The Ghost Cat and the Mysterious Shamisen

A quintessential example-of-the-period "ghost cat" (bakeneko or kaibyō) movie, a substantial supernatural subgenre based in folklore that stretches back at least as far as Shozo Makino's The Cat of Okazaki (Okazaki no neko, 1914), this was one of at least six such titles released between 1937-40, many of which were written by Kenji Hata, to feature Japan's first scream queen, Sumiko Suzuki. Here she plays Mitsue, the possessive onna-kabuki actress betrothed to apprentice shamisen player Seijiro. When one day Okiyo, a beautiful young girl of samurai class, is led to Seijiro's house by his lost cat Kuro, she becomes besotted with him. Dark jealous passions are invoked in Mitsue, which are intensified when Seijiro gifts Okiyo his precious shamisen. The cat is the first to suffer at the end of Mitsue's hairpin, but returns from the grave to assist Okiyo's younger sister Onui avenge her sister's murder. Director Kiyohiko Ushihara employs an arsenal of dark double exposures, slow motion sequences and specially-developed lenses to convey this dark, uncanny tale.

This rare screening of The Ghost Cat and the Mysterious Shamisen, an early chiller especially subtitled for Zipangu Fest in association with the Japan Visualmedia Translation Academy and the National Film Centre of Tokyo is of interest for several reasons. Not only does it present a rare chance for Western viewers to experience a production by Shinkō Kinema, the Kyoto-based company that was assimilated into Daiei during the war, but it is also one of Japan's few surviving prewar horrors, a genre the studio specialised in during the late-1930s but which was soon to be suppressed by the increasing state censorship of the next few years.