Arashi ga oka
The Sound of the World Turned Inside Out
Published
in Japanese Horror Cinema, Edinburugh University Press,
Edinburugh, 2004
Speaking
Japanese and sounding Gothic
The
Gothic is attracted to decay like maggots to a corpse. And
like flies carrying airborne disease, the Gothic vaporises.
It floats along the global trade winds that breathe death
through the fetid national identities which distinguish
each country's cinema. The Gothic may be Germanic in its
morphological origination; it might be English in its formulation
of a literary obesity; it might be American in its slippage
toward social decline. Its constancy is its suffixing to
any cultural identity as a means of decaying that which
it touches.
eJapanese Gothic' is a symptom of this affectation. The
mutative outgrowth of European tropes, figures and icons
from noticeably Japanese environs, architecture and landscape
is a clear demonstration of how the Gothic performs more
as worm wood and less as a rhizome. It atrophies from within
to create new chimeraesque shapes rather than sprouting
forth additional structures. While European and Occidental
Gothic expressions are the result of importation, the Gothic
in Japanese guise is the result of direct injection and
a consequent inability to digest. The spectre of Japan's
unnerving isolationism governs Japanese aesthetics to such
an extent that transcultural occurrences such as the Gothic
are never subsumed, fused or blended: they curdle, pock
and mar their reflecting surfaces into micro-terrains of
cultural mutation. 1
Yoshida Kiju's Arashi ga oka (1988, also known as Onimaru)
announces itself as a contorted duality of Gothic imposition,
with opening credits declaring its basis as Emily Bront''s
Wuthering Heights, and then cutting to an obayashi - the
traditional narrational figure in Japanese ghost stories
from the medieval period. As she tells the tale of Onimaru
to a blind monk, her archetypically rasping voice sucks
in the Gothic and expels it through a uniquely Japanese
dialect. The Occidental vanishes; the Oriental materialises.
The Japanese voice that speaks this versioning of Bront''s
novel serves as a sign of its generative Gothic apparition
- to such an extent that evoice' becomes both metaphor and
metonym in the play between sound and image that characterises
Arashi ga oka as a complex audiovisual text. No mere transposition,
interpretation or translation of Bront''s tale of displaced
souls, windstrewn romance and diminishing vitality, Arashi
ga oka eschews all recourse to estaging' its para-Gothic
literary origins. In place of nominal literary and theatrical
strategies employed in cinematic novelizations, Arashi ga
oka orchestrates and arranges the thematic levels of Bront''s
tale via Takemitsu Toru's musical score.
Collapsing
the orchestra into sound
The
first point to make about the score to Arashi ga oka is
an obvious one: it is performed by an orchestra. This central
detail might fall on deaf Western ears who are happy with
efilm music' as unending echoic strains of Wagnerian clich?s
and gross operatic gestures. But the point is arch: to employ
a European orchestra for a Japanese film is a high-relief
effect comparable to scoring Schindler's List with koto.
Takemitsu amplifies the musicological schisms that arise
from his adoption of the orchestra by employing Japanese
technique in the performance and esounding' of the orchestral
elements. Largely bypassing the linguistic strictures of
Western harmony which tend to apply a default setting to
the harmonic building blocks in orchestral writing and performance,
instrumental identity in Arashi ga oka is always blurred,
diffused, aerated. Flutes behave like whistling kettles;
timpani like rolling boulders; horns like tuned wood resonance.
No instrument in Arashi ga oka's score presents itself as
recognisable. True to the film's ingestion of the Gothic,
Takemitsu's orchestration is the result of the orchestra
being transformed from within, at the level of tactile performance.
No mere vaudevillian mimicry and spookery blasted from the
pit below the screen, the score conjures a spectral being
living and breathing upon the stage, spot-lit with make-up
melting in the lights.
