Tag: Kikuzo Kawasaki

The Ghost Cat of Otama Pond (怪猫 お玉が池, Yoshihiro Ishikawa, 1960)

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Ghost cat films can often be about the ways in which the unresolved past continues to echo in the modern era. The curse is not lifted by vanquishing the evil spirit, but only by coming to an accommodation with and making recompense for wrongdoing in the distant past. This is especially the case when the film involves bookending sequences set in the modern day as in Yoshihiro Ishikawa’s Ghost Cat of Otama Pond (怪猫 お玉が池, Kaibyo Otama-ga-ike) in which a young couple accidentally become trapped within the orbit of a vengeful spirit after stopping off on their journey to get their parents’ approval for their marriage.

To that extent, the fact that they keep walking in circles and always end up back at the lake might hint at their mutual sense of anxiety about their decision to marry. “What will marriage be like if you’re like this now?” Tadahiko (Shozaburo Date) asks in exasperation, accusing Keiko (Noriko Kitazawa) of being “difficult” as she blames him for the decision to come to the lake in the first place and insists she’s too tired to continue walking. Their relationship is further strained by the lingering possibility that the parents may object to the marriage and that arriving late for their visit might not help their chances.

Their situation is mirrored in the circumstances that led to the creation of the ghost cat as related to Tadahiko by a local priest whom he consults after Keiko falls into a coma near the ruined house where they take shelter. Long ago, their ancestors Yochimaru (Shozaburo Date) and Kozasa (Noriko Kitazawa) were in love and wanted to marry, but their families were sworn enemies who strongly opposed the union. When Yachimaru was sent to serve in the capital swearing to call for Kozasa once he’d established himself, her villainous father Gensai (Yoichi Numata) moved against Yachimaru’s father Shinbei (Akira Nakamura) who had been attempting to protest the unreasonable taxes levied against local peasants who were on the verge of causing unrest. Consequently, they killed him and dumped his body in the pond. Shinbei’s beloved cat Tama drank some of his blood and became a ghost cat hellbent on avenging its master.

Tama is quite a popular name for a cat, but in this case it seems to be that it got its name from the lake where it was found which hints at a deeper origin story for this vengeful spirit. Unlike that in other similar films, it seems to have the power to manipulate people physically, at least to a degree, and also to pull them into an alternate reality as happens to Keiko during her coma when she is transported back to the Edo era before the house fell into ruins. It also seems to collect and unify various desires for vengeance though all against Gensai and his allies including the corrupt magistrate and entitled son Gorota (Hiroshi Shinguji). Though it originates with the death of Shinbei, the ghost cat later mainly takes the form of Kozasa after she drowns herself in the pond having been bewitched and seen the ghost of Yachimaru. 

In the end, this curse is only resolvable through the relationship between Keiko and Tadahiko. The ghost cat is vanquished by natural forces putting an end to the curse and releasing Keiko from her coma. After undergoing this experience, they are able to find their way back from the lake as Tadahiko resolves that they will still get married no matter what their parents say in direct contrast with Yachimaru and Kozasa who were constrained by samurai mores and unable to defy their families. In the modern era, they are free to live in the city and do as they please without needing to pay much attention to these outdated rituals, and so the ghost cat’s curse is no longer necessary as the rift is healed with their union just as if Yachimaru and Kozasa were finally united. Ishikawa conjures a suitably gothic, eerie atmosphere around the misty lake achieving ghost effects mainly through lighting in which they take on a familiar greenish hue. Away from the lake, however, it becomes more difficult to tell who is a ghost and who alive, while the ghost cat manipulates those that have wronged it into harming those they love and by extension themselves until finally laid to rest by a new generation resolving to leave the past behind.

Trailer (no subtitles)

A Wicked Woman (毒婦高橋お伝, Nobuo Nakagawa, 1958)

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The term “dokufu” or “poisonous woman” dates back to the Edo era, but rose to prominence once again in the turbulent society of late Meiji in which such women became fodder for the growing penny dreadful industry. Unlike the later “bad girl” or contemporary examples of “bad women” from elsewhere, the problem with “poisonous women” is that they pollute society as a whole, corrupting those around them through their unbridled transgressions. These notions are of course as much about contemporary notions of femininity and a desire to preserve the social order at all costs as they are about conventional morality and the rule of law, but there are reasons that tales of such independent women incited such a frenzy among both men and women who found themselves floundering in a confusing and rapidly changing society.

Nobuo Nakagawa’s A Wicked Woman (毒婦高橋お伝, Dokufu Takahashi Oden) is inspired by the real life tale one particular “dokufu”, Oden Takahashi, who was in fact the last woman to be beheaded in Japan after being convicted of murdering her lover while suspected of poisoning her husband. Nakagawa does not particularly pay attention to the “real” details of her life but to her pulp persona, somewhat reclaiming her image as an ultra cool revenger who refused to be bound by the restrictive mores of her times or suffer at the hands of the feckless men she nevertheless falls victim to. 

