The Ghosts of Yotsuya (1956)

directed by Masaki Mōri

Japan

86 minutes

3.5 stars out of 5

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I'm a big Yotsuya Kaidan fan. I'm immensely fascinated by all the different retellings of the story and the spin every director who handles it puts on it, as well as the meaning the story can take on depending on who tells it, and the meaning a viewer can give to it that it may not have originally had. Although the framework stays consistent, the details change a little from film to film. As such, there's no way to really say that a Yotsuya Kaidan adaptation is "standard fare", but... Masaki Mōri's Ghosts of Yotsuya feels like pretty standard fare, and I mean that (mostly) in a good way.

I'm kind of interested in Mōri as a director because there's not much information about him out there. His short Japanese Wikipedia article says he died of overwork at only 55. He directed a respectable amount of films, but the only two that have ever been subtitled (not that getting subtitled is a measure of worth, it just makes films accessible to a wider audience) are this one and Ghost Story: Depth of Kagami, which I've seen and which is a decent movie, but no great shakes. Even this movie is fairly obscure; I couldn't find it online, but I received a DVD as a gift, and the third-party distributor (Sinister Cinema) who put it out seems to be the only place you can get it. To make matters more confusing, the synopsis on the distributor's website is for this, the 1956 movie, but the poster on the cover of the DVD is for Nobuo Nakagawa's version! I'm quite happy with the DVD, the print is very crisp and the subtitles are good, but as usual, I am begging distributors who release any adaptation of Yotsuya Kaidan to use a serif font for the subs.

The story in Ghosts of Yotsuya begins amid fireworks, and is told in such a way that details at the outset are relatively scarce, but more of the past is revealed as the film goes on. This is one of the more upstanding Iemons I've seen, which is another interesting variation: there's kind of a spectrum of Iemon Nastiness™ throughout the adaptations, where on one end he's almost a bystander in a murder plot that he becomes guilty of by association, and on the other end he is the one who kills Iwa directly. Here, Iemon loves Iwa, but his family isn't happy with her, and wants him to marry a much wealthier woman, Ume. He refuses, and Ume's family won't accept simply sending her to him as a mistress, so everyone is at odds about what to do. Whether Iemon genuinely does love Iwa or simply feels a sense of duty to her out of guilt for killing her father - a fact which, somewhat entertainingly, everybody knows except for Iwa - is a little ambiguous, but he does seem to feel genuine regret at the way things turned out at the end. Usually in these movies Iemon is pushed to act by the people around him, which is the case here. His own mother is out for blood, explicitly commanding him to grow a spine and kill Iwa. Naosuke's as amoral as ever, of course, and goes cheerfully along with the plot, but in this case it's Iemon's family who's the real impetus for most of what happens.

The big reason why I wanted to watch this was to see Tomisaburō Wakayama in a very early role. He would play Iemon again, much more amorally, in Tai Katō's 1961 The Tale of Oiwa's Ghost. As with most everyone else, his performance is very stiff - at least until Iemon's big freakout at the end, which is the best part of the movie - and it's funny to see him basically just doing a job, considering how distinctive an actor he eventually would be. He's got a full face of heavy makeup and looks quite a lot like his brother here.

There are some adaptations of Yotsuya Kaidan that feel like they're attempting to be ghost stories, and some - notably Keisuke Kinoshita's version - that feel like they want to be a character study and nothing else. I think this leans a bit more towards the "character study" side. Iemon is somebody who is constantly being pulled at from all sides and doesn't seem to have enough of a concept of self to figure out his own morals. One of the things that drives him in any adaptation is self-hatred; his resentment at his own low birth limiting his station, and his fall into poverty making him irritated with his life and in turn his family. After she dies and begins haunting Iemon, Iwa makes explicit a really interesting point that I never really thought about: by killing her (directly or indirectly) and their child, and joining Ume's family, he ends his own family line, forever. Iemon basically dooms himself from the start of the story, and everything that happens between then and the end is a long, protracted journey where he drags everybody around him down with him. As I said, his breakdown when Iwa and the masseur return from the dead is the high point of the film, and it bleeds out to Naosuke too, who seems to be less tortured by conscience and more just wanting to get all the ghosts to quit bothering him. Interestingly, Sode, who's usually more of a peripheral character, does not mess around in this one. She finds out Naosuke had a part in the murder of her sister and immediately comes at him with a huge knife.

This movie isn't bad by any means, but it felt much longer than it actually is. It goes through all the beats at all the right times, but aside from an unusually sober, reasonable Iemon, it doesn't feel too remarkable in terms of addition to the story. But I still love watching these, and I'll continue to hunt down all of them that I can find. I would love to see more from this director as well, especially any other ghost story films he has.