An impoverished samurai abandons his loving wife, only to discover a horrible truth upon his return home. A young woodcutter marries a beautiful stranger, and breaks a promise that spells his doom. A blind musician plays for a spectral audience, learning the cost of beauty in the bargain. A martial retainer makes an unlikely enemy, setting him on a path towards an uncertain fate. So proceed the strange tales of Kwaidan, a masterpiece of folk horror cinema directed by Masaki Kobayashi, and adapted from the collections of Japanese folklore transcribed by writer and translator Lafcadio Hearn.
The stories of Kwaidan are strange and unpredictable, offering ambiguous conclusions and often contradictory moral lessons. This is intentional, and Kwaidan is stronger for it, for spirits are not beholden to our simple moral calculus or inherent need for certainty. We attempt to corral the indefinable, to set pen against parchment and draw meaning from experience, but the true nature of the fantastical is more like the ink sinking through water that accompanies Kwaidan’s title sequence – ambiguous and in perpetual flux, its meaning secure only in the eye of the beholder. We are not the stewards of reality. We are not the champions of the world. We are merely one element within it, oblivious to much of what surrounds us. And that scares us more than anything.
“I cannot stay. I have a future. A man must rise to the world,” declares the protagonist of Kwaidan’s first tale, determined to apply an arc of reason to the senselessness of fate. In such tales, all men are like Icarus, certain that they will be the ones to surpass chaotic fortune and claim glory for themselves. They cling to the hope that man’s destiny is to ‘rise to the world’ and carve out a future, heedless of the world’s indifference to our struggles. But is it so wrong to believe we can surpass our station? What else can we do, other than struggle against the cruelty of fate?
I have always been enchanted by stories that envision a spiritual realm which is largely indifferent to our struggles – not some clear moral echo of our failings, but simply another world, vast and strange and immeasurably distant from our own values. Such stories touch on that cosmic horror thread of human irrelevance, that fundamental fear that we are not in fact the center of the universe, and that forces beyond our understanding share this world alongside us, only ever just visible through the corner of our eye. There is indeed horror in that sense of uncertainty, but also a strange kind of hope – a prayer that the world is not fully mundane, that there is always more to discover, a magic hidden in the forests and mountains of the natural world.
Like other animistic beliefs, Shintoism revels in this conception of the world’s supernatural secrets, offering both positive and negative interpretations of the world’s hidden beating heart, of the thousand thousand spirits that dwell and dream and conduct affairs according to a standard of judgment that is as foreign and strange to us as their inhuman and multifarious forms. In collating the variable folkloric tales of ancient Japan into a single collection of mysteries, both Kwaidan and its source material serve to celebrate not just their own original texts, but also the idea that endless numbers of such tales are being experienced and repeated, a living record of our grasping towards the divine.
Such conceptions of the supernatural have been waging a defensive battle for quite some time now. I cannot help but feel sympathetic to their global struggle against mankind’s determination to order and control everything, to slot all matter into stable categories according to either scientific inquiry or more grounded forms of faith, religions that presume the supernatural to be nothing more than a larger human looking down on us from the sky, with all the weird and specific creatures of the earth being categorized as either misinterpreted reflections of the divine or evil spirits intended to trick us.
It is a reflection of such religious formations’ tremendous egos that they presume all pagan or heretical faith is constructed in opposition to their own systems, as a definable “evil” to contrast with their holy “good.” But the spirits of the earth are not simply evil, nor are they inherently good – they just are, ambiguous forces that live according to their own codes, and who infuse their surroundings with the dream-logic of their own distinctive natures. Yokai spirits, fae creatures, djinns and devils and monsters of the deep – the world is greater and more fantastical for their place within it, even if we only imagine it so.
This is not to say there are no systems inherent to this realm, or rules worth keeping in mind. Even within the four brief fables of Kwaidan, certain patterns emerge for detecting and engaging with the supernatural. Those who are haunted by death or regrets have already placed one foot across the threshold, making it easy to invite further specters. Bargains struck with the fae must always be respected; though they do not possess moral codes in the manner we understand them, they have their own lines we must cross, and strict rules for earning their favor or fury. And time and again, Kwaidan emphasizes the power of the threshold – an open door, an ominous gate, a portal to another world. When traveling the borderline of present and memory, or life and death, it is easy to find yourself in the realm of the spirits, and not so simple to make your way home.
But of course, the overall point here is less to enforce moral clarity than to celebrate the wonder and mystery of the world. “Maybe it was just my imagination” is our rear-guard defense against the call of the spirit, the ambiguity that folkloric creatures thrive on. Was that really just the wind, or a creature scratching at the window? Were those eyes in the darkness, or just a trick of the light? I love these stories for championing such ambiguities, for adding mystery, magic, and even terror to the untidy corners of the world. Even if their intentions are malicious or actions terrible, I love to think the world is wilder and stranger than we might believe, that its dark reaches outpace our capacity to catalog them. I don’t want the supernatural or religious to be expertly cataloged, pinned down like a butterfly under glass – I want the fantastical and mythic to be inexplicable and endless, forever creeping in at the corners of our mundane lives.
