Kwaidan and Audition

There are numerous recurring motifs in Kwaidan: vengeful women of a supernatural beauty, cannibalism, wandering priests, unexplained mysteries, wise and foolish samurais, and heads and decapitation. An almost perfect example: the goblins, or Rokurokubi, were cannibals with necks long enough to lift their heads high up in the air, and the priest was able to take one of the heads off during a fight. All very strange, and I’m not sure what the significance of any of it is, but it’s very entertaining.

Often some information is withheld from the reader at the end of a story that adds to the otherworldliness of it. It’s unusual for a horror story to end with a mystery. Typically the mystery is introduced at the beginning and the reader learns more about it as the story progresses. Stephen King’s The Mist for example. Yet in Of A Mirror And A Bell the final sentence reads, “But no!-I really cannot tell you with what [the jar] was filled!”

Diplomacy is probably my favorite. It breaks all the rules of a horror story. The ending is anti-climactic and gives you the opposite of what you would expect, but it’s such an interesting explanation of why spirits are able to come back and haunt its victims that it is satisfying. It’s hard to think of another horror story where a main character’s confidence didn’t betray him/her and put his/her life in danger, but that happens more than once within the Kwaidan collection. There’s no deciphering if this is done to convey any particular message or if it’s simply meant to be a “strange tale”.

The Jikiniki reminds me of a vampire, in that he is required to eat human flesh (albeit dead humans) and it is considered to be a curse on him, which sort of distracts from or downplays the curse that has been placed on the village because of it. For a vengeful “curse” it’s not totally fair. Unlike a vampire he doesn’t take any thrill in this, only shame, but it is interesting to see the self-centered archetype portrayed as “damned” in both Western and Eastern fiction.  

It may be that the more recent Japanese horror has taken a turn from the whimsical horror such as in Kwaidan. Overall, the short stories of Kwaidan were more playful than the Audition movie, although they both dealt with concepts like vengeful women and the deceptiveness of beauty. Audition felt like it was a very slow and long build to one very gory scene. Even Kwaidan had descriptive moments of gore in its text but the dream like quality of the stories kept it always feeling quaint and never too serious. But Audition was hard to sit through at times, not just because of the gore, but I think because it dealt with more relevant and real horrors like child abuse.