Ghosts and Demons in Medieval Japan - "Ugetsu (1953)" and "Onibaba (1964)"

October 2025 was the month of serendipity regarding Japanese period films.  I had stumbled on an article about the Japanese ghost story Ugetsu that piqued my interest and very soon afterwards James told me he watched Onibaba and thought it was great.  I had never heard of either film before, but as my recent experiences with Japanese cinema in Yojimbo and Throne of Blood had been so positive I decided to watch both Ugetsu and Onibaba.

Background

Ugetsu (aka Tales of Moonlight and Rain) is a 1953 film directed by Kenji Mizoguchi and written by Matsutaro Kawaguchi and Yoshikata Yoda, with cinematography by Kazuo Miyagawa.  Per the booklet included with the Criterion Collection release of the film:

The screenplay ... draws on literary sources from East and West. From the East, it takes inspiration from two of the nine stories in Akinari Ueda's Tales of Moonlight and Rain .... These narratives, "The House in the Thicket" ... and "A Serpent's Lust" ..., are combined in the depiction of Genjuro, the potter who goes to the city to make his fortune and encounters a dangerously seductive ghost. Mizoguchi turned to the West, to Guy de Maupassant, for his portrayal of Tobei, the humble villager who stops at nothing to achieve samurai status, much like the medal-seeking Monsieur Caillard in "How He Got the Legion of Honor.'

Onibaba (aka Demon Woman) is a 1964 film written and directed by Kaneto Shindo with cinematography by Kiyomi Kuroda.  It is an adaptation of the Buddhist folk tale "A Mask with Flesh Scared a Wife."

Consonance and Dissonance

Both films are black and white jidaigeki period dramas set in a civil war torn Japan, Ugetsu in the 16th Century and Onibaba in the 14th.  Both films have a distinctly aromantic view of war and deal with its consequence on the individual scale, particularly on the women.

This focus on women tracks with the sensibilities of the two directors Mizoguchi and Shindo, the former of which had previously made what Criterion Collection commentator Tony Rayns called "radically feminist" films, and the latter being described by Elena Lazic in her essay "Masks and Faces" as already "known in the fifties for films that cast an empathetic eye on modern-day characters living in poverty, and in particular on women proving resilient in the face of harsh difficulties."

However, though both films are deliberately paced black and white period pieces, they are shot very differently and have very different tones.  Ugetsu is sad and elegaic; Onibaba is morally horrifying.  Neither is, despite explicit supernatural elements in the former and perhaps some ambiguous ones in the latter, all that scary but I was thinking about both for quite a while after watching them.

Onibaba is also much more explicitly violent and ugly than Ugetsu is.

Ugetsu was awarded the top prize at the 1953 Venice Film Festival (i.e. The Silver Lion prize) and shows up on a lot of 100 Greatest Films lists and Onibaba won the grand prize at the Panama Film Festival in 1964.

Mizoguchi (1898-1956) was an extremely celebrated Japanese auteur whose career spanned the silent film and talkie era. Almost every discussion I've found of Mizoguchi describes him as a perfectionist and a bit of a micromanager.

Shinoda (1912-2012) was a prolific screenwriter (238 films) and director (48 films.)  Coincidentally, he has co-writing credit on Mizoguchi's 1949 film Waga koi wa moenu (i.e Flame of My Love) with Yohshikata Yoda, who co-wrote Ugetsu.

Filmmaking

Shots, Edits, and Composition

As I mentioned above, Ugetsu and Onibaba use very different film techniques.  Ugetsu favors wide shots, Onibaba favors close ups.   Onibaba feels much more claustrophobic, hemmed in by the camera as much as the characters are hemmed in by the omnipresent tall susuki grass.  Ugetsu's shots are framed much more openly with lots of space and depth of field.

It also doesn't cut to close ups very much; characters instead get closer to the camera.  Per Rayns commentary, Ugetsu avoids the more standard Hollywood style dialog techniques of matched reversed shots covering the participants.  The conversations are often shot with the characters in the middle distance with longer takes and emphasis is created by fluid cuts to closer shots from the same angles, what Rayns calls "concertina cuts."  The judiciously used cuts are all very purposeful.

Ugestu's long takes, a technique often used by the director, are not confined to the dialog.  There's long takes even in scenes with a lot of moving characters, which necessitates a lot of camera motion through some complicated blocking.

In his essay "From the Other Shore," critic Phillip Lopate says:

As Mizoguchi's great cinematographer, Kazuo Miyagawa, stated in a 1992 interview, they used a crane 70 percent of the time in filming Ugetsu.