The
tactile timbres and seeping sensory nature of the score
is always at the fore, accenting the physicality of the
orchestral apparatus. In the conjoined history of Western
musical progression, the shift from the musical to the sonic
is perceived as either an unwanted aberration, a sign of
ineptness, or an act of wilful destruction. The evacuation
of controlled musical expression and its collapse into tonal
impurity, sonic irritation and harmonic degeneration have
long formed critical paradigms which qualify emusic' as
a grand and noble pursuit. But to an western ear not exposed
to Japanese music, the highly skilled performance of a lute
(biwa), flute (shakauhachi) or guitar (shimasen) might sound
identical to a three year old western child tearing apart
a violin. Arashi ga oka features superb solo performances
of all these instruments atop the aforementioned orchestral
arrangements. Boldly laid across the splayed fields of European
instrumentation that squirm like carpets of maggots on moist
earth, these uniquely Japanese signifiers of musicianship
and performance are emblematic of the evoice' which esounds'
the score, and serve to continually remind the ear that
they mix with a lush European string section like oil with
water. 2
But
Arashi ga oka is a film, not a concert. The score then is
affected by and in turn modulates the dramaturgy of the
film. And it is precisely here that the power of Arashi
ga oka as a Japanese Gothic scenario is discerned. A reading
of how the music relates to (a) the interior spatial design
and depiction of exterior locations; (b) the psychological
development (or deterioration) of the enmeshed characters;
and (c) the shimmering and wavering dissolution between
sonic atmospheres and temperate musicality, uncovers the
musicological map upon which Arashi ga oka is audiovisually
staged. Despite the bloody chambara explosiveness and the
bodily corruption which posit Arashi ga oka as a dimensional
shift beyond the original Wuthering Heights (directed by
William Wyler in 1939), the dissolution of the score - its
creeping, weeping palpability - is the prime signifier of
the Gothic germ that has overtaken this highly mannered
Japanese film.
Mapping
the terrain of Arashi ga oka
Bront''s
Wuthering Heights is as much neglected as it is referenced
by Arashi ga oka. This 16th century feudal story details
the slow descent into madness of the brutish Onimaru (Matsuda
Yusaku) - an unwanted heir to the Yamabe family fortune
after the death of Lord Takamaru Yamabe (Mikuni Rentaro)
to whom Onimaru has been utterly loyal. Central cause of
Onimaru's madness is his frayed bonding to Kinu Yamabe (Tanaka
Yuko) after she gives herself over to him after her father
Takamaru has been killed by passing soldiers. She does so
prior to leaving to marry her cousin Lord Mitsuhiko. Both
families belong to the Serpent Clan who live on the Sacred
Mountain, each owning a huge mansion on opposite sides,
and each wholly opposed to the other due to generations
of feuding. Forced to become a Shinto priestess at the capital
once she reaches womanhood, Kinu marries Mitsuhiko only
so that she is allowed to stay on the mountain and hence
near Onimaru, even though her marriage to Mitsuhiko prevents
her from seeing Onimaru again. Onimaru is angered by her
marriage and leaves to return some years later from the
capital as a Lord to whom is bequeathed dominion of the
whole mountain - including the household of Kinu and Mitsuhiko.
Kinu has had a daughter, Shino - likely to be from her past
sole union with Onimaru É
Kinu
dies; Mitsuhiko is slain by robbers who in turn are butchered
by Onimaru. Deeply disturbed by the death of Kinu, Onimaru
disinters her body from the mountain's Valley of the Dead,
risking supreme damnation. A now-adult Shino (Ito Keiko)
travels to Onimaru's mansion full of hatred toward Onimaru
as she believes he killed her father. Shino is intent on
retrieving her mother's coffin and remains, and plans to
drive Onimaru mad by reminding him of her mother. After
finding then hiding her mother's remains from Onimaru, Shino's
attempt to seduce Onimaru backfires when he reveals his
past affair with her mother. Onimaru reclaims Kinu's coffin
and withdraws into deepening neuroses and visions. Aged
and lost in his insane bond to the skeletal remains of Kinu,
he has his right arm severed in a conflict with Shino's
young cousin, Yoshimaru (Furuoya Masato). Presumed dead,
the one-armed Onimaru miraculously reappears as Shino and
Yoshimaru return Kinu's coffin to the Valley of the Dead.
