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By Haden Guest
The Criterion Collection
Kaneto Shindo’s 1964 erotic-horror film Onibaba (which translates as “demon woman”), set in the countryside of fourteenth-century Japan and based on a Buddhist fable, initially appears to unfold in a purely allegorical space, where everything is metaphor, every element a symbol. Shindo and cinematographer Kiyomi Kuroda translate the fable’s abstracted meanings into striking images, and the film’s formal audacity makes for an incredibly visceral and immediate experience. But by the end, Onibaba has forsaken allegory to reveal the primacy of vital forces that aren’t representative of anything else in the film, existing there only for their own sake: the twinned human drives of sexuality and the will to survive.
An extremely prolific screenwriter and director, the outspokenly leftist Shindo had already become known in the fifties for films that cast an empathetic eye on modern-day characters living in poverty, and in particular on women proving resilient in the face of harsh difficulties. In keeping with those themes, Onibaba centers on a dangerous duo of women fighting to survive while men are away at war.
The two protagonists spend their days in fields of tall reeds that rise up so high as to obscure almost everything else, blocking out the rest of the world and thus setting the stage for what is essentially, at least at first, an outdoor chamber drama. The focus is largely on the relationship between this older woman (Nobuko Otowa) and this younger woman (Jitsuko Yoshimura), rather than on their interactions with their environment or the world beyond their daily lives. That world, after all, has nothing to offer these women—save for the few lost soldiers it throws at them once in a while, for them to heartlessly attack and kill. Once the deed is done, the bodies dropped in a deep hole in the middle of a field, and the men’s armor and weapons set aside to be sold later, the famished older woman and her daughter-in-law inhale their dinner, in complete silence, before lying down together and falling asleep within seconds. The world exists only to give them sustenance; their bodies are simply tools for survival.
On a literal level, the reeds screen the women from the view of the unfortunate soldiers who cross their paths. What becomes clear, however—especially as we see how the pair must negotiate for every bit of food they get out of the callous merchant Ushi (Taiji Tonoyama) in exchange for the dead men’s belongings—is that the reeds also symbolize the way in which the women are kept out of sight of those in power. Left alone at home while their sons and husbands are sent off to war and often killed, the women in this world are pushed to extremes such as murder or prostitution in their own fight to stay alive. Their invisibility is what enables them to kill without consequence, but it is also what isolates them from the rest of society.
When the women’s neighbor Hachi (Kei Sato) returns from the war, Onibaba gives us more context about the time and place in which the story is unfolding, rooting its events in something more closely resembling a concrete reality. Even so, the facts of this war are so familiar that they could refer to any number of conflicts, at any moment in time. Hachi describes generals engaged in petty power disputes who send conscripted men into pointless, bloody battles, with none of the soldiers really knowing what they’re fighting for.
The combat remains offscreen for the entirety of the film, but Shindo (who also wrote the screenplay) elegantly uses the women’s reality as a microcosm of war and the disregard for human life that defines it. Their apparent lack of remorse about killing lost deserters who are themselves trying only to escape meaningless and violent death is a result of the circumstances into which war has forced them.
The impact that Hachi’s presence has on the psychological dynamic between mother-in-law and daughter-in-law forms the dramatic core of the film. After the arrogant man’s return, both are at first hostile to him, for he has come back without the older woman’s son and the younger woman’s husband. Hachi sticks out like a sore thumb in the symbolic order so economically established by the film in its deceptively simple opening minutes. He is neither a soldier on the run whose armor the women can sell—in fact, he escaped the conflict by dressing up as a priest—nor a predator seeking to exploit them, like the merchant Ushi. What does he want, and what does he stand for?
“Onibaba is striking not only for its rich symbolism but also for the genuine terror its suggestions of the supernatural inspire.”
It all becomes clear when, soon after his return, Hachi and the younger woman embark on an intense sexual relationship, which the older woman does not approve of—though she is at first more concerned about ending up alone if her daughter-in-law moves in with Hachi than she is about the idea that this liaison may be disrespectful to the memory of her dead son. While this pragmatic position makes sense for a woman of her age leading such a difficult life, it also seems to gesture at a more contemporary reality than that of fourteenth-century Japan. The modernity of the film’s concerns is confirmed when Hachi and the younger woman lay out their expectations of the relationship: they want only casual sex between “good friends,” not necessarily to live together or start a family. Of course, on a narrative level, this arrangement is made possible by the freedom from outside scrutiny that comes with an isolated life among the reeds. But here many viewers will no doubt see a reflection of the reality of the 1960s and the sexual revolution that was underway in many parts of the world when Onibaba was released. The older woman’s assumption that Hachi wants to marry the younger woman echoes the expectations of an older generation, challenged by a more emancipated youth.
