds and music to evoke how this atmosphere embraces subjects and how subject support this pacifying atmospheric embrace (e.g. Toshio playing the ukulele while whistling).

The same is true for signalling the (immanent) presence of the otherworldly. Kurahara relies on non-diegetic decorations (e.g. a subtle reverb of the voice) and subtle diegetic sound-decorations (e.g. sudden rushes of the wind, the barking of a dog) to tremble the mundane frame of summery pleasures. These decorations sort a foreboding effect not merely because these natural sounds stress certain enunciations, but also because the characters remain oblivious to these fleeting presences. Kurahara also relies on fitting dramatic musical accompaniment to foreshadow the appearance of the otherworldly threat and its materialization, hereby kindling the spark of tension aroused by the narrative oppositions. 

Woman From The Sea offers a fresh take on the sun-tribe genre by disrupting the tale of post-war subjective emptiness with an element of horror – the sudden appearance of an otherworldly being. While one can read the female sexual element in various ways – e.g. as that what escapes male phallic logic, Kurahara, nevertheless, heavily implies with his ending that the solution to the post-war turmoil – a sense of defeat, a lingering  nihilism – does not lie in the ‘romantic’ fantasy sexual liberation.

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Notes

Language-note 1: Rather than the signifier same [サメ/鮫], the villagers utilize the older signifier fuka [ふか/鱶] to refer to the woman.

Cine-note 1: The few shots with a shark-like presence in the waters are really well-done. These shots echo the danger that emanates from being confronted with the presence of the shark very well.