There are few more complex movies about the meeting of modernity and traditional religious and Japanese folk beliefs than Inugami, though it requires a submersion into a setting as isolated and unusual as in Himatsuri.
High in the mountain interior of Shikoku island, the Bonomiya family are preparing to celebrate the 900 Year Rites of their family, which was the dominant family of Onime for centuries and still owns most of the forest. Then a stranger arrives to unintentionally upset everything. Akira is a new teacher for the middle school in the nearest town and when his motorbike breaks down, he is introduced to Miki, one of the finest traditional paper-makers in the country. His guide Seichi always calls her “old lady,” but from the first Akira sees her as young and beautiful. A romance will gradually develop, and as it does so, we peel back layer after layer of the situation.
For those familiar with Japanese movies and literature, there may be some initial confusion relating to the famous Inugami Family. However, the inugami involved here are the wild dog spirits most commonly found in folklore on Shikoku. Though the inugami are often mentioned, however, they are never seen and, though there are horrible secrets and even the occasional ghost, Inugami is not a horror movie in the usual sense of the term.
On Shikoku, the spirit of the wild dog was often thought to pass down through families, able to cause various curses when disturbed that might affect the person possessed or might affect others who have crossed their path. The Bonomiya family, we gradually learn, are such a family, given the role of guardians of the inugami, passed down through the females. For years things have been calm and the villagers have almost forgotten the inugami, but after Akira’s arrival, strange things start to happen, at first little more than an occasional gust of wind that knocks over the drying paper or a wave of nightmares throughout the village, eventually growing more disturbing to the villagers.
After a tryst in a forest cave, where Miki had also gotten pregnant from a similar tryst as a teenager, she begins to grow visibly younger.
One night Miki’s mother (whom we eventually learn is a spirit herself seen only by us and by Miki) shows her the secret urn where all the inugami spirits are supposed to lie dormant and which she now wants Miki to take charge of. Miki doesn’t want the duty and begins to think of leaving the village with Akira. 
However, the Bonomiya can not leave the mountain and any woman who has tried to do so in the past has always been brought back. Miki herself has never even seen the sea. No one in the village will marry into the family, so they have had to find wives for the men from far away who know nothing about the family. Takanao, the current head of the family, we eventually learn was adopted into the family when he married but only long afterward learned he was a real Bonomiya, the child of a woman who had tried to run away. So several layers of incest will gradually be revealed.
The Bonomiya are a traditional family as well as an ancient one. All decisions are made at the “main house,” where Takanao lives, while Miki and the characters we follow live in a smaller house down the mountainside. Though the women wear modern clothes, they are expected to live in a “woman’s world” with all decisions to be made by the head of the family Takanao. He has grudgingly allowed electricity into the two homes and a computer for himself, because he wanted to try an internet business that failed, but he allows no TV or radio, so they are isolated from news of the outside world. He has also run up gambling debts and may sell off the forest. The woman who wants to buy it has a sudden, inexplicable heart attack in the middle of an argument about it with Miki. A family of strangers from Tokyo drive up into the mountains only for the father to kill his wife and child and then himself. The woman who delivers the newspapers to the village has an accident on her motor scooter. The villagers gradually turn on the family, because they believe that once again the inugami have been let loose. They wreck Miki’s paper studio and finally plan to kill all the family.
But first, Takanao must complete the 900 Year Rites and so he leads them all up the mountain where Miki has also retreated for prayer and where he plans his own horrible solution to all their problems. For this section, director Masato Harada switches to black and white and the dense forests give way to a stark mountainside path.
Before we are done, what began as a romantic love story has become a tale of multi-layered incest, of babies switched at birth, of ghostly ancestors still exerting their power, of a hunter who is saving his 1,000th kill to be the one that saves the village, of traditional ways (from paper making and calligraphy to ancient inexplicable rituals) now at war with the ever-encroaching “modernity,” of mass murder, and of the forest trying to protect itself.
Harada goes out of his way to downplay the horror-movie aspects. There is an occasional glitch on the screen that hints at something odd, but it is never followed by the kind of shock moment such as a ghost’s appearance. In the tryst in the cave, we simultaneously see Miki’s teen-aged experience in the background, but the feeling is not of an eerie haunting but of a flashback that explains Miki’s knowledge of the cave’s existence.
What could have been shocking, in both a horror movie sense and a moral sense, is played without any hint of pandering. Both the detail and the intensive labor of the paper-making are fascinating. Only very subtle changes are made to Amami Yuki’s physical appearance as she gradually reverts to her real thirty-ish age.
Inugami is often gorgeous to look at, both because of its setting and the care with which Harada stages his interiors, one of the most physically lovely films of the decade.
I can recall few more subtle films using horror motifs without any attempt to horrify. While Kyoshi Kurosawa had used horror to explore the personal psyche and loneliness and the J-Horror films that followed Ringu had expressed a general uneasiness with modernization, Inugami explores the deep cultural roots of Japanese society; only as we look back on the whole do we realize that we have been in a horror movie. Though it seems to have been mis-marketed as a horror movie and generally ignored by Japanese critics, I have not found any other movie in my viewing that so completely encapsulates the pre-occupations of serious Japanese film-makers at the turn of the century. It may well turn out to be an ignored classic of the 21st century.
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