It can be seen that the so-called confusion of demons is actually "the confusion of people". When a person's body dies, the breath of his breath returns to the netherworld. If a ghost lingers in the human world, it means that a person has a knot in his heart that cannot be undone until he dies, and cannot return. Mizoguchi Kenji's "Story of the Rainy Moon", which is "talking about ghosts", is the story of "return" or "no return".
1. The first "ghost" to appear in Kuchikiya's Noh world
movie is the noble woman "Wakasa" played by Jing Machiko and her maid. The charming smile in the chaotic crowd took away the mind of the male protagonist Genjuro. At this moment, the sun is shining and the crowd is bustling. It is difficult for viewers to guess their true identities. The foreshadowing is full, and Mizoguchi's scheduling skills are too superb.
Then Genjuro was guided into the dead wood house, and after passing through a corridor with ambiguous light and shadow, a spiritual journey unfolded.
The supernatural feeling first comes from the "corridor" here. Mizoguchi is the Japanese film director who has the most research on the traditional drama "Noh", and here he introduced the important scene of "Noh" - the corridor. There are many "ghost things" in Noh dramas, and the role of "corridors" is often used as a medium to connect the underworld and the yang world. In the film, the maids lit candles in turn from left to right in the dark corridor, implying to the audience that the road between the underworld and the world is open, and the ghosts have become the masters of the scene.
As mentioned above, the ghost is "return". The reason why the female ghost Ruozai refused to "return" is because she is unwilling to die without tasting the beauty of love, so she does not care about the disparity of status or the wife of her lover, and she has to succumb to it. The potter Genjuro. The plot here revolves around "Wakasa can find true love", and the answer is naturally no. Not to mention that people and ghosts have different paths, just because people's hearts are fickle, it is impossible for Ruoza to find eternal love. In the end, everything is illusory, the eternal theme of this Noh drama, Yu Wakasa and Yu Genjuro, are all.
The "Noh" feature of Kuchikiya is also reflected in the shape of Wakasa. It is said that the costumes of the actors were specially borrowed by Mizoguchi from the Noh family, with the purpose of rendering the "Noh sense" of the paragraph. "Neng" has multiple masks. After Wakasa's real identity is recognized, the makeup has changed several times: the crescent eyebrows are gradually slanted, the face is heavy with white powder, the lips are painted with black lines, and the image features of ghosts are shown through "masks". When the truth of this haunted house is torn apart, it is time for the protagonist to return to the world.
It was as if a Noh drama had been inserted into a movie, and Genjuro was confused when he appeared in the play.
2. The inextricable bond between life and death
Due to the special growth environment, Mizoguchi's love for women abandoned the body and went straight to the soul level. Women's weakness and strength presented a harmonious beauty in Mizoguchi's films.
Genjuro's wife, Miyagi, is the carrier of this beauty in "The Story of the Rainy Moon". War, husband separation, and young children, when Gongmu lost all external power he could rely on, he could only hand over his life helplessly, without the power to resist, he became a tragic undead. Different from "Wakasa", she is dying and unwilling to "return", not clinging to her own selfish thoughts, but completely out of motherhood and wifehood. When Miyagi, who was already a dead soul in the dark, lit candles and demurely mended clothes, it was hard for the audience not to be moved by the truth behind the camera—in order to take care of the surviving husband and children, Miyagi chose to stay in the world, even if he didn’t feel it. To the tenderness of both sides, but also to accompany forever.
If the female ghost Wakasa embodies the fluke mentality of human beings who can't let go of what they wanted in life and long to make up for it after death, then Miyagi's undead shows that "the deceased still protects their relatives in that world", which constitutes a Japanese Faith-based ideas, this kind of emotional bond that human beings will never be able to unravel. We are afraid of the supernatural undead, so we hope that they will eventually return home and stop entanglement; we are nostalgic for the warmth of our relatives, and hope that they will stay with us forever.
3. From the dark, into the dark again
Death has plagued mankind for thousands of years. The most terrible thing about "death" is not the pain of the body, but the nothingness of how the self-spirit world continues to exist. Therefore, the ancients firmly believed in the existence of the "underworld", and firmly believed that even if the body decayed, the spirit had eternal psychological sustenance.
The "ghost" in the movie often exists in the dark, waiting for an opportunity to show the image of its materialized existence to strangers. Whether the starting point is good or evil, it will inevitably have an unavoidable impact on the characters in the play. And in the end, it will continue to escape into darkness, or be overtaken, or still dormant. The ghostly world is not so much a copy or imitation of the human world, but rather a personification of the real world by the human heart: saints build bliss to continue to teach, mortals hope for heaven on the one hand, and hell on the other hand, wicked people only believe in this life ... But at the end of "The Story of the Rainy Moon", Kenji Mizoguchi denied the absolute separation of life and death. He let Genjuro return to his previous life as a pottery maker. The potter's wheel is slow, echoing the beginning of the movie. The water pump, which was supposed to be operated by the wife, was standing still, creating a supernatural atmosphere. When Miyagi's monologue rang in his ears, it seemed as if his wife was still alive, and it gave people the belief that the moon is full of flowers.
"The Story of the Rainy Moon" builds a tragic world, where men's ambition, vanity, and lust have brought devastating disasters to the women around them and to themselves. At the same time, two beautiful underworlds have been created, one is the illusory bliss of absolute satisfaction of desires, and the other is the mediocre freeze of the past. Ultimately, the bliss is broken, and the one fixed in the past merges with life itself. It is not difficult to see that director Mizoguchi is calling for "the plain is the truth", and the illusory bliss that emerged from the darkness of the human heart has finally returned to the darkness.
Let’s end the author’s ramble with a waka:
“The world is like a shadow in a mirror, and there is nothing but nothing in the end.”
Since people eventually die, it is better to cherish the long-lasting flow of the world rather than to hope for the ghostly things behind them.
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