Shohei Imamura’s 1981 masterpiece The Ballad of Narayama is not for the faint-hearted. It deals with the dark origins of human nature, challenging our understanding of what it means to be human and humane. It does so with an effectiveness that earned the film the prestigious Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival. It ranks as one of the greatest Japanese films to be released after the golden age of the fifties and early sixties.

Historical Background: Most of the Japanese films best known to Western audiences were released in the relatively narrow time span of 1950-1962. This film being the first non-Kurosawa Japanese film that I have reviewed released later than 1962, I thought it might be interesting to readers to put this film in the perspective of a brief overview of Japanese cinema. Before Kurosawa came along, Japanese cinema had already established itself as one of the most vibrant national cinemas in the world. Makino Shojo was possibly the greatest of the silent era directors in Japan. Kenji Mizoguchi (1898-1956) and Yasojiro Ozu (1903-1963) were the leading voices in the first generation of great Japanese directors of the sound era. Mizoguchi produced sound films from 1930-1956 (Sisters of the Gion (1936), Ugetsu (1953), Sanshô, the Baliff (1954)) while Ozu’s sound films came out between 1930 and 1962 (Tokyo Story (1953), Floating Weeds (1959), Late Autumn (1960)). Other near contemporaries of these two great early Japanese masters included Teinosuke Kinugasa (1896-1982) (Gate of Hell (1953)) and Hiroshi Inagaki (1905-1980) (Samurai 1: Musashi Miyamoto (1954) and the remainder of the Samurai trilogy, Chushingura (1962)).

Akira Kurosawa (1910-1998), the Japanese director best known by Western audiences, represents the second generation of Japanese auteurs. His filmography as a director spans the years 1948-1993 and includes many familiar works: Rashômon (1950), Ikiru (1952), The Seven Samurai (1954), Throne of Blood (1957), The Hidden Fortress (1958), Yojimbo (1961), Sanjuro (1962), Red Beard (1965), Dersu Uzala (1975), Kagemusha (1980), and Ran (1985). Kurosawa’s nearest contemporaries of note were Kon Ichikawa (1915-?) (The Burmese Harp (1956), An Actor’s Revenge (1963), and Tokyo Olympiad (1965)) and Masaki Kobayashi (1916-1996) (A Soldier’s Prayer (1961), Kwaidan (1964) and Samurai Rebellion (1967)).

The third generation of Japanese directors, born in the late 1920’s began to change the style of Japanese film. Niroshi Teshigahara (1927-2001) (The Woman in the Dunes (1964)) and Shohei Imamura (1926-?) (The Insect Woman (1963), Ballad of Narayama (1981), and The Eel (1997)) introduced a darker and more nihilistic element. In the late sixties, Japanese cinema experienced its own New Wave, led by Nagisa Oshima with such works as Death by Hanging (1968) and In the Realm of the Senses (1976). Shuji Terayama (1935-1983) was also part of the New Wave with such films as Throw Away Your Books, Let’s Go into the Streets (1971) and Fruits of Passion (1981).

Since 1981, significant Japanese films (outside of anime with which I have no experience) have been somewhat scattered, but a few worth mentioning include Juzo Itami’s Tampopo (1986), Kenji Onishi’s Squareworld (1996), Mamoru Oshii The Ghost in the Shell (1995), Hirokazu Kore-eda’s After Life (1998), and the aforementioned The Eel (1997) by Imamura.

Thus, The Ballad of Narayama belongs to the dark and deep period of Japanese cinema launched in the early 1960’s. Viewers will have no difficulty recognizing the bleak, dismal, and nihilistic elements of this film. The Ballad of Narayama was based on a prize-winning story by Fakazawa that had been filmed previously in 1958. Imamura has an affinity for disadvantaged, lower class types and their brutal existences. His usual material is the urban jungle but The Ballad of Narayama is a rare excursion for Imamura into rural poverty.

