Demon Pond: Here Comes the Flood

Already a world-famous Kabuki star by the time he was a teenager, Tamasaburo makes his film debut here, at twenty-nine, playing not only Yuri but the ferocious dragon princess in her underwater lair, dominating both realms with wowza star power. His participation in this big-budget film was news-making: a powerful cultural figure who had been raised on theatrical tropes, Tamasaburo brought an air of theatrical prestige to the project, though he apparently felt uncomfortable with how he came off on-screen. For whatever reason, Demon Pond received a relatively muted release both at home and abroad, and though not exactly unseen since—I first saw it on a VHS rented from Blockbuster in the late eighties—it has never quite emerged from under the radar.

Once the three main characters have been fully established, the film’s narrative turns away from their private vexations and slams into third gear: as wealthy and screamingly obnoxious Diet council members arrive in a posh car with an aid shipment of rice for the starving villagers, the movie goes full-on storybook-on-microdots, with Kabuki-humanoid creatures from the pond—a crab, a carp, a catfish—emerging and chattily fleshing out the tension at hand. They, along with the incensed dragon princess, want the bell-ringing to stop, after centuries of confinement in the noxious darkness. Meanwhile, the torchbearing locals—descending into a lynch-mob fever that explicitly echoes the Japanese experience of fascist nationalism (something Izumi might well have seen in the cards when he wrote his play, during the political crises at the start of the Taisho period)—decide to sacrifice Yuri to the pond in order to bring rain. As above, so below, with the two realms both careening toward catastrophe.

It’s a vast, nutty mélange, capacious of style and tone, and capable, like Kabuki itself, of veering from hair-raising histrionics to children’s fantasy. Following Izumi’s lead, Shinoda was doubling down on how Kabuki routinely mined centuries of local folklore and animist traditions, and in particular the ubiquity of yokai: autonomous spirits often depicted as part human, part anything else. Without much warning, the cast explodes into a best-ever costume bash featuring hawk beaks, giant crab claws, catfish barbels, goat heads, and armored samurai ghosts. (Pulp-art-house whirlwind Takashi Miike would have his own yokai year in 2005, when he released both the Kabuki-soaked fantasia The Great Yokai War and a filmed-play version of Demon Pond that has been, up to now, more familiar and available than Shinoda’s classic.) If as a Westerner you see in Shinoda’s film shadows and traces and echoes, going forward and back, of everything from Masaki Kobayashi’s Kwaidan (1964) to the yokai-ish men-in-suits creatures of kaiju films, the permutations of Pokémon and Yu-Gi-Oh! characters, the interspecific morphings within Hayao Miyazaki’s films, and even American nonsense like H.R. Pufnstuf, that’s essentially the infective legacy of Kabuki at work on you. Even so, if Kabuki-ness has been most often cloaked and rarely celebrated in movies, like a faintly embarrassing family secret, Shinoda’s film is the one that dared to kick open the closet and let the freak flag fly.

As with any busy auteur with a career that lasted over four decades, Shinoda’s trajectory can be divided into distinct phases: his years as a young New Wave A-lister at Shochiku, beginning with his feature debut, One-Way Ticket to Love (1960); his independent, experimental period, starting with Double Suicide; and his requisite autumnal period, starting in the eighties, when he, like so many middle-aged filmmakers, drifted into orthodoxy. Though he had an early-career triumph with the blackhearted gambling noir Pale Flower (1964), the seventies were when Shinoda, unfettered and still young enough to cut fresh paths, bloomed into a consistently surprising and uncompromising voice. His risky aesthetic arsenal varied from film to film, but, coming at the end of the decade, Demon Pond could be cornered as a stylistic sister-film to other post–New Wave opuses pushed by their aging auteurs toward lurid, painted-sunset artifice—think of Francis Ford Coppola’s One from the Heart (1981), Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Querelle (1982), and Oshima’s Gohatto (1999).