Kaidan

Following his smash success with Ring (1998) and Ring 2 (1999) - films that launched the worldwide J Horror boom - Nakata Hideo went to Hollywood, where he directed The Ring Two and developed other projects, including The Ring Three.
For his first Japanese film since 2002, Nakata made Kaidan, a period shocker based on the work of Sanyutei Encho, a 19th-century writer and rakugo (comic monologue) performer. In other words, Nakata returned to his native roots, which makes creative sense since some of the scariest elements in his J Horror hits were deeply Japanese, beginning with vengeful female ghosts.
But J Horror also departs from Japanese ghost-story traditions with its use of contemporary technology, mundane modern settings and everyday phenomenon to generate scares. In the Ring films, the carrier of the deadly curse is a videotape. In Nakata's 2002 Dark Water (Hongurai No Mizu No Soko Kara) the house of horrors is the sort of moldy, run-down apartment building found throughout Tokyo.
By that definition, Kaidan is not J Horror, but rather a throw-back to an earlier tradition of Japanese film making. If it had been made in 1957, it would be hailed today as a classic.
The leading horrormeister of that era, Nakagawa Nobuo, also used ancient stories and legends as material for his films, including The Ghost Of Yotsuya (Tokaido Yotsuya Kaidan, 1959) and Hell (Jigoku, 1960), with a familiarity and conviction that gave them extra frisson.
Nakata, however, is not just channeling Nakagawa, but picking up the pace and amping up the shocks to keep today's audiences clutching their popcorn, while engaging their eyes with gorgeous cinematography by Hayashi Junichirô and production design by Taneda Yohei. At the same time, he respects his source material - and does it chills-down-the-spine justice.
Kaidan begins with a storyteller reciting a tale about a samurai who cuts down a debt collector. The dying man curses the samurai and his family, and the samurai ends up killing his wife and himself. Their baby son is raised by a loyal servant, while the slaughtered man's daughters wait in vain for his return.
A quarter of a century later, the baby has grown to become a handsome-but-poor tobacco seller, Shinkichi (Onoe Kikunosuke). By a twist of fate, he meets the elegant Toyoshiga (Kuroki Hitomi), the daughter of the debt collector, who runs a singing school in Edo (premodern Tokyo). Shinkichi is irresistibly attracted to her, despite their considerable age difference (with the ageless Kuroki Hitomi playing Toyoshiga, the attraction is easy enough to understand).
Soon, Shinkichi and Toyoshiga become lovers, and Shinkichi takes a position as an assistant at the school, whose students are overwhelmingly young and female. It's not hard to see what comes next: Toyoshiga becomes madly jealous, until she begins driving her students away, despite Shinkichi's efforts to reason with her.
Finally, Shinkichi decides to leave her - and Toyoshiga throws a fit. In the ensuing struggle with Shinkichi, her eyelid is accidentally slashed by a shamisen plectrum - an injury that eerily reflects the one the samurai inflicted on her father. In other words, the curse is at work.
Toyoshiga soon dies in agony, while Shinkichi runs off with one of her students, the peachy-sweet Ohisa (Inoue Mao). But now Toyoshiga's ghost is on the loose. This starts a pattern: Shinkichi, poor fellow, can escape neither the jealous ghost nor the attentions of the various women he meets in his wanderings; a bad, potentially fatal combination.
The plot's main spring - the bad karma of one generation strikes down members of the next, with romantic love serving as the blade - has a distinguished pedigree. Kabuki and other traditional performing arts have used it, going back centuries. Even so, for Westerners, it not always easy to understand what Shinkichi's crime is - beyond having the wrong DNA.
As Shinkichi, kabuki star Onoe Kikunosuke underscores the film's back-to-the-1950s' feel. With his smooth, round features and gentle manner, he looks and, as the film begins, acts like a nimaime (player of romantic leads) from another era. But as the story develops - and his character becomes more desperate - his performance intensifies until whatever was nimaime-esque disappears. What is left is a man in extremity, stripped of everything but his raw drive to survive.
The finale, when the swords come out, is not horrific but rather stirring in the best chambara eiga (sword-fight movie) style. Maybe it's time Nakata switched from ghosts to samurai.