The camera, almost constantly moving not only laterally but vertically conveys the instability of a world where ghosts come and go, life and death flow simultaneously into each other, and everything is, finally, transient, subject to betrayal.

There's also some really neat multi-level compositions where there are characters in the foreground, mid-ground, and background all at the same time, all moving naturalistically without distracting from the focus of the scene.

It's all really well done and isn't distracting but it does give it a slightly unusual and, to my eye anyway, a very "you are standing in the scene too" feel.

Onibaba has a more standard visual style, in comparison to Western cinema anyway.  It does use a lot of matched reverse shots in the dialog scenes.  It is also blocked and composed carefully but doesn't stick out for the depth of field stuff the way Ugetsu does because there is only like 1 scene that has more than 3 characters in it.

There's a lot of really nice shots in both films.

Sound

Ugetsu and Onibaba are both quiet movies with long stretches where there is no dialog and pretty minimal scoring.  Onibaba has no score after the opening titles until almost 9 minutes in and no dialog until around 11 minutes, with the only real sounds being the blowing wind through the susuki grass.  This blowing wind noise is pervasive throughout.

Onibaba's score favors drums, either in the score itself or in diegetic sounds of the characters hammering things.

Ugetsu's opening credits have a quite eerie song in the background, with keening flute drones, some interesting dissonances, and vocalizations that sound like shouts in the distance.  It sounds like it's played on traditional Japanese instruments.  Onibaba's opening credits, by contrast, have a score that sounds like jazz with jazz instruments.

Ugetsu also has some pretty yet haunting diegetic songs, sung by Ohama and Lady Wakasa.  Onibaba's characters do not sing; their horrifying world of howling wind and rustling grass doesn't allow for song.

The Stories

I'm not going to do a detailed blow by blow of the films' plots but I'm also not going to particularly avoid spoilers.

Plot Summary - Ugetsu

Ugetseu is the story of two couples: the farmer / potter Genjuro (Masayuki Mori) and his wife Miyagi (Kinuyo Tanaka) and their neighbors Tobei (Eitaro Ozawa) and his wife Ohama (Mitsuko Miko.)  They are villagers trying to survive the endemic civil wars engulfing the countryside.

Genjuro crosses Lake Biwa to go to the town of Omizo to sell his pottery, leaving Miyagi and their son behind and promising to return before ten days have passed.  With him comes Tobei who hopes to use his share of the profits to become a samurai.  Tobei's skeptical wife Ohama also comes along to make sure Tobei doesn't do anything stupid.   It does not go well.

Plot Summary - Onibaba

Onibaba is the story of two nameless women also trying to survive the civil wars engulfing the countryside.  They are credited only as Older Woman (Nobuko Otowa) and Younger Woman  (Jitsuko Yoshimura.)  The younger is the wife of the older's son who has been away at war.  They live in a secluded hut in the tall marsh grass and waylay and murder soldiers who wander into the marsh in order to trade their armor and weapons for food.  Conflict arises when their neighbor Hachi (Kei Sato), a deserter and friend of the older woman's son, returns with the news that the son has been slain.

Hachi and the Younger Woman start a relationship which the Older Woman tries to prevent, eventually donning a demon mask taken from a slain samurai to frighten the Younger Woman on her way to her trysts.  It does not go well.

War

The details of the endemic wars are vague in both films and it wasn't usually clear which side the soldiers shown onscreen were even on but that's kind of the point.  It isn't relevant.

Hachi says this after relating how he and Older Woman's son Kichi were captured in a battle and forced to fight for the other side:

It was all the same to us.  It's the generals' war, not ours.  We didn't even know what they're fighting about.

War destroys everyone, either physically or morally, no matter what side of the line they are on. Onibaba begins with a shot of the deep pit the two women throw their murdered soldiers into along with this caption:

A pit.  Deep and unlit.  A dark passageway from ancient times to the present.

Such is the nature of war.  It's a dark pit waiting to swallow humanity from time immemorial.  It doesn't matter who you are.  The pit eats just the same.

This is not explicitly stated in Ugetsu but applies there as well.  None of the characters seem to much care about the politics of the situation.  Whose soldiers rape Ohama and rob then stab Miyagi?  I don't know.  It certainly doesn't matter to the afflicted women.

Per Rayns's commentary on Ugetsu, the setting of Ueda's two stories was changed during the adaptation to film perhaps because of the shadow World War 2 which devastated the country less than a decade earlier.  It's hard not to see this as likely for both films given their extremely not romanticized view of war and both directors having lived through the destructive militarism of Japan's society in the early 20th Century.  There's no extolling martial virtue, here.  There's just desperate people and dead people.

