The exact translation of Kwaidan is "ghost story," and Kwaidan is nothing more--and nothing less--than four elegantly chilling ghost stories. What it lacks in ultimate significance it more than makes up for in style and sensibility, and maybe that is part of the point of the movie. The ghost story we were told when we were young, the one that seemed so paralyzingly frightening then--it runs the risk of becoming simply silly when placed on a big screen, unless the dramatization contains its own bite and brilliance. Here, it does.
Kwaidan features four classic stories from Japanese mythology via Lafcadio Hearn, a Westerner who lived and taught in Japan for most of his life and became a sort of cultural ambassador for that country to the West. Hearn's retellings have not only become staples towards understanding Japanese myth in this country, but in Japan as well: there are few anthologies of such work that do not feature at least one of his stories. Masaki Kobayashi, director of the lurid but powerful Harakiri and the outstanding thee-part epic The Human Condition, collected three of the most popular and commonly retold of Hearn's stories (as well as a fourth fragmentary story) and filmed them with great care and wild visual imagination. The result is moody, lovely, and broad, if not always deep, but no less fascinating to watch. It calls to mind Kurosawa's Dreams, but without that movie's didactic self-importance. It's literally like watching a painting come to life, and that in itself is reason enough to see it. Kobayashi shot it almost entirely on sound stages built in a giant aircraft hangar, and it took four years to complete.
