Hal Kitchen
Kaneto Shindo’s 1964 film Onibaba (trans. Demon Women) is widely regarded as one of the greatest horror films in world cinema. The film follows the jealousy and fear sparked between a mother and her stepdaughter when they learn the son uniting them has died, leaving the younger woman free to pursue her desire and abandon her stepmother amidst the ravages of war. It’s a very cynical and dark film but one rooted in a sense of compassion for peasant women of the feudal era, for whom achieving any kind of agency necessitated acts of evil and gross breaches of societal taboos. This is a theme that Kaneto Shindo revisited and reexamined throughout the ’60s and looking at his adjacent works, we can gain an insight into what makes Onibaba such a radical and unforgettable masterpiece.
The 1960s was a time of radical reinvention for Japanese cinema. The post-war years had seen great auteurs like Akira Kurosawa, Yasujiro Ozu, and Masaki Kobayashi lead Japanese cinema to heights unequaled across much of the globe, with family dramas of love and manners and historical epics exploring morality, honor and justice, interrogating the institutions that had led Japan into imperialism and ruin. As they were across much of the world, this interrogation blossomed into a full blown artistic counterculture in the ’60s, with the narrative ambition and scope of the preceding decade added to with formal experimentation and a riotous disregard for propriety, resulting in era defining works from a new generation like Funeral Parade of Roses, Tokyo Drifter and Woman in the Dunes, and arguably the film that surpassed them all, Onibaba. For his part though, Kaneto Shindo started the decade with a very different kind of film, albeit one that would form a thematic base for much of what he delivered throughout the decade, with 1960’s The Naked Island.
Told with scarcely any dialogue, The Naked Island tells the story of a woman (Nobuko Otowa) who lives with her husband and two sons on a desolate and otherwise uninhabited island on which they live and work, sustaining a meager farm. There is no source of fresh water on the island though, so in order to irrigate their crops, they spend all day, every day, rowing across to a neighboring island, collecting water in buckets and carrying the buckets up the steel slopes to feed their crops, all of which is shown in exhausting detail. You feel the weight of these buckets, the steepness of these hills, the dryness of the land, and when the woman spills a bucket, we feel the pointless tragedy of her existence. We also see that she and her husband are not equal partners in this Sisyphean existence, as when she accidentally spills her cargo, he strikes her to the ground, without comment or anger, simply as punishment and to discourage further accidents.
Extraordinarily, The Naked Island is not a period piece, as we see when the family make a rare excursion into town and watch TV through a shop window. Instead we are glimpsing a family whom the irresistible march of modernity has somehow left behind. Both husband and wife are deeply unhappy in their existence but as the film ends, it is she who reaches her breaking point after the death of one of their sons, and in her grief, she simply throws down her buckets and gives up. The protagonist of The Naked Island lives as her duty, as her husband, commands, and receives nothing in return, no power, no pleasure, no joy or pride. As Kaneto Shindo’s next film illustrates, not all women succumb to the patriarchy.
Four years later, Kaneto Shindo released Onibaba. It is perhaps the definitive film—along with De Sica’s Two Women—in the tradition of wartime films about women. Set during a period of incessant war, the film follows a mother (tellingly, also played by Noboku Otowa) and her daughter-in-law (Jitsuko Yoshimura), the man who unites them has been off fighting for some time, and to survive, the pair have turned murderesses, killing any soldier who loses his way in the tall grasses where they live, and selling his armor to a local merchant. To survive, these women have abandoned morality, but in so doing, have freed themselves from the rule of men, of propriety and duty, and liberated themselves to pursue their own desires.
Their predatory equilibrium is disrupted by the arrival of their neighbor (Kei Sato), conscripted with the son he has deserted and returned home, bringing news of his death. Neither woman is especially grief stricken though, much of their humanity has been sapped out of them by their situation, and the young widow is instead quick to attach herself to the neighbor, he is after all, the only eligible man around and she has her needs. Alas, so does her mother-in-law, who becomes consumed with jealousy, though it is perhaps ambiguous whether she is jealous because her daughter-in-law is abandoning her, because she’s dishonoring the memory of her son or simply because the younger woman’s getting some sexual gratification while she’s not. A solution presents itself in the form of a proud and condescending samurai with a demonic war-mask. He says his beautiful face is not for the likes of her to look upon, so she kills him, takes the mask and uses it to scare her daughter-in-law to abandon her lustful ways. However, karmic justice strikes and a seemingly supernatural power fuses the mask to the mother’s face, transforming her into a true demon of spite and envy.
Onibaba finds its women on the path to liberation. Unlike the protagonist of The Naked Island, mother and daughter seek their own desire, plundering men, even men of significance, for their trinkets or their sexual natures and then discarding them. Only one of them is truly punished for her crimes, and the crime that incurs the retribution is trying to frighten and trap another woman, not all those men they both killed and robbed. However, there are still ways in which these women are confined, above all by each other. They are also at the mercy of the bartering merchant, who drives a hard bargain in exchanging swords and armor for bags of rice. Moreover, the ultimate goal of the younger woman is a man’s comfort and companionship, she does not want to live the life of a spinster with her mother in law. She wants to get out there and get some! The desire she chooses to pursue is that of a man, while the mother chooses to hold onto her instead and is undone.
These stumbling blocks became the focus when Kaneto Shindo returned to this concept with Kuroneko (trans. Vampire Cats! I added the exclaimation mark because I thought it deserved it). Like Onibaba, Kuroneko follows a mother (yet again played by Otowa) and her daughter-in-law (Kiwako Taichi) preying upon men in a war-torn region of feudal Japan, however, while Onibaba merely raised the specter of the supernatural, keeping things within the realm of possibility, Kuroneko is a full-blown fantasy horror. As the title implies, these women are vampire cats (!). As in Onibaba, mother and daughter-in-law are abandoned at home when the son goes off to war. This time, the women suffer at the hands of men first. The film opens in the aftermath of atrocity, as we find the women have been surprised in their home by a band of soldiers, robbed, presumably raped, and murdered, their home burned to ash in the soldiers’ wake. Quite understandably, the women return as vengeful spirits, luring men off the road and feeding on them, a metaphorical escalation of the activities of their predecessors.
Also unlike in Onibaba, the son survives battle and returns covered in glory (he killed a feared and renowned opponent by stabbing him in the back when he got his club stuck in the mud, the myth of honor in war is another recurrent theme in these films). So praised are his actions though he is charged with slaying the monsters preying on noble warriors in the vicinity, unaware that the monsters are his own wife and mother. Like many before him he falls into their trap, not recognizing them, but they do recognize him, despite his rapid elevation, and his wife cannot bring herself to kill the man she loved. In sparing him, she defaults on the deal she made for her second life and earns a true death, while her mother-in-law scorns her weakness and chooses to live on as a demon. So here we see an inversion of the resolution of Onibaba, where the younger woman does choose a pure and romantic love, at the cost of her own life, while the older woman embraces her monstrosity and lives on, feared, reviled and unloved. She is not free from dependence upon men or other women, free from servitude. She will take no lover and she will not see heaven, but nor will she carry any buckets.