When we first meet Oden (Katsuko Wakasugi), she is being pursued by a large number of policemen whom she manages to outrun, eventually tricking them and escaping by getting a lift from a passing rickshaw driver. The ride is tense, and we worry that Oden will encounter an accident that will bring her to the attention of the police, but the crisis is something quite different. In a staggering coincidence, the rickshaw driver is none other than Oden’s estranged first husband, Jinjuro (Akira Nakamura), once a samurai but now reduced to pulling a cab after ruining himself through drink and debauchery (apparently why Oden eventually left him). Though it’s not exactly a happy reunion, the pair part on good terms while he laments that their small daughter Omitsu still misses her mother, managing to extract a few notes from Oden supposedly for her upkeep.  

Oden meanwhile goes home to husband no. 2, Ryosuke (Asao Matsumoto), who is bedridden with TB and increasingly paranoid about what Oden does outside the house to keep them fed. Operating out of a remote cottage, she puts on a ridiculously elaborate Western outfit and heads to a jewellers where she pretends to look at precious stones for a ring, dropping one on the floor while the salesman’s back is turned and spiking it with the point of her parasol knowing that no-one is going to think of looking there. The assistants aren’t stupid, they know a stone is missing and Oden must have pocketed it but all they can do is search her person, calling in the local bobby, Kazuma. (Juzaburo Akechi), who thinks they may be going too far in forcing this upperclass lady to strip off to prove she’s not a thief. The owner of the store, Osawa (Tetsuro Tanba), looks on knowingly but is intrigued more than anything else, eventually content to let Oden go despite knowing she has the jewel concealed somewhere about her person. 

Disaster strikes, however, when Oden runs into Kazuma in the street and he spots her parasol sparkling. He tries to arrest her, but she pleads with him to let her change out of her extremely silly outfit first, playing the poor widow card and eventually seducing the naive policeman. What Oden didn’t quite bank on was actually falling for him for real, drawn in a sense to order and goodness, longing to be caught and restored to the rightful condition of womanliness but fearing she has lost all right to conventional happiness. 

Oden’s relationship with Kazuma is an example of the effects of her “poison” on society at large. Kazuma as we first meet him is earnest and good, a naive young rookie with a strong sense of justice who leaps to defend Oden thinking she is a maligned noble woman unfairly accused of thievery. His superior Kakunosuke (Gen Funabashi), has set him up with his innocent little sister Kozue (Minako Yamada) and it seems the pair will soon marry, but Kazuma is apparently not so much interested in sweetness as he is in Oden’s complicated darkness. He falls obsessively in love with her, perhaps partly out of a desire to save her from her criminal life by bringing her to justice, but also in attraction to all of her transgressive qualities which contradict everything he stands for. 

Nakagawa reframes Oden’s poisonousness as a consequence of her frustrated maternity and a continual failure of masculinity. After re-encountering Jinjuro, Oden finds it increasingly difficult to justify the act of abandoning her child and leaving her with a man she knew to be a violent and feckless drunk. Though Jinjuro appears to have reformed himself through the time-honoured devices of humbleness and hard work, we later find him extorting money from Oden to pay for Omitsu’s medical care only to drink it all himself. Oden tries to visit her daughter, but is after all a stranger in her life. Her attempt to reclaim her maternity, escape the trap of criminality and leave the city with her little girl is the primary motivator for all of her subsequent actions which culminate in an intense desire for revenge against Jinjuro, the architect of all her misfortune. 

All of Oden’s earlier crimes were in some way permissible, taking from those who could afford to lose and doing it with a degree of style. The botched job at the jewellers, however, sees her fall into the hands of Osawa, who turns out to be a violent and sadistic gang boss. Osawa keeps women captive in his basement and whips them for his own enjoyment, forcing Oden to become a procurer tricking vulnerable women into becoming sex slaves. Oden thinks nothing of this, smirking that there must be good money in selling women, willingly complicit in the oppression of those just like her. To free herself from Osawa, she uses Jinjuro, attempting to kill two birds with one stone and finding partial success only for the plan to fall apart when confronted by the face of order in the reappearance of a ruined Kazuma. 

Oden ends her journey in Yokohama, a bustling international port, where she’s the tattooed madame of the Osawa’s Chinese bar and a familiar face at the gaming tables. The suggestion is that this corruption is foreign in origin, Osawa’s top hat and smart suit not to mention plush Western-style bed, suggesting that his savagery is a facet of his seduction by Chinese hedonism and Western individualism. Individualism is again painted as Oden’s sin when she leaves the women locked in a jail cell to escape a fire while cradling her ill-gotten gains, only to tell Kazuma to man up and that money is what she truly loves. But Oden is also victim of her times, betrayed by a failure of masculinity in a patriarchal system. Jinjuro the drunken samurai, Ryonosuke the impotent consumptive, and Kazuma the conflicted young man. The last of these she refuses to “ruin”, setting him free because she truly loves him and does not want to see him dragged into her life of crime, intent on reclaiming her goodness by reassuming the role of a conventional mother living an honest life with her daughter somewhere far away. Her “wickedness” is only really her desire to survive but an independent woman, good or bad, is always a threat to the social order and so she must be stopped lest her inconvenient desire to live a life free of male control become a “poisonous” example to those around her.