Onimaru regains Kinu's coffin and drags it into the rising
mist covering the upper reaches of the Sacred Mountain É
3
The
settings for Arashi ga oka are essentially polarised between
the chiaroscuro interiors of the east/west mansions, and
the unforgiving volcanic landscape of the Sacred Mountain
(also referred to as a efire mountain'). The figures of
Onimaru, Kinu, et al are positioned within these settings
as delicate gestural shapes, mostly layered in relief against
massive and expansive backdrops of colour and texture. They
are materialisations of the solo traditional instruments
(biwa, shimasen, shakauhachi, koto, taiko, etc.) dancing
atop the seething density of the orchestral murmuring which
represents the haunting terrain of the Scared Mountain and
the penumbral gloom of the east/west mansions. While visual
grandeur and eopulent minimalism' is readily apparent, Arashi
ga oka's overall brooding tone arises from the way the sound
design and film score interpolate these settings. Predominantly,
when we are outside on the dark ashen mountain, the orchestra
sounds like howling wind; when we are inside the cavernous
mansions' rooms, we hear actual moaning wind. This is a
major reversal of the dominant logic of western mimetic
cinema (labelled erealism', enaturalism', etc.) in that
music is often deemed the voice of humanist enterprise and
dramatic conflict, while landscapes are enon-human' and
thus often felt to require non-musical (i.e. sonic) representation.
Arashi ga oka consistently places sound as the backdrop
to the chamber dramas in the mansions, while music is employed
to speak the voice of the landscape. This conceptual technique
is typical of much Japanese cinema wherein land is inextricably
linked to the psyche and spiritual tenets place the human
and the non-human on a coexistent plane of energy.
Yet
Arashi ga oka invigorates this Japanese cinematic template
of audiovisual construction. Through Takemitsu's quasi-spectral
compositional approach, the volcanic carpet of the Sacred
Mountain becomes a mindscape for the characters as they
are emptied of all social mores in their decline to madness;
the composed silence of the mansions' rooms is amplified
to form hollowed resonators for the characters' emptiness.
Opposite to western notions of house design, the traditional
Japanese domus is to welcome sound rather than block it:
paper walls allow sound to filter through; wooden floorboards
create reverberant points of contact for sliding doors and
walking feet; the sounds of nature outside flow throughout
the house as a soundtrack to framed openings onto manicured
gardens. The Japanese experience of what constitutes the
relationship between inside and outside of both home and
environment is substantially different to those of us living
in bricked and plastered walls and closed glass windows.
Consequently, the symbolic role of interior and exterior
sounds performs differently - especially in the film's imposition
of the Gothic whose symbolic codes accent the repression
of the inside and sensationalise its unleashed rupture of
the outside.
Arousing
the interior and planing the exterior
Arashi
ga oka sounds this difference of the interior/exterior bind
at two levels. Firstly, the score charts the shift between
objective capture of scenes and subjective impressions of
being in those scenes. Soft timpani rolls fused with richly
bowed double-bass against a panorama of the Sacred Mountain
will simulate wind but invoke the power its mass has on
the minds of those who traverse its barren terrain. At other
times, bass-heavy droning wind against the same panorama
will simulate a portamento pitch drop of a bowed double-bass
but evoke the acoustic characteristics of wind travelling
low to the ground to create an ominous hum typically felt
on such terrain. The edifference' between these two aural
states concurs at the symbolic level, but their actualisation
- their choice of aural rendering - reflects the angle at
which the drama is positioned as it moves forward. In effect,
this is emusic as mis-en-scene': a staging of sound that
becomes a plane upon which theatrics are played out.
The
second way in which the interior/exterior bind is articulated
as different to conventional western modes of audiovisuality
lies in the narrational aspects of the music. The score
employs its solo instrumentation of traditional Japanese
instruments to embody the psychological stature of its characters.
For example, Onimaru is esonically signed' by growling low
frequencies (drums, cellos, oboes) and a low shakauhachi;
Kinu by a blend of koto and harp, and a high shakauhachi.
