Later, at the Rajomon Gate, a samurai trots by and stops at the sight of a young noblewoman. It's the middle of the night and she would appreciate an escort to her house. The samurai complies. They chat as they walk and when they reach her house she asks him in for a rest. Her mother welcomes him with sake and food which he enjoys but his eyes are on the younger woman. She is not resistant to his advances. After all, they help her get within fang distance of his neck which she tears at until he is dead. Just prior we have seen the mother from the rear and how a length of her hair moves like a long black tail. We have entered a strange chamber of the night, ethereal enough to vanish in a moment, real enough to kill.
More samurai meet the same fate until the local warlord orders lethal action against the threat without success until a rawly formed hero, dubbed Gintoki of the Grove, returns from the war and presents himself. Cleaned of the mud and filth he picked up in the campaign, he is dashing and ready to have at the cat spirits. Problem, he went home first and saw the cottage by the grove (well, its remains) where his mother and his wife lived. Asking a local about the missing bodies he gets worryingly vague answer. Riding up to the gate at midnight, following the lady home and meeting her mother he sees, if not quite comprehending, his wife and his mother rendered aristocratic and a little strange. This mission has just got tough.
Japanese cinema expanded so rapidly after the occupation and grew so rich and self-challenging that it never needed a new wave to ignite it into innovation. Whether it was Kurosawa applying a supernova to the samurai tale, Teshigahara and his magical realism, monster movies that were really about nuclear warfare or Ozu's refinement of the melodrama into aching family portraits, the late fifties to the late sixties in the national cinema remain a wonder of invention. Kaneto Shindo, whose military service in the war took him away from his hometown the day the first atomic bomb was dropped on it, grew hybrid fictions from his neo-realist tales of survival and identity into the likes of Human of the durable masterpiece Onibaba.
By the time he got to Kuroneko in 1968 he was ready to hurl everything he knew at the screen and did just that. Theatricality bumps shoulders with cinematic realism, folkloric magic tears at the local realpolitik, martial arts wirework jolts against the ugly violence of the day to day. The Ballad of Narayama had flaunted its theatrical roots with set building and transitions laid bare. Kwaidan folded this into its fabric but happily let the mixing show. In Kuroneko when Shige somersaults incredibly through the air behind the samurai on horseback it is all part of the supernature of the midnight realm of the cat spirits. The warlord's account of his skepticism extends to the current case. He thinks it's probably just bandits but makes a public show of hiring a hitman to get rid of the ghosts.
But it is the individual performances that really cover the seams of the artifice, here. Nobuko Otowa plays a similar role to the one in Onibaba except that here she is far more maternal and then torn at the situation with her son. She transits from ghost to demon with voice and expression, going from a parental softness to a wily sharpness from line to line in some scenes (particularly the final showdown). As her daughter in law, Kiwako Taichi takes a lot on, going from cozening spirit, to savage feline demon to a kind of ethereal echo of the lover she had been with Gintoki. Kichiemon Nakamura as Gintoki is introduced to us as a brute from the swamps (which remind us powerfully of the marshes in Onibaba). When he is cleansed to civil standards in a heavily satisfying scene of the caked mud on his skin being wiped away, the intense survivalist glare in his eyes remains. You can't take the swamp out of the boy. But then when the enormity of the situation with the demonic duo confronts him he breaks back into innocence before having to forage for his strength. There is just no opportunity for any of these three turns to fall back on cruise control.
And then there is Shindo's vision itself which renders the potentially silly wirework fights rivetting and the bamboo forest into a profoundly eerie setting by lighting it naturally and letting it present itself as is. Shindo's career, a kind of vow of life against nearly disintegrating in seconds when younger, is one of earnest work that ranged from the fantastical through returns to unadorned social realism and back. He made it to a month over one hundred years old, only two years out from his final film as director (Postcard). A late entry Fukuro (Owl) is a kind of replay of Onibaba for contemporary Japan but funnier and more starkly unconventional. Still young, he made Kuroneko (The Black Cat) which looked like an exact recounting of a nightmare unearthed after centuries of burial. Kuroneko feels older than the earlier Onibaba, with its incorporation of ancient theatrics and folkiness. While that freakier vision sticks stronger in the mind, this later entry beguiles all over again with each viewing as though magic had hidden its treasure.
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