Summer of Demon (1981)

directed by Yukio Ninagawa

Japan

96 minutes

3.5 stars out of 5

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I've mentioned on here before that I'm really into Yotsuya Kaidan and am always looking for screen adaptations of it that I haven't seen. Unfortunately I will never be able to watch them all due to the sheer amount of Japanese films from the early 20th century that were destroyed during WWII (if I had a stereotypical lamp genie, the first thing I'd do after getting it to grant me infinite wishes would be to ask it for a copy of Shōzō Makino's adaptation) but there are a good many of them that survive, and they still continue to be made.

One of the things that caught my eye about Summer of Demon was that it had comedic elements. (There are definitely comedy versions of Yotsuya Kaidan out there, but not a ton of them.) The other thing that made me want to see it was Renji Ishibashi in the role of Naosuke. I feel like Naosuke's role is the real wild card of any Yotsuya Kaidan adaptation: some films play him up as diabolically, remorselessly evil; some make him out to be almost a goofball; some have him just be a shady grifter, looking for money and not much else. More on Naosuke's role in this specific adaptation in a moment.

Another thing I think I mentioned in one of my Yotsuya Kaidan reviews is that there is a spectrum of Iemon Nastiness™ that fluctuates throughout these films. Some of the most compelling are ones like Keisuke Kinoshita's version, where Iemon very clearly did love Oiwa at some point and is more of a bystander in a process that he is horrified by than a murderous, adulterous husband. The Iemon of Summer of Demon is somewhere in the middle of that spectrum. I would say he leans further and further into cruelty the more you think about him, though: he's not concerned with Oiwa's safety and well-being as a person and as his wife, just whether or not he's able to possess her for himself. To this end, he kills her father early on in the film to get him to stop asking Iemon to give her back. What's interesting is that Iemon actually seems to see everything coming: he says that he's concerned about people "interfering" with their life, and outright declares that he has to protect Oiwa, to protect their family, but protecting her, to him, is less about her protection and more about his strength and his ability to protect as a man.

And surprisingly, while he is a murderer and a general scumbag, Iemon is not the one to kill Oiwa. He's fine with it when he learns that the father of his new bride has started slowly poisoning Oiwa, and continues to make sure she takes the poison, but when Oiwa dies, it's an accident. I think a lot of Iemon's torment comes, therefore, from knowing that his hand was not on the sword that killed her; he could have stepped in to stop the process of her death, but didn't.

One of my favorite scenes in this is when Iemon, Oiwa, and Oume all go to watch a play together that appears to actually be a version of Yotsuya Kaidan. This exemplifies how oblivious the characters are to the cycle that they're caught up in. If you want to get deeper into symbolism, the figure in the play who is suffering what Oiwa would later suffer is scarred over her left eye, while Oiwa's illness affects her right eye - the play is a mirror that no one recognizes themselves in.

Back to Naosuke - I don't think I can recall having seen a version of Yotsuya Kaidan in which Naosuke and Iemon are contrasted this much as characters. Iemon is uncomfortable in the shabby, poor life of a ronin, but Naosuke actively wants that life. Naosuke doesn't care that he isn't a samurai anymore: he's done with that, would rather hang out at brothels and marry a pretty girl no matter her status. Iemon jumps at the chance to regain some standing by marrying a noblewoman who is obsessed with him - never mind that he already had a wife. Both of them kill someone in the first act of the film, and their reactions could not be more different: Iemon retains some of his samurai mindset in that he goes about the killing of Oiwa's father with a modicum of formality, but Naosuke kills a guy practically just for kicks and then laughs hysterically about it - and it's not even the guy he meant to kill. Iemon is amoral and conscience-haunted; Naosuke is amoral and having a great time, thank you very much.

Ishibashi steals the show in every scene he's in, by the way; Kenichi Hagiwara - former lead singer of The Tempters - as Iemon is good, but I didn't feel like he brought much depth to the role.

The cinematography is surprisingly gorgeous even when watched as a poor-quality webrip. There is one scene where Iemon's retinue of ne'er-do-wells are all running around a brothel as viewed from above, and then it cuts to an aerial shot of a group of women holding umbrellas - the jagged, squareish hallways of the brothel immediately giving way to the perfect circles of the umbrellas - and honestly, that was so, so visually satisfying. I personally prefer my jidaigeki dark as hell, so the comedy elements in this felt a little jarring, but it's balanced out by the fact that this is a really well-made film in all respects. Yukio Ninagawa is apparently mostly known for his Japanese-language adaptations of Shakespeare's plays, which makes a lot of sense.