Now while this might seem standard practice in western cinema
(thematic representation of characters through instrumentation),
Arashi ga oka displaces these themes into a complex bio-rhythm
that at time synchronises with on-screen depiction of a
character and at other times completely dislocates any continuity
or simultaneity. Over a static shot of Onimaru might be
the shakuhachi line of Kinu, but then allowed to carry over
into a landscape shot of the mountain. Contained within
this complex interweaving of themes and their roving, shifting
apparition is the way in which sound effects, atmospheres
and foley will appear and disappear according to intensity
or prominence of the psychological fissure being presented
at any one moment. The mix of the film is thus a psychologically
monitored one and accords little to the linguistic/structural
guidelines of realist/naturalist cinema. This is emusic
as dramaturgy': an arousal of the interiority of the story's
characters expressed beyond and despite the plastics of
the filmic construction (costume, sets, lights, camera,
etc.).
Some
detailed charting of the ways in which Arashi ga oka's score
articulates its weave of sonarised mis-en-scene and dramaturgy
can now be undertaken. The terrain of Arashi ga oka is the
breadth and depth of the Sacred Mountain. A volatile geography,
its volcanic aspects figure it as unsettled earth whose
ground is unfixed and whose fluctuating temperature suggest
its living quality. Following folkloric tradition, the Lord
of the Yamabe family must annually perform the Rite of the
Serpent, designed to keep the serpent deep within the earth.
Its symbolic rupture of the earth is deemed responsible
for crop failure by the villagers, hence the need to repress
its arousal. Yet the sexual symbolism of the rising serpent
is the sediment to Arashi ga oka's unending sexual tension.
Read this way, the low rumbles which flow throughout the
film like a sonar network of invisible ducting symbolise
the earth as a living corpus which affects and controls
those who touch its surface. From the occasional subsonic
vibrations which shudder the mountain's slopes of dark gravel
to the low-toned wind drafts surging throughout the wooden
corridors of the mansions, the earth is a responsive being
triggering states of arousal in its denizens.
While
such a view of the earth would be aligned to mystical and
fantastical tropes in western story-telling, Japanese culture
supports the animist notion of spiritual energy contained
within the apparently einanimate'. The earth and all its
discontents are as alive as any human. When Kinu and Mitsuhiko
discuss the bond each of their clan shares with the mountain
and its serpent essence, low-pitched oboes and clarinets
swirl around each other in snaking lines to musically represent
and symbolically evidence their awareness of the mysterious
power embodied by the mountain. Notably, the volume level
of this theme almost overcomes the dialogue track, indicating
how elemental energies can overpower the human.
Becoming
the Other and visceral rendering
The
core of Arashi ga oka's drama is sited in the elove action'
between Onimaru and Kinu. This actioning of desire, consummation
and obsession is concentrated in their lovemaking scenes.
Prior to their first physical encounter, each bathes in
seclusion. A naked Onimaru roughly buckets water over himself,
the bursts of white noise gashing the silence of the mansion.
Earlier, clothed in white muslim, Kinu has had cupfuls of
water carefully poured down her lithe form by her attendant.
The water barely makes a trickling noise; in place is a
series of delicately plucked koto notes and tinkling chimes.
This musical tinkling represents the upper filature that
breaks free from the corporeality of the earth: Kinu is
hovering on the transcendental cusp of becoming eother'
than the Shinto priestess custom dictates her to be.
These
tinkles also represent an inner nucleus to the swirling
sexual energy which both polarises and attracts Onimaru
and Kinu to each other. After they have made love, Kinu
is attended to by her maid while holding a mirror. She is
transfixed by her own image (like she was as a child when
first given the mirror by her father) yet narcissism and
vanity have no play here. As her oval face hovers like a
beautiful orb within the circular frame, Kinu chants softly
to her reflection, eHe is here É I am Onimaru É Onimaru
is me.' Not only has his seed taken hold in her body (symbolised
by the mirror as womb), but she has given herself over to
him as an act of self-erasure. When she departs to start
a new life with Mitsuhiko, she is, as she says, Onimaru.
