Summer of Ubume (2005)

directed by Akio Jissōji

Japan

123 minutes

3.5 stars out of 5

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I read Summer of the Ubume a few months ago and it's never really left my mind since then, but somehow I failed to notice that there was a film adaptation of it. And, what's more, it was directed by one of my favorite directors, Akio Jissōji. I had no foreknowledge of this movie's existence, so I wasn't giving the question any thought, but if you had asked me who I would want to direct an adaptation of Summer of the Ubume, I would probably have named Jissōji before anybody else.

I'm not going to attempt to go through every plot point of the book, because if nothing else, Summer of the Ubume is a tremendously complicated story. There are about a hundred different threads that mostly all end up connecting at some point or another, as well as what feels like a hundred different characters, major and minor, who are involved in the central mystery. That "central mystery", if I may do it a great injustice by summing it up in just a few words, is this: A daughter from a reclusive, ostracized family who have run a medical practice for several hundred years appears to have been pregnant for 20 months, ever since the unexplained disappearance of her husband under mysterious circumstances. There is no "main character" so to speak - possibly in the book, but not really in the film - but the two central players are Sekiguchi, who feels more like a non-person in this than ever, and Kyogoku, Sekiguchi's enigmatic occultist bookseller friend, who also moonlights as a Shinto priest and an exorcist. I would argue that Kyogoku is the most important character of the whole thing, but again, it's difficult to explain exactly why without writing an essay on this story.

If that name sounds familiar, it should. Summer of the Ubume was written by Natsuhiko Kyogoku. (Also worth noting is the film's original title, which is translated literally into its English one: Ubume no Natsu). The author and the character don't just share a surname but part of their given name as well; book-Kyogoku's name is Akihiko, although this is never mentioned in the film. And "Kyogoku" isn't even his real surname, it's a nickname based off the bookstore that he runs, but again, not mentioned in the film. It's very difficult not to wonder if the author wrote this character as something of a stand-in for himself, and honestly, if so, I don't have a problem with that at all. Movie- and book-Kyogoku feel exactly like how it would be if an author were to somehow gain the ability to transport themself into their own story: He's preternaturally savvy about everything that's going on, and although he interacts with other characters, he seems like he's never in doubt of how the story is going to end. Most of his actions throughout the film and the book are done to manipulate other characters into seeing his point of view, which is the truth, or as close to it as you can get. I found this all fascinating, not pretentious, although I recognize how it could easily come off that way. Having a very thinly-veiled stand-in for the author transforms Summer of the Ubume from a mere work of fiction into something that stretches the boundaries of the term "fiction" itself. With no background, this doesn't come across as well in the film; Kyogoku instead just seems like a guy who has all the answers for no reason, but he still works as a character.

While this whole movie works on its own, I think there's a lot about it that underscores the difficulty in adapting a book. This movie is two hours; the book took me several days to read and required participation on my part in the form of generating a mental picture of what was going on and keeping track of the plot and characters. I wouldn't say that this movie has any flaws, but you lose a lot of what made the book so unique: Namely, the literal pages upon pages of Kyogoku philosophizing on the nature of reality and the limits of human perception, which forms the core of the story, but there's also a little more background on Sekiguchi's time in the military, and a fairly large subplot about the depth of his involvement with the impossibly pregnant woman (I didn't mind this being glossed over, however, because it was gross). This kind of feels like a movie you have to study for, but then the book itself also feels like you have to study for it.

So let's move on to more of what the story is about. Towards the beginning of the film, Kyogoku talks about what will become the backbone of the film: That human perception cannot show us the "truth" of reality, and there's nothing that is truly, objectively "strange" in the world, because seemingly supernatural events, and the perception of them as such, are inextricably tied to the brain's limitations in experiencing reality. Essentially, because we experience reality through the filter of our own interpretation of it, we can never know what the "truth" is, if there even is such a thing. This is not just a simple story involving a family curse and an old legend, it's something that questions the very nature of such things. It's the philosopher's ghost story: A premise that acknowledges the supernatural as really existing in the minds of those who experience it, but then shows how fallible those minds are. Kyogoku's end-game when he reveals that the location of the husband's body was known all along is an exposure of the human brain's flawed ability to perceive the world.

Jissōji's unmistakable style is perfect for portraying all of this in a visual medium. Admittedly this is the first of his later movies that I've seen (aside from the episodes of various Ultra series he directed); his earlier films like Poem and Mandara left an indelible mark on my very soul and will never be topped by anything else he made. But this is good, this is really good. Decentralizing Sekiguchi in the film changes the story from having an unreliable narrator to the story itself being unreliable; now, instead of figuring out the cracks in how Sekiguchi is remembering and perceiving events, we have to figure out what we, the viewers, are unable to see. There's always a feeling that there is a larger truth in the film that we are not quite ever able to reach - flashes of a disturbing bird-winged woman hint at this. Another framing device I really enjoyed was the occasional interlude of a storyteller presenting an illustrated version of the events of the film to a group of children - bonus points if you spotted that the storyteller is played by tokusatsu veteran Noboru Mitani, probably best known from Ultraman Taro and Space Sheriff Gavan. (Kyogoku the author also appears in a vanishingly small cameo role.)

All in all I guess the only real complaint I have about this aside from the inherent changes made when a book is adapted for film is that it could have been a little spookier. The exorcism scene in the book was a terrifying whirlwind; I could not put it down. It is a central moment in the film as well, but it's (necessarily) protracted. If anybody's seen The Wailing, I imagined something more like the absolute powerhouse of an exorcism scene from that film. Kyogoku is not exorcising any literal spirits, just dispelling the misperceptions of human witnesses, but although nothing haunts Summer of the Ubume aside from our own grudges and flaws, the eeriness of it comes from realizing the limits of our perception. However, despite Jissōji's immense skill in creating an atmosphere that is deeply unnerving for no apparent reason (the whole of It Was A Faint Dream feels like a panic attack), unless this movie was about eight hours long, it couldn't capture one hundred percent the immersiveness of the book. This is not a mark against the film itself, because I think this movie is excellent, it's just different from the book.