Kwaidan’s stunning production ably supports its fantastical ambitions. Its lush backdrops serve as a testament to the enduring power of a painted sound stage, offering richly detailed and impressively scaled venues for its ominous tales. In cinema we can essentially expand on the promise of theater, embracing abstraction and scale at the same time, presenting a painted world that seems like our own but somehow apart, an effect that actually feels akin to animation, or perhaps reality as experienced in a dream. As in both such venues, every object is manifested and imbued with intention – every visual ornament crafted by hand, offering the composition a sense of vitality and purpose that aligns neatly with this animistic folklore, which also assumes beloved household objects can possess a spirit of their own, and that each shadowy bend in the trees might house a creature spying, considering, plotting to reach out.
Crucially, this act of transportation does not involve attempting to banish the frame, or create a sense of familiar cinematic realism. The tools of theater are employed widely and successfully here, ranging from the kabuki-reminiscent deathly pallor affixed to the faces of those who’ve witnessed the unspeakable, to the deliberate use of spotlights and shadows drawing our eye across the frame. The aesthetic tools used to ensure full theatrical audiences could parse visual choices and dialogue from afar have become a language and toolset apart from the theater, with unique possible applications in film. Rather than seeking a naturalistic illusion, the film invites us to join the characters in the on-stage world they inhabit, of which we can only see a pale reflection while seated out in the theater.
Perhaps the most omnipresent and effective flourish of cinematic staging is Kwaidan’s painted backdrops, alternately providing the comfort of a late summer’s day or the terror of a night lost in a relentless blizzard. While a young man seeks shelter from the storm, he is watched from above by eyes painted across the heavens, an effect calling to mind the ostentatious voyeurism of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis. When he is isolated from his love, the darkness enshrouds him, a single spotlight casting him as alone in a silent world. With its every aesthetic choice, Kwaidan embodies a truth that early directors understood, but which we have since seemingly forgotten – that film is theater on celluloid, and embracing the opportunities of that framing is often far more effective than seeking to disguise the medium’s theatrical origins.
Through Kwaidan’s wandering tales, morally inconstant as they may be, a theme nonetheless emerges of the folly of attempting to clamp down or categorize our surroundings, or to claim what we desire heedless of the cost. The impoverished samurai remarking that his wife hasn’t “aged a day,” looking just as she once was – a warning against dwelling in memory, or sharing our bed with the spirits. The woodcutter’s idle betrayal of a near-forgotten promise – an entreaty to recognize happiness once you’ve found it, and not tempt the vengeful gods. Or a monk’s pointed reflection on hungry ghosts, stating that “for those who believe, they are real. For those who don’t, they aren’t.” Faith and fear are not just emotions; they are methods by which we construct our very reality.
Ultimately, the one resounding theme of Kwaidan is that the world is more mysterious than we know, and that we must tread carefully and with humility, accepting that our understanding of the world will always be fragmentary. It is fitting then that Kwaidan ends on an incomplete manuscript, a story that begs for resolution but offers none. “Why were they left unfinished?” muses the narrator. “Perhaps the writer was lazy. Perhaps he had a quarrel with his publisher. Perhaps he was suddenly called away from his little desk, and never returned.”
The fragmentary nature of such stories aligns neatly with the strange, unknowable spirits of the natural world. Though we as human beings desire coherency of form and dramatic closure, the world itself is rarely so accommodating; we exist within a realm of mystery and chaos, where immoral actions often go unpunished, and good men experience hardship far beyond their proportion. Just as the realm of mankind is full of moral incongruities and dreams abandoned, so does the world of the spirit contain such loose, dangling edges, promising nothing but disruption to our provincial lives. As we must forgive the writer for leaving us with only fragmentary narratives, so we must learn to accept that the world of the supernatural will often challenge or change us without rhyme or reason, offering no lessons, leaving us to pick up the pieces.
“I can imagine several possible endings,” confesses the absent writer to his long-suffering publisher. “But none of them would leave you satisfied. I’ll just leave it to you to imagine for yourself the best ending to a story about a man who swallowed another’s soul.” That’s the ultimate gift of folklore and fairy tales – that they ignite our own imaginations, inviting us to wonder at the possible truths behind their frayed edges, and thereby contribute in our own way to the grand project of preserving magic in the world.
There is little enough magic in our modern lives as it is – so let us celebrate these tales of wonder and mystery, seek the ambiguous and mysterious in our own lives, and embrace the beauty of the unknown, the frightful, fantastical, and ultimately life-affirming idea that we are small creatures in a vast and inexplicable world, tasked with doing right by our responsibilities and loved ones, but also capable of reaching out towards a world beyond the world, even if only through our collective fantasies. Let us hold tight to our fables, embrace humility in our engagement with the unknown, and help foster a spirit of wonder in those who walk beside us. The human heart yearns for something beyond our mortal coil; let us nourish it gladly, and hold fast to the mysteries that bind and transcend us.
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