Kuroneko
A powerful folkloric idea about death is that when we die we keep our living allegiances, but add to them new motives that are not compatible with what we were. Thus to be dead is to have two minds, two identities, two moralities. A vampire may be a humanist; but they will also crave blood.
Kuroneko (Black Cat) is about two ghosts, mother and daughter-in-law, Yone and Shige. At the beginning of the film we see them raped and killed, and their hut burned down; it is the Heian period (displayed as a time of might-makes-rightism), they are farmers, and they are set upon by a band of roving samurai. Afterwards a black cat appears, nuzzling their corpses. This is all the exposition we need. The next time we see Shige she will have a pale luster, light feet, and sharp teeth. She lures a man to her house, where Yone serves him sake; the man gets drunk, follows Shige to bed, and she tears out his throat.
The man is a samurai, but he is not one of the band we saw earlier. There is no such sense of specific, person-based justice here. That band of samurai go their way, out of the world of the film. The director of Kuroneko, Kaneto Shindo, was the son of farmers, a socialist, and interested in a larger class-based apportionment of guilt. In this view farmers are the working class, the generators of wealth, and samurai prey on them, taking wealth by violence. In death, Yone and Shige have vowed revenge on the samurai – specifically, they have made a deal with the god of death, that they will be allowed to return to earth as ghosts only if they continue to kill samurai and drink their blood. They are pledged to continue, in fact, until they have drunk the blood of every samurai on earth – until they have eradicated the samurai as a class.
In this impersonal manner they kill twice more. The three killings are done in sequence, as variations on a theme, with none of the interstitial bits we would expect in a modern horror film where killings are treated as a chorus to the narrative verse. Donald Richie has posited repetition as a core Japanese cinematic value, traceable to the Lumière era when the very short films of time – single simple scenes – would be played on a continuous loop, prolonging the audience’s response; and Kuroneko is a loop-based film. There is a minimal musicality to the way that it conserves its palette. An element or image should never be used only once; but it must also gain from its repetition. When a man bathes, we don’t just see him take a bath. Instead we watch a set series of images – water pouring over a man’s face, water shimmering – while with each repetition the man grows cleaner. As such the film has a stringency that creates opportunities for satisfaction. As she lures the first samurai to his death, Shige leaps over a puddle. The leap is meant to demonstrate her newfound feline grace, but the specificity of the puddle, shown in close-up, nagged at me; an hour or so later the puddle appeared again, to perform another vital highlighting of transformation, and the itch was scratched.
The sharpest departure from this looping close-knit structure occurs shortly after the initial sequence of killings. We see the local warlord react, and a call go out for brave men to investigate; and then we are placed in the middle of a rice paddy, near the end of a long battle, just in time to see a threadbare samurai strike down the enemy general. It’s a matter of pure luck, the kind of violent muddling-through we expect from modern depictions of war. This samurai is Hachi, the son of Yone and husband of Shige; he was conscripted into the warlord’s army several years prior. We need to see this battle because Shindo wants us to see that Hachi is, in fact, a modern hero – that is, he’s someone trying to muddle through. To the extent that he does what is right, we’re meant to take it as chance; and we shouldn’t assume that he represents any moral perspective other than his own. As far as horror film protagonists go, he is neither an anonymous teen nor a purified counterweight to evil.
Hachi returns home, greatly elevated. Inevitably, the next task he’s set is to solve the recent rash of murders. He also finds out that his hut has been burned down, and his wife and mother are missing; and thus with quick confluence he is soon waylaid by their ghosts, and there are mutual recognitions. Shige takes Hachi to bed, a scene we have now seen twice lead to murder, and which plays out in parallel to those earlier sequences. But Shige spares him – it is like a minor chord repeated and then resolved – and we enter into a brief affair between the living and the dead, one which parallels and inverts Mizoguchi’s Ugetsu of seven years earlier. In Ugetsu it is the living man who, in love with a ghost, gives up the allegiances and responsibilities he held in life, and thus puts himself at risk. In Kuroneko it is the ghost – Shige – who wishes to cast off the new, alienating commitments of death; class commitments, which command that she kill her samurai husband. This kind of resistance is possible, but for only a short while – when the dead grant too much sympathy to the living, they themselves become mortal. For her violation Shige is taken to hell; her ghost, her impingement on the living, vanishes.
Yone, Hachi’s mother, remains. She chooses to honor her dual commitments, as one who was living and is now dead. She loves her son, but she also must drink his blood. The conflict between son and mother is the falling, or rather turning motion of the film, which ends where it began.
Shige is played by Kiwako Taichi, Yone by Nobuko Otawa (who served as Shindo’s muse and later married him), Hachi by Kichiemon Nakamura. All three came from the world of classical Japanese theatre (Nakamura was a well-known kabuki performer at the time, and is now designated a Living National Treasure), and the film is overtly theatrical. Performers are often shown against a plain black background, an analogue to actors performing against a curtain which, as outside the fictional world of the play, can be portrayed on film as a void. Much of the acting consists of staying still, or of moving in a way that emphasizes the artificial nature of the movement – unconventional movement is the special effect the film uses to indicate when we have passed into fantasy. As ghosts Shige and Yone are capable of performing elaborate flips and spins – wire work – and the effect is as unsettling as even the grosser physical transformations used today to indicate the restless dead. Nobuko Otawa, playing Yone, doesn’t blink – in a climactic scene we can see her eyes streaming tears from the effort. This is not to say however that the film is mannered. If anything it’s raw. At one point Yone’s arm is chopped off; detached from her, it grows black fur, and its fingers grow claws. The resulting prosthetic is stiff and unnatural, but grossly physical. When she reclaims it by carrying it off in her mouth, like a cat with her kitten, we believe.