The tinkling thus actions the presence of Onimaru in shots
or sequences where he appears to be absent.
The
lovemaking of Kinu and Onimaru takes place in a glowing
room tainted with what suggests smears of dried blood. This
rosewood-toned colourisation of the room's screens is never
outrightly explained (Onimaru enters and declares, eIt's
the smell of blood, not damp mould') though when Kinu first
encounters the space she clearly finds its aura unsettling.
This humoral room is actually referred to as the Seclusion
Room where household members are interred as acts of punishment.
Kinu acknowledges her wrong in seducing Onimaru by performing
their sexual union in this Seclusion Room. When they have
sex, a seductive edance' is first deployed, as each hovers
around the contours of the other's body, suggestively following
its lines with finger, hand, tongue, hair. They contort
and entwine like two snakes, engorged by the energy of the
serpent spirit of the mountain. Tuned wind drafts rise and
fall in response to the intensity of their movements. Swirling
around them like sonic smoke curls are two shakauhachi solos,
a low flute and a high flute engaged in a sensual dialogue.
Having conjured forth the serpent energy into the realm
of the corporeal, the music represents this transformation
of their selves by functioning as a form of oxidised sexuality:
airborne, it molecularly transforms their space. These floating
flutes are thus not symbolic of Onimaru and Kinu per se,
but moreso the transformation they underwent. As they move
into tactile embrace, all foley sound effects disappear:
they have absented themselves from the plane of physical
existence to become the Other.
Apart
from trailing across the end credits roll, the only time
the dual shakauhachi theme appears in full-bodied form is
during the above lovemaking scene. Elsewhere, the flute
solos are sounded alone. When Kinu dies, she is seen through
a muslim gauze similar to the fabric she wore during her
ritual bath before being with Onimaru. Fevered and dying
slowly from within ever since she left Onimaru, she now
claims to hear the sound of Onimaru's horse's hooves. The
deep timpani rolls we have heard many times now come to
the fore: this is the spirit of the mountain sounded through
the spectre of Onimaru who has been possessed by the spirit
of Kinu who seduced him as she in turn was controlled by
the mountain's sexual energy. The looping here is important,
remembering not only how Kinu perceives herself as one with
Onimaru, but how the low rumbles symbolise the way the mountain
affects those who walk upon it. Crying that she'll drag
Onimaru down to hell, her last words are spoken calmly:
eOnimaru, you are dead'. Throughout this scene, Onimaru's
low shakauhachi plays the exact solo dance it performed
during their love making. Read through visuals alone, the
scene would be one of desperate revenge. Acknowledging the
transferrals that have occurred between Onimaru and Kinu,
plus the presence of his sexual ebecoming' flute theme,
the scene is actually a morbid sex scene - one that forecasts
his descent into necrophilia.
Possessed
by the spirit of Kinu - and equally dispossessed by not
having her body following their sole night of love - Onimaru
is driven to extend his consummation of her being after
death. When he first opens her coffin, Kinu's decaying corpse
is illuminated by lightning and revealed as an undulating
spread of maggots. Mixed atop the sheets of lightning noise
and deep thunder claps (prime sonic signifiers of rupture
and transgression in global Gothic cinema) is Kinu's high
shakauhachi theme played solo. This is Kinu dragging Onimaru
down to hell by sexually luring him to take her despite
her state of decrepitude. Onimaru passes over to the other
side in his love actioning here as he embraces both what
he has become and what the mountain has made of the bond
between him and Kinu. The breathiness of their shared shakauhachi
sighs are as hot and moist as breath felt on your own neck,
imbuing their musicality with a viscerality that allows
the film to waver between erotic denouement and pornographic
stimulation.
From
this point on, Onimaru lives in his own eValley of the Dead'.
