• 夜叉ヶ池 (Demon Pond)

3/2/25 (Sun)

Shinoda Masahiro’s 1979 adaptation of Izumi Kyoka’s 1913 stage fantasy. Shinoda, who had previously drawn on Bunraku theater for Double Suicide, here turns to Kabuki as his inspiration. While the stage show was not necessarily written for Kabuki, I saw a pitiful Kabuki version directed by and starring the great Tamasaburo way back in 2008 that I’d prefer to forget. The film, which also starred Tamasaburo, had not been seen for 42 years after its initial television broadcast, and I didn’t recognize the material until I started watching. I wouldn’t have bothered had I known. The unnatural acting, the unconvincing sets, the stilted dialogue – it has it all. The amateurish representation of the animals still represents the low point with lines like, “Hey, you’re a crab. Open this letter with your claw.” Shinoda may have intentionally kept the artificial look as in Double Suicide to heighten the theatricality of the setting, but I just found it grating. The one redeeming feature is the thrilling flood scene towards the end, which apparently used images from Brazil’s Iguasu Falls and Hawaii. That was undermined immediately by the ridiculous ascent of the Dragon Goddess into heaven, but it still represents one of the best disaster scenes I’ve ever seen, even with the superior CG effects possible nowadays. That’s the one scene where the movie really improves on the source material.

Tamasaburo is young and beautiful in his double role as the wife and goddess; I suspect that they’re meant to be one and the same given the ghostly way he renders his voice as the wife. Yamazaki Tsutomu is adequate as the teacher, Kato Go is wooden as the husband, and everyone else is expendable.

The show is about appeasing a natural spirit to prevent disastrous flooding, which I imagine these days would be reworked into some environmental lesson. But the story as rendered here is pure fantasy with no moral finger-wagging, so that’s at least something to be thankful for. Not enough to make it interesting, though. Eminently missable.