Blog - Yotsuya Kaidan
Yotsuya Kaidan
Yesterday we went to the Japan Foundation Forum in Akasaka to see the film Misumi Kenji's "Yotsuya Kaidan" part of their series "The Best of Japanese Horror" being shown with English subtitles this weekend. English subs were definitely useful to understand this one fully, as I think the old Japanese isn't even all easy for natives.
Yotsuya Kaidan tells about a unhappy married couple of which the husband Tamiya is tricked into adultery by his bad friends. Things turn bad when the rich father of the beautiful girl who desperately wants to marry Tamiya order for his wife Oiwa to be poisoned. She'll come back and take revenge.
The 1958 color film was captivating and much scarier than I expected for the era. In fact you can see that recent horror classics like "Ring" have definitely been influenced by such films and tales from back then. Frequent Japanese horror elements such as hair and a well are also present.
After seeing the movie, we decided to walk to Shinjuku. As we passed through Yotsuya, we went to two shrines that memorize the Yotsuya Kaidan tale. While Tamiya and Oiwa really existed in Yotsuya, the tale is all fake and was originally written for kabuki. The Tamiya Shrine is said to be the real one owned by the Tamiya family, and flyers are available there which tell the true story of the fictive horror tale (flyer here at the bottom). Just across the street is another impressive shrine which contains a well said to be related to Oiwa-sama's, but that shrine is fake and was built post-war, and isn't related to the Tamiya family. My pictures are of this later one.
Thanks to Jean for pointing out the event, otherwise I'd surely have missed it.
Posted on September 18, 2005 at 12:33 | Tweet
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