Alongside ‘In a Cup of Tea’, a disturbing account which derives from an evil omen, all stories are carried with the ritualistic weight of ancient art forms.

‘Hoichi the Earless’ materialises the spirits of the once illustrious Taira family, massacred in war but returning from the dead to haunt a blind musician. A Yuki-onna, an infamous spirit frightening lost travellers in snowy mountains, is portrayed gloomily in ‘The Woman of the Snow’. In ‘The Black Hair’, the flowing hair of Heian women are revealed as a dark symbol of despair. Unearthing the core of Japanese superstitions, Kwaidan adapts a book by the writer and translator Lafcadio Hearn from 1904, the first to collect scattered stories of folkloric phantoms and introduce its lore to the West. The classic horror from 1964 narrates mythological tales from a feudal past, conjuring some of its best known ghost stories amongst bamboo rooms, rusticated landscapes and surrealist colours. Takemitsu became a go-to guy for many other major Japanese filmmakers as well, including Masaki Kobayashi ( Harakiri), Akira Kurosawa ( Dodes’ka-den), and Nagisa Oshima ( Empire of Passion) his themes remain some of the most beautiful, spectral music ever written for the screen.United by the cinematography of Masaki Kobayashi, Kwaidan stages four separate unearthly tales in a spine-chilling ritual. “He involved himself so thoroughly in every aspect of a film-script, casting, location shooting, editing, and total sound design”). The deeply sympathetic working relationship that they discovered on that project resulted in Takemitsu’s providing the haunting, instrumentally jarring themes for virtually all of Teshigahara’s subsequent output (“He was always more than a composer,” Teshigahara would recall. It wasn’t until a few years later, though, when his friend Hiroshi Teshigahara asked him to score Teshigahara’s short debut film, José Torres (1959), that Takemitsu’s career in movies truly began. A noted musical avant-gardist in midcentury Japanese intellectual circles, as influenced by jazz as by Debussy, Takemitsu first turned to feature film composing when he was commissioned (along with Masaru Sato) to write the hip, twangy-guitar-inflected score for the Ko Nakahira youth flick Crazed Fruit (1956). Japanese composer Toru Takemitsu, known to Western listeners predominantly as the man behind the music in such iconic movies as Woman in the Dunes and Ran, was an acclaimed classical composer and music theorist well before he became one of his country’s most reliably brilliant scorers of film.

Kwaidan japanese ghost stories