with Dmetri Kakmi

Ugetsu Monogatari

Japan, 1953

Director: Kenji Mizoguchi

Cast: Masayuki Mori, Eitaro Ozawa, Kinuyo Tanaka, Machiko Kyo, Mitsuko Mito

Kenji Mizoguchi’s Ugetsu Monogatari (Tales of Moonlight and Rain) is based on two ghost stories taken from Ueda Akinari’s 1776 short story collection of the same name; the subplot about the peasant aspiring to become a samurai is based on an 1883 story by French author, Guy de Maupassant. 

Not content with melding two different literary sources, Mizoguchi also blends two popular Japanese genres of the time — the period drama and the ghost story — to create a seamless whole that is simultaneously a beautiful supernatural tale as well as an effective anti-war film.

Set during Japan’s civil war (1568–1600), the story follows two married couples as their lives unravel in a time of violence and greed. One is a farmer/potter who wants to sell his wares so that he can buy his wife beautiful things. The other is his brother-in-law who, despite wifely protestations, wants to become a famous samurai. Although the men’s actions drive the narrative, it is the underlying, and more deeply felt theme about how women suffer during war time that lingers in the mind long after the film ends.

Telling cinematographer Kazuo Miyagawa he wanted the film to unfold seamlessly like a scroll painting, Mizoguchi achieves a dreamlike quality that often tips into nightmare, through the use of roaming cameras and crane shots that shift perspective so that it’s difficult for the audience to stabilise itself in one locale or reality. By effortlessly sliding from realism to fantasy and back again, the film posits the notion that reality is a nominal state dependent on who is experiencing what and when. Beauty and horror, fantasy and reality can exist simultaneously.

Although beautiful to look at, with exquisite black-and-white images, the beauty never precludes a world in which ugliness and brutality exist. Thus the famous poolside seduction sequence between Genjuro and the ghostly Lady Wakasa is starkly contrasted with Miyagi fighting for her life at a roadside. Tobei’s triumph as a samurai is similarly juxtaposed with his wife Ohama being gang raped. For every sweet there is a bitter pill.

The shifts between the phantasmal and the real acts as the shocks or ‘jump scares’ one expects from a contemporary horror movie. But Mizoguchi’s shocks are real and believable; there is no relief in laughter. He means business and in its own way Ugetsu is as serious in its intent as the following year’s masterpiece, Sansho Dayu. That’s why the final moments of Ugetsu are so heartbreaking and leave a lasting impression.

One of the things I love about this film, and perhaps it can be said that this element is also the thing I treasure most in the horror genre, is the way it slides so effortlessly and invisibly between real and unreal. 

The elision from one state to the other occurs early on when the two couples cross Lake Biwa. As the boat emerges from dense fog, there is no doubt that the characters have moved out of the everyday into the uncanny, even though everything that happens and is uttered subsequently is real and believable. Perhaps the touchstone in this sequence is when they pass a boat whose sole passenger warns them about the dangers ahead before drifting back into the miasma. It’s like encountering Charon on the River Acheron.

Readers might have noticed over the previous ten meditations that, as a general rule, the movies that mean most to me, the ones I return to often, are those that have one single element that is beautiful, a stylistic formalism, that qualifies them for the pantheon of greats. 

Amid the chaos and brutality, Ugetsu is so resplendent with beautiful images that their presence highlights a key factor about cinema: it is an aesthetic experience, a matter of painting with light, and dreaming with the eyes open. When true artistry is brought to bear on all aspects of the process, the interplay can be a seduction; reason and the senses are overwhelmed. We are lifted out of the daily grind and carried to a stylised realm that has everything and nothing to do with the real world. That is precisely what Mizoguchi achieves here and this might well be the reason why I find cinematic iterations of the Japanese ghost story so irresistible.

Dmetri Kakmi is the author of The Dictionary of a Gadfly (as The Sozzled Scribbler), The Door and Other Uncanny Tales, Mother Land, and When We Were Young (as editor). His gothic horror novel, The Woman in the Well, will be published in March 2025. He is now working on a crime novel called The Perfect Room.