Two notable scenes extol this in unsettling ways. The first
is when he throws Mitsuhiko's sister, Tae (Ishida Eri) into
the Seclusion Room after she travels to the east mansion
in order to become Onimaru's bride. Sensing the spite which
impels her desperation, he rejects her sexual advances which
she uses as a means to overcome and control him. A terse
gender confrontation occurs, as she flaunts herself as a
reappearance of the dead Kinu, not realising that he could
only relate to her as the dead Kinu. Psychologically sparring
with each other, he is overwhelmed and rapes her as a vessel
of enot-being' Kinu, dry-humping the absence of Kinu embodied
by the physical form of Tae. Tae's face expresses outrage
not simply at being raped, but revulsion at ebecoming symbolically
dead' in the grasp of Onimaru. The depths of his madness
shock her so much she hangs herself at the gate of the east
mansion the next morning. Throughout the rape scene, the
shakauhachi lines affirm the presence and absence of Kinu
as a dark shadow cast upon everyone.
The
seemingly blood-stained walls of the Seclusion Room are
less material residue and more a sexual ectoplasm that defines
an epidermis to this erotic realm. The second scene that
depicts the morbid domus of Onimaru's mind occurs when Shino
cloisters herself in the room - first lying in Kinu's coffin,
later appearing naked and ready for sex. She taunts Onimaru
by flaunting her body; wind drafts sonically surge around
the room and cause a candle Onimaru holds to lap and dance
around her body like he once did with Kinu. As he eyes the
genetic imprint of Kinu upon her daughter's form, Shino
dares him, eCome - hate me if you can.' This time Shino
is a corporeal manifestation of Kinu's shakauhachi solo:
Shino carries on the love-actioning of Kinu as an act of
becoming that which haunts and lures the crazed Onimaru.
eTurned
inside out' and sono-musical conflation
The
graveyard of the Yamabe clan on the Sacred Mountain - poetically
named The Valley of the Dead - is often accompanied by swirling
and slow-throbbing oboes and clarinets. A possibly straightforward
choice of instrumentation, but the accent of woodwinds relates
closely to the terrain being one of degraded wooden coffins.
It is almost as if the wooden coffins have been remodelled
into woodwinds in order to sound human breath through their
morbid materiality. This is no over-reactive reading of
the use of woodwinds, as elsewhere in the film wind is the
breath of the mountain, rumbling across the mountain's dales
and troughs and tunnelling down the mansions' corridors.
Takemitsu's approach to scoring is often based on an animist
awareness of the materiality of chosen instruments, and
clearly in Arashi ga oka wood, wind and death are thematically
and aurally fused.
Essentially,
Takemitsu is less engaged in efilm scoring' as we know it
and more absorbed in edecomposing' music for the film's
Gothic-infected scenario. Rather than presume the cinematographic
scenario is somehow a ephoto-realist' document of drama
which requires the non-diegetic mode of musical discourse
to articulate a human perceptiveness (the lofty yet limited
quest of most classical western film scoring), Takemitsu's
approach is to emake sound' from the abject materiality
of the components which exist within the diegesis of the
depicted world on screen. In doing so, he effectively turns
the cinematic world inside out, hiding the thematic striations
which obviously suggests dramaturgy to the film composer,
and revealing the sonic elemental nature of a film's fabric.
This perception of the world is a key philosophical determinant
in the sono-musical conflation strongly associated with
Takemitsu.
Yet
Takemitsu is not an imposition on Arashi ga oka's dramatic
logic or fictional realm. His method of edecomposition'
is perfectly suited to the film's Gothic impulse as well
as its visceral rendering of suppressed thematics. Recalling
the aforementioned eaeration of musical themes', one must
acknowledge its resonance with the central notion of decay
which drives the Gothic in general and Arashi ga oka in
particular. When the inside of the body is exposed through
incision or rot, airborne germs gain access to that which
hair and skin block and cover, causing decay of the most
mortal kind. Onimaru experiences this potently when he disinters
Kinu's body, but as also noted, he is affected by the psychic
stench unleashed by Kinu's bodily decomposition. Inner and
outer realms - their trembling disclosure, their acidic
meld - are also at the base of the story's social construction.
