Kaneto Shindō :: Onibaba
Folk horror, reeds, hunger, bodily erosion and postwar memory
The reeds in Onibaba are seven feet tall, and they close over the fugitives’ paths like dark water.
Kaneto Shindō shot the film in 1964, in black and white, with the cinematographer Kiyomi Kuroda, over three months among the reeds of Inba Swamp in Chiba Prefecture, under working conditions that bordered on siege. He films the susuki field as an organism, a vegetal labyrinth that swallows samurai fleeing civil war and returns them, stripped, to a pit dug in its depths.
Two women live from that pit, a mother-in-law and a daughter-in-law played by Nobuko Otowa and Jitsuko Yoshimura, both nameless, as befits figures in a rite. They kill, strip the bodies, sell the armour to the merchant Ushi and survive. Hunger is the only theology left standing in a country ruined by fourteenth-century warfare.
The ground matters more here than the plot it produces. Shindō said he chose the field because the wind moving through the grass struck him as an emotional barometer, almost a seismograph of feudalism in its death throes. The field seems older than that explanation, almost chthonic, and it imposes its terms on the drama.
Then there is the pit, a stubborn black aperture guarded by the two women like a family secret. Psychoanalytic readings have taken it, not implausibly, as the repressed femininity of a patriarchal society, whatever must be silenced, absorbed and digested by the earth before it can contaminate the village.
The older woman wears a demon mask to frighten the younger, and it later fuses to her face and tears the skin when it is removed. By Shindō’s own account it carries an echo of the burns suffered by hibakusha. A historical scar is carried into myth, as though postwar Japan required an ancient demon to speak of a wound still too recent to approach directly.
This is where the film enters the territory of hauntology, a landscape compelled to become film, a place that has to narrate itself.
Erosion reaches beyond the soil of Chiba, where the crew lived for three months in makeshift accommodation near the set. It reaches the bodies, the faces and the moral structure of the characters, and necessity abrades them as acid eats into the mask.
Shindō treats nature as an agent and grants it no pantheistic consolation. The wind in the reeds records, with the dull patience of matter, the gradual unravelling of every human compact.
