ABSTRACT
Yotsuya Ghost Story (Yotsuya kaidan) has been one of the most popular plays in kabuki theater since its first performance in 1825. This tale of haunting and revenge has been adapted to film since the 1910s, along with television dramas and other media, thus entertaining generations of audiences and showing the enduring appeal of ghost stories. This chapter discusses how director Nakagawa Nobuo (1905–1984) turned this classic ghost story into a sympathetic tale of a woman’s suffering in patriarchal Edo Period society in his 1959 Tōkaidō Yotsuya Ghost Story (Tōkaidō Yotsuya kaidan). Nakagawa satisfied his cult followers by pursuing his own audacious artistic schemes in color, composition, camera movement, editing, music, and sound design, while perpetuating historical customs for adapting Yotsuya Ghost Story. He used tropes of kabuki, showing the continued influence of Edo Period mass culture in the twentieth century, and pioneered conventions for the developing genre of Japanese horror films (J-horror). This chapter’s close reading of Tōkaidō Yotsuya Ghost Story is also intended to serve as a model of how to analyze Japanese film to understand its artistic and historical significance.