Takamaru holds an awesome power over the villagers by enacting
the Serpent Rite to keep the mountain's serpent energy at
bay and assuring their livelihood.
However
he is acutely cogniscent of the theatrical charade he enacts,
declaring, eNow is an age of wars É Only fools worry about
curses or divine punishment.' Yet true to the Gothic drive
to prove that which one most denies or refuses to believe,
he neglects how the mountain's ominous form has affected
the sexual and psychological composure of the family he
has built on its bed of volcanic rock. Desire, love and
familial growth are thus affected at the micro-level, allowing
for a fulsome decay and deterioration to take hold of everyone.
The
Gothic - encompassing its criss-crossing folds of eNeo-Gothic'
which historically skirt both the sub-history of serialised
romances and the validated examples of great 19th century
novels - returns uncontrollably to the sensational intersection
of the morbid with the romantic. Never tragic but always
titillating, the Gothic loves death and loves to count the
ways. Its thrill within western modes is one of knowing
the silent, hearing the mute, acknowledging the unspoken.
Gothic literature's excessive descriptiveness (precursor
to cinema that edwells on the unsavoury') is an erotic striptease
of signification, where the unutterable is framed and spot-lit
but never named or spoken. A complex of Judeo-Christian
mores and Eurocentric morals might block the Gothic from
rendering the totality of its unspeakable action, but Japanese
Gothic has neither qualms nor concerns in adhering to the
caveats placed on the Gothic's lean to the lurid. Hence,
the wuthering musical depths and psycho-sexual heights of
Arashi ga oka that truly is the world turned inside-out.
Thanks
to Chiaki Ajioka and Rosemary Dean.
Notes
1. Not a particularly official genre of horror, eJapanese
Gothic' would be ably demonstrated by notable films like
Nakagawa Nobuo's Kyuketsuki ga (1956), Kaidan kasanegafuchi
(1957), Borei kaibyo yashiki (1958) & Takaido yatsuya Kaidan
(1959); Shindo Kaneto's Onibaba & Kobayashi Masaki's Kaidan
(both 1964); Kobayashi Tsuneo's Kaidan katame no otoko &
Sato Hajime's Kaidan semushi otoko (both 1965);Shindo Kaneto's
Kuroneko, Yasuda Kimiyoshi's Yokai hyaku monogatari, Kuroda
Yoshiyuki's Yokai daisenso, Yamamoto Satsuo's Kaidan botandoro,
Tanaka Tokuzo's Kaidan yukigoro & Hase Kazuo's Kaidan zankoku
monogatari (all 1968).
2. For more on Takemitsu Toru's approach to film-scoring
especially in relation to horror, see Brophy, P. (2000),
eHow Sound Floats On Land: The Suppression & Release of
Indigenous Musics on the Cinematic Terrain', in P. Brophy
(ed.), Cinesonic: Cinema & the Sound of Music, Sydney, Australian
Film TV & Radio School, pp. 191-215.
3.
For an analysis of the depiction of Woman in Arashi ga oka,
see Iwamura (Dean), R. (1994), eLetter from Japan: From
Girls Who Dress Up Like Boys to trussed-Up Porn Stars -
Some Contemporary Heroines on the Japanese Screen', Continuum:
The Australian Journal of Media & Culture, 7: 2, 109-130.
Credits
for Arashi ga oka
Onimaru
Matsuda Yusaku
Kinu Tanaka Yuko
Mitsuhiko Nadaka Tatsuro
Tae Ishida Eri
Kinu as a girl Takabe Tomoko
Yoshimaru Furuoya Masato
Takamaru Mikuni Rentaro
Hidemaru Hagiwara Nagare
Shino Ito Keiko
Sato Sugiyama Tokuko
Ichi Imafuku Masao
Suke Ueda Shun
Director
Yoshida Kiju (Yoshihige)
Producers Yamaguchi Kaz Francis Von Buren
Writer Yoshida Kiju
Cinematographer Hayashi Junichiro
Set designer Muraki Yoshiro
Composer Takemitsu Toru
Sound design Kubota Yukio
Editor Shirae Takao
