Kuroneko (1968)

Kuroneko (Kaneto Shindô, 1968)
English Title: Black Cat From the Grove

With Kuroneko (Black Cat From the Grove), director Kaneto Shindô dissects the divide that separates the classes in medieval Japan. The opening scene shows a solitary hut that is enveloped by a bamboo forest. Hordes of samurai warriors appear from the forest, slowly walking towards the hut. Inside the hut are two peasant women quietly eating their lunch. The warriors start grabbing their rice, and unsated, start raping the two women in horrid succession. The warriors leave the two unconscious women and the hut burning.

It's a disquieting introduction. Shindô doesn't emboss the sequence with any musical score, as we only hear the crickets chirping, the stream running, and the few shrieks and grunts by the women and the invading horde. It reinforces the feeling that the samurais arrived, pillaged, and disappeared with hardly anybody noticing and anyone really caring. Later in the film, the samurai leader would defend his class by stating that it is the powerful that rule over the weak; that there's no rationale in hating the samurai class. His statement is of course pure folly as we have witnessed with immense efficiency how the samurai and war can directly affect the comman folk.

Kuroneko is of course a kaidan (ghost story) and the two women resurface as vengeful spirits who roam the night to lure wandering samurai into their abode. After seducing the samurai with gratitude, flattery, cups of warm sake, and sex, the two would finish him off with a violent bite in the neck --- the same way a tame black cat would pounce on his master. The treachery keeps them alive; and it fuels their vendetta against the warmongers who ruined their lives in an unnoticed heartbeat.

The warriors would of course retaliate. Several mighty samurais have died and the samurai lord orders Gintoki (Kichiemon Nakamura), fresh from an unexpected victory against a formidable fighter, to investigate and destroy the spirits. Gintoki turns out to be the husband and the son of the murdered women; yet the twist is that Gintoki is no longer a peasant but a samurai, and thus an appropriate victim to the wraiths' murderous plans. The blurring of these roles are treated with unabashed tenderness --- Gintoki and his wife (Kiwaki Taichi) would thereafter spend several days in romantic bliss, unmindful of each other's missions to destroy each other.

It is obvious that Shindô admires this class-less happiness. He shoots the couple's scenes together in an eroticically gorgeous manner; quite different from the wife's previous seductions wherein the men are ravenous for flesh. The sequence is poignant; coupled with the mother (Nobuko Otowa)'s painful dance (again, different from the more rabid dance performed during their murderous sessions) and the couples' incandescent lovemaking, there's no denying that the class-crossing dilemma is the ultimate heart of the film.

Shindô tells the story with a dutiful eye for detail --- the bamboo grove is made eerie by the fog; the wardrobe and the make-up applied to the two wraiths; the intricate detail that surfaces the amusing stereotypes (the mustache and the body hair of the samurai leader, the transformation of Gintoki from filthy peasant to titled samurai by several buckets of warm water); the perfect lighting (especially inside the wraiths' abode). Kuroneko is simply wonderful cinema. It is scary not because of jarring sound effects or sudden visual stimuli, but because it draws you in into the hapless drama, and the irrevocable damage caused by war and the men whose fortunes are rooted from it.

Children of Hiroshima (1952)

Children of Hiroshima (Kaneto Shindô, 1952)
Japanese Title: Gembaku no ko

In a scene in Kaneto Shindô's Children of Hiroshima, Takako Ishikawa (Nobuko Otowa) converses with the adoption center's caretaker. The caretaker, as if reading statistics from an almanac, tells Takako that there are more orphans in Hiroshima than Tokyo and Kyoto combined, notwithstanding the fact that the two latter cities are bigger and more populated. He goes on telling that there are a few hundred orphans in a number of orphanages in the city, but the exact number cannot be determined since there must probably be more who are actually living in the streets. Shindô takes those statistics into account and tells a compassionate story of the surviving offsprings of that fateful day when the A-bomb was dropped in the middle of Hiroshima and literally obliterating its innocent citizens.

Takako used to be a kindergarten teacher in Hiroshima but later on, moved to a remote fishing island after her parents and sister perished during the bombing. After six years, she decides to return to visit her former colleague in Hiroshima. While walking past the street, she notices a blind beggar who she remembers as her father's assistant Iwakichi (Osamu Takizawa). She stays the night in Iwakichi's shack and learns that the former assistant's son also perished during the war, leaving only little Taro, his grandchild, as his remaining relative. However, Taro is staying at the adoption center since Iwakichi cannot afford to raise the child with his meager earnings. Takako then stays with her colleague Natsue (Niwa Saito), and from there, visits the three remaining survivors of her former kindergarten class. The visits and the entire experience in Hiroshima becomes an eye-opener for Takako, who takes more than experiences with her on her way back to the fishing island.

Made right after the Americans occupation of Japan, Children of Hiroshima seems more like a reminder that the scars of the Pacific War have not faded. When the shores of Hiroshima appears in Takako's sight, while aboard the ferry from the island to the city, she begins a narration about how the land has forgotten that day. The river is still flowing as it was, the skies as wide as it was. We also see reconstruction undergoing, with huge machineries blocking the rubbles and the devastation that used to be there. However, the scars are visible. Physically, structures remain as mere skeletons of their former grandeur. Black chars color cement steps telling a story of a man who was completely vaporized while innocently seated there. Less tangible is the taint that will forever haunt the city. In the beginning, Takako's aunt and uncle carefully select their words as if avoiding the topic of the bombing. The citizens of Hiroshima nonchalantly joke about it and just continue their lives, bearing whatever permanent injury or disease they have encountered because of the A-bomb's radiation. It's a creeping terror that has afflicted the city. The result is a forced forgetfulness, or a graceful acceptance that such is an act of fate, or a complete rejection of the past's former grandeur, and that the present is merely a perpetual hell one has to live with.

Shindô achieves what he wants by combining both objectivity and melodrama. Flashbacks are utilized to depict the change that was caused by the bombing. Most disturbing among these flashbacks is the depiction of the few minutes before the explosion, which Shindô captured with both the objectivity of a documentarian and the emotionality of one who is actually affected by the tragedy. There, he uses bizarrely formed tableaus of bloodied and injured women, their babies crying, and destruction within the perimeter of the frame, to create a lasting image of how terrifying and hellish it must have been caught in the middle of a sudden twist of fate. The effective musical scoring by Akira Ifukube accompanies the imagery with emotional precision.

At times poignant, but mostly overbearing and pushy, the revelation of Hiroshima's orphans' plight unfolds in uneven levels. There are times when Shindô seems to be pondering too much on a point already driven at, and there are times where Shindô quickly steals away a moment wherein much emotional resonance is still brewing. The narrative arcs might be a bit creased at the edges, and could have been reduced to less melodramatic effects. However, the import of the film is derived because of its value, as a belated warning that, as one of the children states in a surprisingly innocent and peaceful demeanor before finally dying, "war is evil."