There’s a village in Japan that’s mostly inhabited by scarecrows. One of the last remaining residents began creating them to replace something that had been lost, fashioning effigies of those who had passed away and immortalising them as if clinging to a distant past long before the shadows of rural depopulation were cast over the village. In a way, it’s an expression of grief or at least a lament for a loss of community and a sense of increasing loneliness and isolation.
Adapted from Junji Ito’s manga, Norio Tsuruta’s Kakashi is also in its way about grief and the way in which it can consume those left behind so that they too have no more desire to live. Dr Miyamori (Kenzo Kawarasaki) later explains that in the village they co-exist with death and he returned to his home town in the hope that he could save his daughter, Izumi (Ko Shibasaki), through its peculiar magic of resurrecting the deceased as human scarecrows. As he freely admits, he could not accept his daughter’s death and so has chosen to stay here in the village though alive himself rather than attempt to remake his life without her.
The village itself appears to exist slightly outside of the mortal realm as Kaoru (Maho Nonami) discovers on encountering the long tunnel that leads to its entrance. Her car breaks down half-way through signalling her liminal status as one who does not yet belong on either side. It’s not quite grief that’s brought her here but still a nagging sense of foreboding in that she’s come in search of her missing brother, Tsuyoshi, after discovering a letter from an old school friend, Izumi, next to his telephone. Kaoru appears confused as to why the letter should be there and travels to the village hoping for answers, assuming that Tsuyoshi (Shunsuke Matsuoka) may have travelled there in search of Izumi.
As the landlady lets her into his empty flat, Kaoru explains that she is his only family and there’s a suggestion that her attachment to him is unnatural, bordering on the incestuous. A policeman taking a look at the photo Kaoru hands him remarks that they look like a couple, which they do, leading her to stuff the photo back in her pocket as if she were embarrassed. To that extent, she’s come to reclaim Tsuyoshi, not just from death, loneliness, grief, and depression, but from Izumi or at least the spectre of her. In life, she feared that Izumi would take him away from her and at least in Izumi’s mind frustrated their romance out of romantic jealously. Dr Miyamori implies it was this sense of despair that contributed to her death and it’s clear that Izumi’s mother also blames Kaoru while Izumi accuses Kaoru of being forever in her way.
But then again, she did not bring Kaoru to the village and is not targeting her personally out of vengeance. Rather, she has moved beyond that as she finally’s about to become “herself” thanks to the village’s dark magic and the following day’s scarecrow festival, and therefore no longer needs to care about the resentments of her mortal life even if her father says that her evil spirit has empowered the town. There is definitely something quite creepy in this weird village with its shades of the Wicker Man in its strange ritual and humanoid effigies where improbable numbers of children softly blow pinwheels under a large windmill that seems to be moving time itself. Tsuruta even borrows a particularly eerie shot from Don’t Look Now and emphasises the liminal qualities of the village in Dr Miyamori’s advice that Kaoru leave as soon as her car is fixed otherwise she may no longer wish to.
The village is apparently full of those like him who are trapped but wilfully so because they no longer desire to leave. Kaoru attempts to help one of them, a young living woman from Hong Kong unable to let go of the memory of her late father whose scarecrow eventually tells her to go. It’s a place for those who have no other place to go to because they cannot let go of their grief and despair. Thus Kaoru is pulled towards the edge of the tunnel, not so much to free her brother as, in a way, herself by allowing her grief to consume her and consenting to live this empty life alongside death rather than allow herself to accept her loss.
Trailer (no subtitles)
Windows on Worlds 