Lopate writes:

The perennially dissatisfied Mizoguchi stressed in his notes to the long-suffering Yoda: "The feeling of wartime must be apparent in the attitude of every character. The violence of war unleashed by those in power on a pretext of the national good must overwhelm the common people with suffering moral and physical. Yet the commoners, even under these conditions, must continue to live and eat. This theme is what I especially want to emphasize here."

Onibaba is much angrier about all of this.  Older Woman has this exchange with a lost samurai:

Samurai

I was left all alone

Older Woman

That’s what you get for making war.

And then after tricking him into falling into the pit, she says this to not quite dead man:

Rest in peace in this hole.  You have friends here.  You made others die.  Now, it's your turn.

The overwhelming "moral suffering" Mizoguchi wanted to emphasize is on full display here.  All the characters in Onibaba are deeply morally compromised.  Hachi murders a monk for his clothing before the start of the film to disguise himself; Younger Woman drowns a man without a second thought; Older Woman refers to a sound in the night as "More prey coming our way" and when faced with Younger Woman leaving her to be with Hachi, she cries "I can't kill without her!"

Women

In both films, the moral and physical consequences of war land most harshly on the women left behind.  Younger and Older Woman fall into banditry.  Ohama has to resort to prostitution after her abandonment and rape.  Miyagi is murdered.

Even their identities are stripped from them and they lose who they were in their lives Before.  Ohama goes from wife to prostitute.   Older and Younger Woman, the principle characters of the film, are even denied names.  The new rhythm of their existence is laid out by Lazic:

Once the [murders are] done, the bodies dropped in a deep hole in the middle of a field, and the men's armor and weapons set aside to be sold later, the famished older woman and her daughter-in-law inhale their dinner, in complete silence, before lying down together and falling asleep within seconds. The world exists only to give them sustenance; their bodies are simply tools for survival.

And if Ohama and the women of Onibaba metaphorically lose themselves, Miyagi literally does when she is killed.

Ambition and Greed in Ugetsu

An element in Ugetsu that is not present in Onibaba is the consequence of ambition and greed.  Both Genjuro and Tobei let their greed for money, fantasy, or prestige lead them to endanger their families.  They are seduced by illusions, both natural and supernatural.

Genjuro's reckless war profiteering when, as Miyagi says, they already have more money than they need leads him to leave her behind, defenseless against the marauding soldiers plaguing the land.  As the village elder says:

Quick profits made in chaotic times never last.  A little money inflames men's greed.  They'd do better to prepare for the coming war.

Genjuro's greed also leads to him meeting Lady Wakasa, the ghost of a woman who was the victim of the same kind of wars that will soon kill his wife. He forgets Miyagi and their son to spend idyllic days indulging in fantasy with Wakasa, and if not for the fortuitous intervention of a Buddhist priest who saw the "shadow of death" on his face, he would have been lost forever.

Tobei's fantasy of becoming a samurai in a time of extreme violence, a desire he only achieves by deception and murder, leads to his wife's brutalization.

Both men's greed, though, was a distortion of good intentions.  Genjuro really believed he would make his wife happy with more money and he gestures at it as the only defense against bad times, despite Miyagi's assurances that she did not care about material things.  She tells him early on:

It's not the kimono but your kindness that makes me happy. I need nothing else as long as you're with me.

He responds with:

Look. Dried fish, oil, flour, arrowroot, and rice cakes.  Money is everything.  Without it life is hard and hope dies.

In a time of wartime privation, he's not wrong, but his later scene in the market of Omizo reveals he's primarily thinking of using his newfound money to buy her more nice things.

Similarly, after the newly minted samurai Tobei meets his wife by chance in a brothel they have this exchange:

Ohama

Be my customer tonight and we'll celebrate. Buy this fallen woman with the money your exploits earned you!

Tobei

Without you, my success means nothing.

Ohama

That's a lie! My fate meant nothing, as long as you became a samurai.

Tobei

No, you're wrong. I thought you'd be proud if I made good. I never dreamed you'd be brought to this.

Ohama

I'm a defiled woman. And you're to blame. Can you restore my honor?

Tobei

I can.

Ohama

Otherwise I've no choice but to die!

Tobei

I can! I swear I'll restore your honor.

Ghosts and Demons

Ugetsu's Lady Wakasa, explicitly revealed to be a ghost, is kind of unsettling but like I said above, is not actually scary.  She first appears shot from behind, looming over Genjuro in the market in broad daylight and the camera avoids her face for a noticeably long time which immediately signals something is off.

Her make-up is a direct reference to Noh theater masks and is very different than everyone else in the film, who are styled realistically.  (Noh is a classical Japanese theater tradition.)

