Presented in a new restoration by Toho, Kaidan (Ghost Stories) (1965) revives the visionary elegance with which Kobayashi brought to the screen four tales by Lafcadio Hearn. A classic of Japanese cinema, where folklore, visual abstraction, and chromatic sophistication turn ghostly legends into images of extraordinary power.
Kaidan (in its archaic form Kwaidan) is the ghost story, a narrative genre that has always been popular in Japan. With Kwaidan, the great Masaki Kobayashi tells with refined sophistication four episodes (the last of which is metanarrative) drawn from the eponymous collection by Lafcadio Hearn, the renowned writer who became Japanese under the name Yakumo Koizumi. These are tales rooted in Japanese folklore: Yuki Onna (the Snow Woman), the spectral wife, the body painted with sutras to ward off spirits – motifs that also reappear in Mizoguchi’s Ugetsu (Tales of the Pale and Mysterious Moon After the Rain). At the center lies an Eastern idea: the world of the dead is not separate, but touches and intersects with our own.
Kaidan weaves together four supernatural tales from Lafcadio Hearn’s classic collection, which Masaki Kobayashi transforms into visions suspended between dream and nightmare. Premiered at Cannes in 1965, where it won the Special Jury Prize and earned an Academy Awar...
Kaidan stands out for its striking abstraction: many scenes are filmed in the studio, conceived in an explicitly stylized, declarative mode; the painted backdrops, especially in the second episode, conjure an unreal, painterly, almost delirious sky, where the motif of the eye recurs. In sharp contrast, the acting remains realistic. The sole exception is the naval battle between the Genji and Heike clans, where narration takes on an abstract, epic quality, carried by song as it recounts the fall of the Heike – the very heartbeat of Japanese epic tradition. With its sumptuous use of color, Kobayashi’s film radiates a sophisticated elegance, different from, for example, the fervor of Nobuo Nakagawa, though it does not attain the poetic heights of Kenji Mizoguchi.