Onibaba is striking, however, not only for its rich symbolism but also for the genuine terror its suggestions of the supernatural inspire and, especially, for its visceral sexuality, the powerful life force that moves it forward. When the older woman first sees the couple in the throes of passion, in Hachi’s hut, she walks away angry and painfully frustrated. She wraps her arms and legs around a tall tree, and with this obviously phallic image Shindo initially merely seems to be pushing the film’s symbolism to an (almost comical) extreme. But indeed, desire is slowly creating a rift in the older woman’s firm structure of beliefs and values, without her realizing it. She does not simply stand for the conservatism of an older generation; rather, Shindo suggests that behind her adherence to these beliefs is a repression of her own sexual desire and a fear of loneliness—in short, a need for intimacy. Like her daughter-in-law, the older woman is a creature of flesh and blood.
As the two women, along with the viewer, become more aware of the realm of the body, details in the film take on a more haptic, physical quality. The reeds flowing in the wind now seem to quiver between moments of calm and wildness like waves of desire. After the first time Hachi invites the younger woman to his hut, he runs through the grass and rolls around on the ground, venting his sexual frustration but also perhaps celebrating the fact that the woman did not exactly turn his offer down. His energy is matched by that of the younger woman when she races to meet him at night, lust piercing through the physical barrier of the reeds. One particularly joyous moment shows the two naked lovers laughing and chasing each other by the water; amid close-ups of the reeds and shots of birds startled by their laughter, the couple are just another part of nature, at one with the elements in their own version of Eden.
The two of them would have made natural enemies, considering Hachi’s failure to protect the younger woman’s husband in combat. But theirs is a friendship that goes some way against meaning-making—against attributing outsize significance to mundane, harmless acts. In Hachi’s words, “What men and women do is no sin. Everyone does it!” Sexual liberation also liberates the act from the meanings that are ascribed to it out of fear and a desire for control. The older woman, for these very reasons, seeks to restore a symbolic order in which her daughter-in-law’s “adultery” would be punished.
The mother-in-law tries in vain to convince the restless young woman that she has sinned, and that “those who indulge their passions in this world” would go to a kind of purgatory—the “animal realm”—when they die. It’s the older woman’s fortuitous encounter with a lost samurai, wearing beautiful armor and a terrifying oni (demon) mask, that restores her hope of putting a stop to the liaison. After walking the unsuspecting masked stranger to the hole to fall to his death, she climbs down to retrieve his armor and mask. When she tells the dead man, “You sent men to their death. This is your just reward,” while standing among the bones of the people she has herself killed, the older woman does not seem to pick up on the hypocrisy of her statement. Perhaps even more chilling is the possibility that, with no one around to hear her, she may be talking to herself, in a desperate attempt to once again attribute convenient meanings to the things and people around her.
On her way to meet Hachi the next day, the young woman is surprised by a figure in a white robe and a terrifying mask. She screams in terror at what we know to be her bitter mother-in-law wearing her latest victim’s disguise, and runs back home, terrified and convinced that the demon the older woman had told her about actually exists. But as her desire goes unsatisfied, so does Hachi’s; on the third night, while once again trying to evade the demon, she bumps into her lover, himself on his way to meet her. In a confused state of terror and lust, the couple embrace right there, under the pouring rain, in front of the dumbfounded monster. Even the storm loses its signification of doom as the lovers roll around in the wet grass.
In the face of all-consuming desire, the older woman and the order she represents seem utterly defeated. But even she did not genuinely believe that adultery was a sin punishable by death or that a demon would bother to visit the couple as a result of it—she had to manufacture the vengeful apparition herself. The film’s ultimate rejection of symbolism in the face of immediate, visceral truth would not be complete if it stopped there. The real test comes in the final act, in the form of a challenge to the notion of cosmic punishment, which is itself based on the idea that everything happens for a reason, and that events hold great symbolic significance. As the focus turns to the crimes committed by the older woman, all much more serious transgressions than her daughter-in-law’s affair, the question arises: Will higher powers make her pay for them? Will a frightful demon appear to her?
When she finds herself unable to remove the mask from her face, the older woman believes this alone to be her punishment. After all, this would make for an especially beautiful case of poetic justice, given that the mask is meant to represent the face of a jealous woman. But with the reluctant help of her daughter-in-law, she eventually manages to free herself. Her face, like that of the samurai before her, has been gravely disfigured, and the younger woman runs away terrified, convinced that the woman really is a demon. Even so, this seems relatively modest retribution for a murderer, and the older woman knows it. She is euphoric at being free from the “samurai’s curse.” Her daughter-in-law runs toward the hole in the ground, hoping to lead the creature chasing her to its death. She jumps over it, but, surprisingly, so does her mother-in-law. In that instant, the older woman escapes the fate of so many film villains, who, just as they think they have either gotten away with their crime or finally finished paying for it, meet with a particularly gruesome or humiliating end. As the exhilarated mother-in-law screams, “I’m not a demon! I’m a human being!” it is her turn to reject a symbolic system, one that would attribute some kind of evil significance to her scars.
Both characters have left far behind the prison of meanings they lived in at the beginning of the film. From bloodless symbols, they have reclaimed their existence as human beings, with their own desires and agency, though as the film leaves the two women jumping over the hole—the young woman running away in fear while her mother-in-law, desperate not to be abandoned, chases after her—both of them still appear to struggle to distinguish between bad luck, consequence, and divine punishment. But Shindo’s film leaves no space for ambiguity: for him, there are no demons, and to err is only human.
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