Snow Woman / Kaidan Yukijoro (1968)

When compared to Snake Girl released the same year, Snow Woman* gives us a much more traditionally Japanese approach to the horror film. Its basic shape will seem quite familiar to many, for it is based on the same legend from which Lafcadio Hearn wrote the story used in the second episode of Kwaidan.

Instead of woodcutters lost in a great blizzard, we meet an old sculptor and his student in search of the perfect tree for a statue of a goddess in the local temple. When they take shelter in a hut, a strange woman in white glides in and freezes the old man but spares the young because he is so beautiful, so long as he never tells anyone else what happened. Later a beautiful woman called Yuki takes shelter under the eaves of his master’s house and is welcomed by the mistress, whom Yuki later cures of various maladies. But an evil Bailiff beats the mistress and her dying wish is for Yuki to marry the apprentice, so she does. Five years later, the tree is now dry and he can start carving the statue, but the Bailiff brings in a famous sculptor from Edo to compete with him and fines him for “stealing” the tree. Yuki can become the Bailiff’s concubine or she can find the money, which she does by saving the sick child of the samurai who is the Bailiff’s boss. When the Bailiff tries to abduct her anyway, she freezes him and his men, But the sculptor lets slip the story of his night in the storm and she leaves, rather than kill him, out of concern that their son would be left an orphan.

Thus, we mix two concepts fairly typical of ghostly love stories the world over — the ghostly witch who is a killer of men for no particular reason except that they are men, and the witch or spirit who learns humanity through learning love, which almost costs her her powers and who, to stay alive, must surrender her love and return to her otherworldly ways. The Japanese modification is that she learns compassion rather than love.

Earlier ghostly women on this blog have been out for revenge, embodied by cats, and the most beautiful and elegant version of that type of ghost would appear in this same year in Kuroneko. Here we see the Japanese witch that is most familiar to us in modern J-Horror — the beautiful pale woman with long, long black hair who mysteriously and silently glides across the ground (Japanese witches have no feet, so they glide, but they do not fly as do European witches). It is hardly the first such film appearance of such ghosts, but I haven’t written much about this character before.

Two odd bits of dialog leap from the subtitles. When the old mistress is dying, she asks Yuki to marry the young sculptor, and Yuki replies that “It would be an imposition,” but she would do so since it was the old lady’s dying wish. The other is a song. Yuki’s son is ridiculed by the older kids because he doesn’t know their song, so she teaches it to him, and after she leaves, the father sings it to the boy to comfort him. It is about a turtle who takes over a snake’s yard and “disappears” the nine people living nearby. Since this has little or nothing to do with the movie thematically, I must assume it is a real Japanese children’s song. Children’s songs and stories are often more brutal than they seem — think about “Rockabye-Baby” — but this still seems a remarkably unfunny story to make into a children’s folk song and dance.

If you use Kwaidan as your standard, the movie is simply professionally competent, but if Kwaidan is your standard, you could say that about most any movie. Then again, if Kwaidan is the standard, Snow Woman moves along at a lightning pace, its 80 minutes feeling about the same length as Kobayashi’s 40 or so. Tokuzo Tanaka’s direction keeps the story straightforward, Chishi Makiuri’s photography doesn’t strive for anything particularly artistic, though it does continue the tradition of shifting from realistic settings to artificial, theatrical lighting depending on the scene. Akira Ifukube’s score provides the aural shock to match the visual shocks when needed. No makeup credit is given, but it is the stand-out technical aspect of the film, giving Shiho Fujimura (who has always looked perfectly healthy in her movies with Zatoichi and Kyoshiro Nemuri) the palest possible skin that could be thought natural without actually resorting to  Kabuki white-face.

* Once again with Japanese films, it’s not always clear which movie it is that critics are actually describing. According to the Weissers, a movie called Yukionna, literally Snow Woman, was released only in America, composed of the “Yukionna” segment of Kwaidan, which had been cut from the initial American release, padded out with additional scenes directed by Tanaka.  It is hard to see how this could be that film, even though they also give this an alternate title of Kaidan Yukijuro, which is the title used on the available DVD of the movie described here. Admittedly, the central section about the Bailiff feels like a separate movie, but still, the cast is different from Kwaidan, the sets are different even in long shot, and they were made by different studios. If an American distributor did try to combine Kobayashi’s film and Tanaka’s film, it would have been an absolutely incomprehensible mess. The history of American releases of Japanese films is full of such cobbled-together versions (see Godzilla for the best known example), so it is not inconceivable, but it does appear that they have somehow confused that release with this film, which is a different movie entirely.  (Thomas & Yuko Weisser, Japanese Cinema: Horror, Fantasy, Science Fiction Films (Miami, 1998), p. 103.