Dear friends,
In his 1993 book Spectres of Marx, Jacques Derrida argued that though the USSR had recently collapsed and Francis Fukuyama’s neoliberal “end of history” pronounced, the key ideas and approaches of Marxism not only survived but were, in effect, indelible. To explain this he used the titular metaphor of the spectre, itself taken from the opening line of The Communist Manifesto, and coined the word “hauntology” as playful reference to the way the past is always intrinsic to the present. He also threw in a bunch of Hamlet references for good measure, because of course he did.
In our latest podcast episode, Eddie mentions the “hauntological quality” of Masaki Kobayashi’s 1964 film Kwaidan, which presents an artful anthology of ghost stories set throughout Japan’s distant past. We’re hardly the first to observe that if its main text depicts quite literal hauntings, its deep and fascinating subtext is obsessed with the more abstract hauntings of history.
In Kwaidan, humans meet with spirits that prove variously demanding, accusatory or violent. The titular onryō of ‘The Black Hair’, our first encounter with the otherworldly, is arguably the only one of the film’s demons with any clear motivation for her bloodthirst. Beyond this, we are introduced to types from throughout folklore that seem simply malevolent (‘A Cup of Tea’’s Heinai Shikibu), manipulative (the complexly characterised yuki-onna of ‘The Woman of the Snow’) or both, as in the spectral samurai that torments Hoichi in the feature’s third segment. That these ghouls are shown to spring so physically from the very fabric of the characters’ worlds—earth, snow, wind, fire and water all figure—is, in Kobayashi’s logic, no accident. As in the military motif that hangs over here from his previous films, it seems that in his figuring, Japanese culture and society on the whole are inescapably haunted by these barely concealed nasties. It’s quite the radical approach to folk tale narration.
The very structure of the film, despite its languid pace, seems to crash each of the four stories into one another with relatively abrupt transitions: freeze frames, quick fades to black, silence. Moreover, the action within these stories seems to intensify and, arguably, grow ever stranger. Aside from the obvious comparison—Kobayashi’s Hara-kiri—Kwaidan bears reading alongside Kaneto Shindo’s Onibaba, released just weeks earlier, in November 1964. Here, too, the occult logic of the folk tale is played out in a medieval setting, with war and the military again serving as a key part of the text. But most intriguing is the way it also smashes together spaces and temporalities, shifting fluidly between night, day and various interstitial gloamings while blending its apparently 14th-century backdrop with a perfectly clear 20th-century framework—that is, not only does it symbolically allude to the atomic bomb, it even uses its sometimes evasive dialogue to create the implication that its events could actually be occurring in the wake of just such an event. (It’s folly to lean too hard on this, especially with the samurai presence, but the hermetic seal of its rural setting and limited cast draw us away from an ultra specific historical context and instead into something malleable enough that a reference to Kyoto having “burned to the ground” takes on a broad dystopic quality.)
Ultimately, both of these films offer glimpses into a spirit world whose morals align only obliquely with those of our physical realm. The intensified erotics of Onibaba become reified in the demonic mask that causes havoc in the final reel, but in a way that only offers ellipsis, right down to its ambiguous closing shot: what, specifically, is this spirit punishing and what, if indeed anything, is it sanctioning? So, too, is Kwaidan marked by its presentation of its culture’s spiritual world and folkloric tradition as sites of ethical ambivalence. Derrida wrote in Spectres of Marx, “[a]ll national rootedness […] is rooted first of all in the memory or the anxiety of a displaced—or displaceable—population,” and this certainly speaks to the way in which Kobayashi’s human subjects (as well as Shindo’s) fit into a landscape marked by civil wars, as well as restrictive ways of being that have been forced upon them by greater forces. This is where Kwaidan’s length comes in. The luxurious three hours allow for a quietly insistent repetition and variation on its most horrifying overarching theme: whatever the reason, whatever the period, whoever you are, history’s always waiting somewhere, ready to pop up and haunt you.
As ever, thanks for listening.
—Calum & Eddie
Share this post