A young woman charged with disposing of the corpse of an infant has only a few words to impart as she lowers its body to the river, “Don’t be born human in your next life.” Set in late 18th century Tohoku where famine ravages the land, Takeshi Fukunaga’s bleak fable Mountain Woman (山女, Yama Onna) sees humanity in extremis pushed to its most inhumane but also offers refuge in spirituality and a retreat to a less sophisticated existence.
Calling this existence sophisticated might be a stretch, but there is more than a little constraint attached to the idea of community in this typical farming village in a feudal society. Bad weather has produced two poor harvests, and the villagers are beginning to feel desperate. As the film opens, a woman goes through a painful and traumatic labour only for the midwife to silently offer a cloth to her husband (Takashi Yamanaka) who ignores her pleas and smothers the child. They have nothing to feed it, and perhaps a part of him thinks it’s kinder this way. A young woman, Rin (Anna Yamada), waits outside for the inevitable and accepts a few coins to spirit the baby’s body away. Rin’s family is shunned by the other villagers because of a crime her ancestors apparently committed, and it’s for this reason that they deal with the dead.
When it comes to handing out the rice rations, the village chief gives Rin’s father Ihei (Masatoshi Nagase) only half but justifies it as a kindness explaining that he is entitled to nothing because his family owns no land (it was taken from them because of their ancestral crime) but even those tainted with the legacy of criminality are still considered part of the community and so they are doing what they can. It’s this liminal status that begins to eat away at Rin. She’s expected to support a community that as she later says considers her less than human and gives her nothing in return. When her father is caught stealing from the rice reserves, she selflessly claims responsibility and Ihei lets her, savagely beating his daughter in front of the village elders as if he thought that might be enough to settle the matter.
It’s at this point that Rin decides to leave the village, taking off her sandals and leaving them at the gate to imply that she has been “spirited away” though everyone likely knows she has walked into the mountains to die. Several times we see her gazing at Mt. Hayachine which is where locals believe souls go after death, praying to its goddess who was herself apparently a thief and sympathetic to those who find themselves in moments of desperation. As Rin tells her younger brother who is rejected by the community because he is blind, the goddess Hayachine accepts everyone the same, good or bad, rich or poor, unlike the hypocrites from the village desperate to find a scapegoat on whom to blame their plight. There is no longer any space for sentimentality in their lives. Listening only to an old shamaness who claims to be in contact with the gods, they squabble amongst themselves for what little that remains before deciding they must sacrifice a virgin girl to the Weather God to end the bad harvests.
But what Rin discovers in the mountains is freedom in simplicity. Having broken a taboo in stepping beyond the Mountain God Stone, she is freed from the constraints of “civility” and later tells a man who has come to rescue her that she has no desire to return for only in the mountains has felt herself to be a true human being. She encounters another person there she assumes is the mysterious Mountain Man (Mirai Moriyama) and is kind to him though he never speaks and shows her only silent comfort. It may be this that later saves her life in a fable-like moment that frees her to return to the mountain and the only place she has ever felt alive, but also says something of the inhumanity of so-called civilisation that only in a “savage” land can she find comfort and serenity. Often shot in crushing darkness contrasted with the overwhelming light and beauty of the forest, Fukunaga’s bleak tale of human selfishness implies that only by shaking off the false sophistication of an oppressive “civilisation” can one discover true humanity.
Mountain Woman screened as part of this year’s Nippon Connection.
Original trailer (dialogue free)
Images: ©YAMAONNA FILM COMMITTEE
Windows on Worlds 