Wild Japan Day 4 - Jigoku

Personally financed by the director, Nobuo Nakagawa, Jigoku (Hell) was made for ShinToho (New Toho, a company formed by prominent figures who left the legendary studio during a series of strikes in the heady years following world war II) in 1960, the year the company went bust. It was plucked from a potential life of obscurity a few years later and put out for distribution by Toei, setting a new standard for the emerging horror genre; its influence apparent in the fact it has since spawned two remakes including a recent interpretation in 1999 by Teruo Ishii, most famous for his Joys of Torture series.

Yet it would be wrong to write Jigoku off as a prototype for the later works of J-Horror, which have come to dominate the western perception of Japanese cinema from the late nineties. An utterly original execution of a director’s unique vision, the film is consequently both a brilliant invocation of the stylistic and narrative concerns of its time and a landmark of the genre, which still seems fresh today. Peculiarly structured, the film’s first half is set in the real world, although one coloured by a darkly absurdist humour, whilst the latter part is set in an invocation of hell ingeniously constructed from minimal materials and staged against a black backdrop in the style of a Kabuki morality play. The only connection between these two sections, vastly different in form, are the human characters, who move through their lives like pathetic bugs sinning and then answering for those sins in the eight hells of Buddhism, where their bodies are hacked apart, skinned, flayed or simply doomed to languish forever beside the river Styx, which flows languidly across the set in an unhealthy greenish hue.

After a brief prelude, which shows the menacing fires of hell waiting for our eternal souls, the film opens in a university lecture theatre where theologian professor Yajima is speaking of the depiction of hell in world religions. The camera zooms in on Shiro, a student with a bright future ahead of him, who is due to marry the professor’s beautiful daughter, Yukiko. However he is haunted by the presence of fellow student Tamura, who, representing something of a bad conscience, is the mirror opposite of Shiro’s upright sense of tradition and morals (whilst Shiro wears the traditional school uniform and wooden sandals, Tamura dresses in shocking red shirts and sunglasses). He is also racked by guilt over the fact that the night before the two of them, whilst driving back from Yajima’s, hit a man and left him for dead. Little does he know that this man was a yakuza and that his amoral stripper girlfriend, Yoko, and his manipulative mother are out for revenge. After Yukiko is killed in another car accident - the brief match cut of Tamura’s face in place of the taxi driver’s indicating his diabolical origin - the characters are all drawn out to the countryside, where Shiro’s father runs a retirement home and here the increasingly outlandish plot developments come so thick and fast that it would take a small book to record them.

Here Shiro learns that his corrupt father is skimming money off the business for himself while feeding the emaciated lodgers dross. Furthermore he spends all day in bed with his mistress within earshot of his wife, who lies on her deathbed in the next room. Meanwhile a drink-addled artist lives with his daughter, a spitting image of Yukiko, painting a mural depicting the horrors of hell. The otherworldly Tamura reappears and, like the mysterious inspector in J.B. Priestley’s An Inspector Calls, begins to denounce all present for their sins. Very soon everyone is dead and their souls pitched into hell; the circumstances of their deaths a series of brilliantly burlesque accidents and misadventures, building into an orgy of fatalities so ridiculously sublime that it will have you in tears. For instance Shiro is invited onto a rickety suspension bridge by Yoko under the pretence of an amorous encounter, but when she attempts to lunge at him with a knife she instead trips and falls to her death, followed by her mother, and finally by Tamura. Suffering from shock Shiro returns to the retirement home where he finds that the artist has hung himself and the inmates are all dying of food poisoning during the celebrations of the institutions’s ‘twenty years of caring for Japan’s senior citizens’.

The general consensus seems to be that the part of the film set in hell is the best, whilst that of the secular world is more conventional. Although it is easy to see anything as conventional in contrast to the surreal excess of these later sequences, which can’t help but stick in the mind much like the spike rammed through Shiro’s throat as he dangles above a pit of flame, the early part of the film is none-the-less a brilliantly successful farce that seems to draw on the French absurdist theatre movement as well as anticipating the dark humour of the Czech new wave (Milos Forman’s The Fireman’s Ball springs to mind), especially in its irreverent approach to death. Just as the directors of the new wave, especially Nagisa Oshima and Hiroshi Teshigahara, were beginning to incorporate a radical European aesthetic in their films, in order to counter the classicism of the Japanese studio system, drawing on surrealism and existentialism to deconstruct prevalent ideologies, Jigoku successfully melds new European theatrical influences and traditional Japanese forms respectively in the two halves of the film. The result is an important and thoroughly entertaining film.