In Kutsuki Manor she is frequently emerging from or weaving in and out of shadow and her song / Noh dance to Genjuro, shot in long flowing takes, is hypnotic, haunting, and a little unnerving.  She sings:

The finest silk of choicest hue may change and fade away

As would my life, beloved one, if thou shouldst prove untrue

Our vow to love for a thousand years is sealed with this cup.

The first overtly supernatural event in the film occurs after this dance, when her dead father's voice sings out from his empty armor, and she is plunged into shadow.

What I think is most interesting about Wakasa is that she's a victim, too.  She was cut down in her youth by war and the ghost of her nurse tells Genjuro:

Lady Wakasa departed this world without ever having known love. It grieved my heart to see her sorrow.  I wanted my lady to enjoy fully the pleasures of a woman's life so we returned to wander this world. Our hopes were fulfilled.  She met a good man like you and found a love that happens only once in a lifetime.  Now, when she has at last found joy, you speak of returning home, never to see each other again. Would it not pain you to know you'd destroyed her only chance for happiness? Would you not feel remorse?

It's not clear that Wakasa is even malevolent.  She and her nurse don't seem to know Genjuro is already married.  After the ghosts have been exorcised and Genjuro looks over the bits of ruin where the mansion once was against the backdrop of Lake Biwa, Wakasa's song plays again and rather than eerie it now comes across as poignant and establishes Wakasa as a tragic figure in her own right.

Wakasa is not the last tragic ghost in Ugetsu; Genjuro sees Miyagi when he returns home and after he learns that she has been dead and sees her no more, she gives the final voiceover over the ending of the film.  (There's room for interpretation, here, but It was my read that Genjuro did not hear this.)

The supernatural element of Onibaba is much more ambiguous and centers around the demon mask the lost samurai was wearing when he asked Older Woman to lead him out of the tall grass of the marsh.  The mask itself is very unsettling and the samurai absolutely refuses to remove it, making some very strange excuses for why he will not show her his face.

After she leads him to fall into the pit and later climbs down to loot his body, she has an extremely hard time getting the mask off him, but when she does she sees his face is disfigured.  She uses the mask to pose as a demon in the darkness to frighten Younger Woman away from going to see Hachi but after the last encounter in the storm, she cannot get the mask off.

She admits to Younger Woman that the demon was just her and after begging for help, and offering concessions regarding Hachi, Younger Woman agrees to help her get it off.  Even pulling with all of her strength, Younger Woman cannot remove it without using a hammer and mallet.  When it cracks apart, Older Woman's face is ruined and disfigured.  Younger Woman calls her a demon and runs from her.

Is the mask cursed?  Is it the samurai's revenge for his murder?  Or did it fix itself to the samurai and to Older Woman because of all the men they'd killed?  Or is it not supernatural at all and Older Woman's ruined face is because of the hammer Younger Woman had to use?  The answers are exercises for the viewer.

Lake Biwa and the Tall Grass

The two most obviously creepy and atmospheric locales in the films are Lake Biwa in Ugetsu and the tall susuki grass in Onibaba.  Lake Biwa is creepy despite, or maybe because of, how pretty it is as a backdrop, where Onibaba's tall marsh grass is frightening.

Lake Biwa first takes on an eerie vibe during the characters' initial boat foray in the thick fog.  The mist, the low shots where the camera is just above the water line, and Ohama's beautiful, if a touch unearthly song as she rows all combined to almost make it feel to me like there was something waiting in the water.

Ohama sings "This world is a temporary abode where we weep until the dawn comes, pitched by the waves" which only amplifies the creepiness.

Soon they encounter a small derelict vessel, which they initially think is a "ghost of the lake," containing only a dying man who warns them of the pirates patrolling the waters.   The scene ends with them rowing back to shore and literally fading into the mist.

Later, the lake is show in full daylight in the background when Genjuro spends time with Lady Wakasa, and like Wakasa herself, there's something off about it despite it's superficially pastoral beauty.   It almost looms in the background.

The tall grass of Onibaba, shot in Inba Swamp, is the most pervasive image of the film.  It's basically always in frame somewhere and there are many shots of it undulating in the wind.  It's confining, obscuring all periphery vision as the characters grope through it, and danger could be anywhere.  And it often is.

The opening scene of the film is two wounded soldiers stumbling through the grass, trying to evade two pursuers on horseback.  The stumbling soldiers don't know where they are, they don't know where their pursuers are, and right when they think they are in the clear, two spears come knifing out of the grass and kill them.  They don't see the wielders and neither does the audience.  It immediately sets up the threat of the grass.

