Kaidan (1964)

This promised to be Japanese ghost stories (it was a very Asian weekend with Kung Fu Panda, J's akido test, As You Like It, and this). It's actually four stories, not really related except they are Japanese and include a "ghost": "Black Hair," "The Woman in the Snow," "Hoichi the Earless," and "In a Cup of Tea."

"Black Hair" was very predictable. A samurai divorces his first wife in Kyoto and leaves her in poverty to marry the daughter of a wealthy, socially prominent family which gains him a better appointment as a samurai. He is haunted by the memory of his wife, who is, by all accounts, better than the second. He sends the second back to her family and waits out his ten year appointment. He then returns to his wife and has a wonderful reunion night only to wake to find her a corpse whose hair is still lovely.

"The Woman in the Snow" is also predictable. Two woodcutters, one old and one young, get caught in a snowstorm. The older one is killed by the Snow Woman but she spares the younger because he is beautiful--but on the condition that he never tell anyone about that night or she'll kill him. Well, we all know what's going to happen there. She comes to him as a mortal and they get married and have three kids. She, meanwhile, doesn't seem to age and they have the perfect marriage until one night, in the right light, she looks like the Snow Women. Well the man then tells her all about it, forgetting (of course) that he was sworn to tell no one. She reminds him of this fact while revealing that she is the Snow Woman. She then abandons him--leaving him alive to care for the children but promising to kill him if they ever speak ill of him.

"Hoichi the Earless" was my favorite and probably could have just been the whole movie. The beginning of this part tells the story of the ancient battle between the Genji and the Heike clans in Japan. Then we fast forward to find Hoichi, who is blind, living in a temple which was built in an attempt to calm the restless spirits killed on the site during the battle. Hoichi is left alone in the temple one night and is visited by a man who requests that he come chant the story of the battle for his master--the child emperor. Hoichi goes and is sworn to tell no one. He tells no one even when directly questioned about it. He continues to go to play every night and begins looking like he is deathly ill. One night the priest of the temple sends two men to follow Hoichi to see where he is going. They find him chanting and playing in the middle of a cemetery. They drag him back and the priest explains that he has been visited by ghosts and they will rip him to shreds if he visits one more time. The priest and his assistant then cover Hoichi in religious texts from head to toe--this is very intricate and very pretty. They instruct him to sit outside and wait for the ghost but that, when the ghost comes, he is not to move or speak no matter what happened. The ghost comes and cannot see Hoichi because he is covered in the religious text but the assistant missed Hoichi's ears. The ghost sees only the ears and decides to take them back to his master to prove he tried to bring Hoichi. The ghost rips off Hoichi's ears but Hoichi does not speak. Hoichi recovers, sans ears, and becomes famous as the earless chanter. Nobles, maybe ghosts, visit from far and wide and he plays for them at the temple, making him a rich man.

The last one, "In a Cup of Tea," was less interesting than Hoichi but sort of intriguing. It starts out being about unfinished stories and speculating about why they may have been unfinished. It then says, here's a story that's unfinished and we know why. So, the story begins: a man sees a face in his cup of tea, repeatedly--even after tossing out the tea and refilling, and even after smashing the cup on the ground--finally he gets over it and drinks the tea. He then returns home where is he is a guard in a large house. The man he saw in the cup of tea appears out of nowhere. He fights and injures the ghost man and the ghost disappears. The man calls the other guards who search the house and find no one. The next night three men appear to tell the man that he has injured their master and the master has gone to a hot springs to recover but will return to avenge his injury the next month. The guard fights the three men and seems to go mad. The story ends there and we cut back to the frame where the published has come to visit the author (who was writing the ghost story). The writer seems to not be at home but the woman who lets the publisher in screams and runs away, then the publisher does the same, after looking in the barrel. We then see that the author is trapped in the water in the barrel. The writer's story had left off with a line about what might happen if you consume another man's soul.

These are interesting--maybe worth using the Hoichi or Tea one in teaching--but the whole thing is almost intolerably long at 2 hours 5 minutes. It's a little slow and the segmenting makes it seem longer to me. Maybe watching one at a time over the course of several days would be better. Who knows. But I did like the Hoichi one very much.