Shinoda Masahiro (篠田 正浩) died four days ago at the age of 94. Shinoda was a prominent director in Japan's New Wave though, until yesterday, the only movie of his I'd seen was 1964's Pale Flower (乾いた花). However, I absolutely love Pale Flower, a yakuza movie that runs madly contrary to the trends of yakuza movies at the time which tended to cast handsome young idols as misfit yakuza who glory in tales of tragic youth. Pale Flower features a middle aged yakuza, recently released from prison, inured to the culture, bored of everything, finding ecstasy only in the moment of the kill. A sadistic young woman becomes his apprentice in a story about scraping the barrel of self-gratification in an amoral universe (you can see my review from fourteen years ago here).
So last night I watched another Shinoda Masahiro movie, 1979's Demon Pond (夜叉ヶ池), a very different film to Pale Flower, but a good one.
Based on a stage play from 1913, the story follows a teacher called Yamasawa (Yamazaki Tsutomu) who travels to a region between Fukui and Gifu where a legendary Demon Pond is said to be located. He trudges across dry, hot landscape and arrives at a village with enormous thatched roofs (I think it was probably filmed in Shirakawa, which is actually in Gifu). There's a drought. When Yamasawa enters one building, he finds a few people gathered. He has something in his eye so he asks for water. A woman cheerfully offers her breast milk instead, shoving her nipple at his eye, at which he, shocked, recoils. Leaving the village, he starts up a hillside where he's surprised to find a trickling stream. He washes his eye with the water before realising it comes from the very Demon Pond he sought. The villagers won't take water from the pond for fear of angering the dragon that's said to dwell in it.
From here, the film becomes more stylised and deliberately artificial. He goes to the pond and nearby finds a small house occupied by a married couple, though at first he only speaks to the wife, Yuri, who's played by a man named Bando Tamasaburo. Bando is a kabuki actor, the form of Japanese theatre in which, for much of its history, all the female parts were played by men. This was because, in the 17th century, when kabuki was first introduced, the actresses were seen as too sexually provocative for the male audience. Of course, replacing them with men led to men having sex with men but the taboo against women playing women remained in place. It must have loosened at some point, because we have a kakubi actress depicted in Ozu's Story of Floating Weeds as early as 1934.
Bando is an onnagata, a male actor specialising in female roles. Men like him gain repute for artistically conveying ideals of feminine manner.
The other occupant of the house, Yuri's husband, turns out to be Yamasawa's old friend, a scholar named Hagiwara (Go Kato), who wears a very artificial-looking grey wig for reasons that are not explained. He immediately removes the wig when he speaks to Yamasawa.
No reason is given in the story but the film's symbolism is pretty clear. After Yamasawa refuses to have his eyes cleansed by breast milk in that natural, working class world, he instead washes his eyes with the Demon Pond, and thus has senses opened to an unnatural, or supernatural, world where performance has more reality than reality. In his occupation, Yamasawa is already more connected to this world as someone who deals in abstract ideas. There's also a potential class allegory as the people living on the hill maintain a right to the Demon Pond while the farmers suffer from drought. If a certain bell near the pond isn't rung three times a day, the release of the dragon is prophesied to be accompanied by a flood. Since the villagers have a drought, they start to think a flood might not be so bad. Fluid as a symbol of change and new ideas is pretty common and, as is common with revolutionaries, the farmers become too consumed with toppling the old order to begin to understand the devastation that will follow in the wake of the revolution.
Shinoda was obviously a director of great talent and intellect. Many of his movies are available on The Criterion Channel.
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