As the lost samurai puts it "This field of susuki grass is terrifying.  Who knows what demons or serpents dwell here?"

One of the more sinister things about the susuki is that it obscures the death pit which has swallowed so many men.  And the pit itself is an interesting hazard.  It's nature and origins are not really explained.  Especially given the opening caption describing it as "a passageway from the ancient times to the present" it doesn't feel like something the women dug.  The HBO version translates the caption as "The hole, deep and dark.  It's darkness has lasted since ancient times."  How much of this is accurate and how much is metaphor is again, unclear.

It just is, and lies in wait for the careless.

Gallimaufry

Ugetsu

• The HBO and Criterion translations seem to be the same here, unlike in Throne of Blood where they were very different.   But I can't find who did translation, which saddens me.

• I like the scene near the end of Genjuro working his pottery wheel alone.  It's composed and shot to recall the early pottery scene where he had Miyagi helping him.

• The story "A Serpent's Lust" is pretty different in detail but the inspiration is obvious.  Ueda's two tales, per Rayns, are actually Chinese in origin.

• I like the closeup of Ohama's sandals on the ground outside the temple while the rape is happening.  I'm glad the movie used this as a stand-in for actually showing her during the crime.  And the way the perpetrators throw money at her before leaving is horrific.

• Rayns speculates that Ugetsu's use of Noh theater (i.e. Wakasa's makeup) influenced the use of Noh in Throne of Blood.

• Mizoguchi had some ambivalence about the final product, saying in a 1954 interview with Kinema Junpo magazine: "This too is a film I'd long wanted to make but I'm not very satisfied with the result as it stands."

• The prayers written on Genjuro's body which protect him from and exorcise the ghosts are written in Sanskrit.  Rayns notes that Japanese speakers wouldn't understand the writing either

• I like how, for the last shot of the film, the camera pans up after Miyagi's son leaves an offering of her grave, revealing a wide pastoral landscape with farmers in the background.  This drama is one among many in this world.

• Is Lady Wakasa's father's singing verbal or non verbal?  I can't tell if it's just vocalizations or he's saying something.  There's no subtitles here so I assume there's no actual words, which I think makes it creepier.

• Lady Wakasa already knows who Genjruo is and about his pottery.  This injects some ambiguity: is some of this in his head?  She knows his name and his trade, but doesn't know he's married though, admittedly, she doesn't seem to care once he reveals it.

Onibaba

• The HBO translation here is not the same as the Criterion one for this film, though my spot checking didn't reveal anything so strangely different as what I found in HBO's Throne of Blood.  Again, I found no trace of who did either translation.

• The characters speak of insane and out of season weather events.  The disorder of the human world has also created chaos in the natural one.  "The time is out of joint."

• The opening with the two running soldiers is reminiscent of a slasher flick.

• I like how, after he and the women murder the two soldiers in the river, Hachi immediately realizes this was not the first time the women had killed.

• Older Woman's line to the lost samurai that "I’ve never seen anything truly beautiful since the day I was born" is a bitter reminder of how hard her life has been.

• Older woman kicks one of the dead soldiers in the opening scene in the face in an act of contempt that is good foreshadowing of what she will say to the lost samurai.

• I like the ambiguity in the last shot of whether Older Woman, chasing Younger Woman and yelling "I am a human being" actually cleared the pit.  We see her jump but it cuts before she lands (or falls.)

• I like Older Woman's line in response to Younger Woman protesting she shouldn't leave so late to sell the samurai's equipment because it will be dark soon.   She says "Once it's dark it can't get any darker" which is also a good metaphorical reference to the moral degradation of the characters.  Shades of Macbeth's "I am in blood / Stepped in so far that, should I wade no more, / Returning were as tedious as go o'er"

• Nobuko Otowa as Older Woman was only 40 when this released which makes the characters' referring to her as an old hag kind of funny.  Or sad.

• There are so many skeletons in the pit

Conclusion

I really liked these quite different, though thematically connected, films.  I would recommend Onibaba to pretty much everyone with basically no hesitation.  I would probably be hesitant to recommend Ugetsu to a casual movie goer as it is weirder and a slower burn.   The plot is just a little looser and more deliberately paced.  I found it to be interesting and moving but it's probably not for everyone.

It's not surprising that Onibaba is a tighter narrative as it's just one narrative and not four woven together, but I think it's the more accessible and, on the surface, the more exciting film. And man, it is intense.  Having said that I wouldn't warn anyone away from Ugetsu who just read this piece and is still curious.  And honestly, it's intriguing on just a technical level, too.

This was a good experience.  I love good movies!

-m