KWAIDAN 1964
Masaki Kobayashi’s Kwaidan (1964) is a cinematic spell, a ghostly symphony of shadows and color painted from Lafcadio Hearn’s Japanese folk tales. Kwaidan is an anthology of four unrelated stories, each a self-contained descent into the uncanny.
It is not a film that startles so much as it entrances, its four stories unfolding with the slow inevitability of a dream—each segment a meditation on beauty, terror, and the spectral boundaries between the living and the dead.
Kobayashi, (The Human Condition Trilogy (No Greater Love [1959], Road to Eternity [1959], A Soldier’s Prayer [1961])—an epic, nearly ten-hour antiwar saga that stands as one of the most significant achievements in world cinema, Harakiri (Seppuku, 1962)—a powerful critique of the samurai code and feudal hypocrisy, widely regarded as one of the greatest samurai films ever made) is known for his unflinching social dramas, his body of work marked by its moral seriousness, visual rigor, and deep humanism, often critiquing authority and exploring the resilience of the individual against oppressive systems -here turns his eye to the supernatural, marshaling a team of master craftspeople: screenwriter Yoko Mizuki, cinematographer Yoshio Miyajima, composer Toru Takemitsu, and a cast including Rentar Mikuni, Tatsuya Nakadai, and Takashi Shimura. The result is a film that is both painterly and theatrical, its visuals saturated with bold, expressionistic color, its sets vast and stylized, more like haunted paintings than real spaces. Every frame is composed with the precision of a woodblock print, every sound—whether the eerie silence or the atonal clang of Takemitsu’s score—designed to unsettle and seduce.
Four Ghostly Tales:
The Black Hair: A poor samurai, seeking fortune, abandons his devoted wife for a wealthier marriage. Years later, wracked with regret, he returns to find his first wife unchanged, her love undimmed. But as night falls, the samurai discovers he has embraced not the living, but a vengeful specter—her long, black hair becomes a shroud of retribution, and he is consumed by the consequences of his betrayal.
The Woman of the Snow: Lost in a blizzard, the woodcutter Minokichi encounters a ghostly snow woman who spares his life on one condition: he must never speak of her. He marries, raises a family, but years later, confesses the secret to his wife, who reveals herself as the snow spirit. Heartbroken, she leaves him alive for the sake of their children, vanishing into the winter night and leaving Minokichi in a spotlight of tragic solitude.
Hoichi the Earless: The film’s most elaborate tale opens with a dazzling, silent reenactment of the naval battle of Dan-no-ura, the sea stained red with the blood of the defeated Heike clan. Blind musician Hoichi is summoned nightly by ghosts to perform his biwa – a traditional Japanese lute- for the restless dead. The ghosts, appearing as noble samurai, bring him to the cemetery where he unknowingly performs for the restless dead of the Heike clan, who perished in the battle.
To save him, priests cover his body with sacred sutras, Buddhist scripture (specifically, the Heart Sutra) written directly onto Hoichi’s skin with ink as a protective measure against vengeful spirits. But they forget his ears—when the spirits come, they tear his ears from his head, leaving him alive but forever marked. Hoichi’s suffering brings him fame, and he becomes the legendary musician, “Hoichi the Earless.”
In a Cup of Tea: The brief, enigmatic final story follows a samurai’s attendant haunted by a face glimpsed in his teacup. The tale ends abruptly, unresolved, with the narrator musing that some stories remain unfinished—perhaps by design, perhaps by death’s interruption- leaving us adrift in existential uncertainty.
The film’s haunting vibe from the opening ink swirling in water—a metaphor for stories taking shape—Kwaidan is a film obsessed with the act of storytelling itself. The battle in “Hoichi the Earless” is a visual and sonic marvel: a ghostly chorus, a sea of painted faces, and the mournful strum of the biwa. The moment Hoichi sits, his body covered in sacred script except for his ears, is one of horror cinema’s most indelible images. In “The Black Hair,” the samurai’s return to his ruined home becomes a descent into a haunted memory, the past literally and figuratively consuming him. “The Woman of the Snow” floats between warmth and chill, love and doom, its snowbound forests rendered in eerie, unnatural blues.
Takemitsu’s score and sound design are as crucial as the visuals—silence stretches, punctuated by the snap of bamboo, the crack of ice, or the ghostly echo of a biwa, creating a sense of ma, the Japanese aesthetics, that refers to the concept of “negative space,” “gap,” or “pause” those haunted spaces between sounds.
Kwaidan is less a horror film than a ritual, a cinematic noh play where every gesture is deliberate and every shadow meaningful. Its influence echoes through Japanese horror and beyond, in the expressive colors of Bava and Argento, the spectral girls of J-horror, and even the stylized costuming of Star Wars. The film’s deliberate pacing and painterly compositions demand patience, but reward it with images and moods that linger like a half-remembered nightmare.
In the end, Kwaidan is a meditation on memory, regret, and the stories we tell to keep the dead close—or to keep them at bay. It is a ghost story told with exquisite beauty and a chill that seeps into the soul.