Kwaidan or Ghost Stories

I saw this old Japanese Movie only twice in the last ten years. The original title 怪談 is not only means ghost stories. If you see the two kanjis you can read their elements in backwards: 'fire and fire', 'words to say,' 'earth,' 'heart' and 'again'. With these items Japanese tries to express the strange or obvious things that were told in the ancient times near the fire in the night. It's true that most of these stories in Japan are ghost stories or something similar because they have a lot of words for these creatures, see the following movie in the same year (1964) from Kaneto Shindo (新藤 兼人) Onibaba (鬼婆), or in literature, Akutagawa's story about 'Kappas' and so on. Most of them live under the mirror of the water. When tears fall into this mirror you can call these ghost or they suddenly appear in front of you. In Kwaidan's fourth story the guard drinks an inner reflection with a cup of water.



He sees not himself in the mirror of the cup but a strange, almost onnagata like Japanese face is gibbing at him. (Onnagata is an actor who always appears as a woman in the kabuki plays, and usually he will act this role while he walking in the streets, out of the theater.) And the first kanji 'kai' or 'kwai' put the question mark on these situations. Just like in the Kwaidan. You can think that something is wrong, it is not real, it is just a vision, but so vivid and exact and you talk to him or her, and she replays... and you already spent the night in love with her. The 'kwai' refers to this doubtful and ambiguous situation on the border of the dream and reality.
Hoichi, the Earless is my favorite. When you see his face, it wears a lot of Chinese characters of Heart Sutra. It seems thirty years before Greenaway's Pillow Book. Hoichi's mouth shows the charachter 'shin' or 'kokoro' that means 'heart'.



On his face there are the most famous and well known lines of this Buddhist text: 'the form is empty, the emptiness is the form'. To write a sacred texts on some body is a common practice in South-East Asia. In Thailand they tattoo with a huge iron rod, made big wounds and exorcize the demons, in China or Japan they have very fine inks which have a shine on the skin when they are writing with a brush.