The Story: The story takes place in a remote village in northern Japan in the latter part of the nineteenth century. This small community in a valley beneath a great mountain is at a bare subsistence level of existence, barely able to grow enough crops during the warm months to sustain itself through the cold winters. Their system of beliefs and rules are organized around the brutal circumstances of their existence. There’s just no room for human sentiment in the lives of these people.

The family at the center of the story consists of an aging widow and family matriarch, Orin (Sumiko Sakamoto), her two sons, the widowed Tatsuhei (Ken Ogata) and Risuke (Tonpei Hidari), and Tatsuhei’s two sons, Kesakichi (Seiji Kurasaki) and Tomekichi (Kaoru Shimamori). The film covers a year in the life of the village. As the story begins, Orin is celebrating her 69th birthday. One of the most sacred traditions of the village is that old people, when they turn seventy, are taken to the top of a nearby mountain, Narayama, and left to die – regardless of their state of health at the time. Orin is a firm believer in the value of this tradition for maintaining the viability of the community and looks forward to her death at Narayama. “A law is a law”, she says. “Kindness has nothing to do with it.” By contrast, an elderly man in the same community is far less reconciled to the idea. Tatsuhei loves his mother and is pained by the idea of carrying her to Narayama, but he too is a believer in the village rules. In fact, when he was an adolescent, he had shot his father to death because the father had refused to follow tradition and take his mother (Tatsuhei’s grandmother) to Narayama.

Although this particular “accommodation” to their desperate lot is the core element of the story, there are many other examples of practices among these people that we would deem inhumane by our standards. Infanticide is practiced frequently, especially if the newborn is a boy. Girls are more prized, in this society, but only because they can be later sold! Early in the film, Risuke discovers a dead infant dumped in his rice paddy and tracks down its father. The father says that Risuke should be grateful because the body of the infant, when it decomposes, will fertilize the field.

Risuke is something of an embarrassment to his brother and family. He sleeps in the barn with the animals and is disinterested in basics of hygiene. Nearly everyone he encounters in the village complains that he smells bad. In fact, he is able to “win” arguments merely by breathing on his opponent because his breath is intolerable. Consequently, Risuke has never been able to interest any woman in the village in having sex. As disgusting as it may sound, he takes out his pent up urges on a neighbor’s dog – engaging in on-screen bestiality. One day, Risuke overhears a conversation between a dying man and his young wife. The dying man believes that his family is cursed because he had once killed a young man who was trying to rape his sister. He instructs his wife that once he has died, she is to have sex once with every man in the village to rid the family of the curse. The malodorous Risuke is delighted, imagining that he will finally get his first experience with a human partner. After the man dies, the young widow, Oei (Mitsuko Baisho), dutifully begins working her way through the men of the village, one per night, starting on the west end of town and working east! Risuke counts down the days until his turn will come, but Oei skips past him. Later, she reports to Orin that she had gone to her deceased husband’s grave and asked him if she could make an exception of the foul-smelling Risuke. A butterfly had then appeared which she interpreted as a sign of concurrence from her dead husband. This is typical of the ribald humor that provides the comic relief for an otherwise bleak and distressing film.

Tatsuhei’s eldest son, Kesakichi, is a young man and very hormonally active. He fornicates whenever the opportunity arises, forcibly or otherwise, with the young women of the village. His favorite is Matsu (Junko Takada), who is a good lover but lazy and a poor worker and a thief. She comes to live in the household of Orin and Tatsuhei and is discovered stealing food from the family’s store for her parents’ family. She is daughter of Amaya (Akio Yokoyama), who has such a large family to feed that he resorts to stealing from the other families. In a subsistence community, stealing food is a capital offense, since it can result in starvation of individuals in the victimized family during the winter. The villagers raid Amaya’s home and find a stock of stolen food items. Later that night, the men of the village meet and settle on the punishment. Amaya and his entire family will be put to death. Orin instructs Matsu to return to her parent’s home for a night to help them out. The “rules” require that she die with her family even though she is now married to Kesakichi. The men of the village raid the home, bind the members of the family, and dump them all – man, women, and child – into a large pit that they had previously dug. They then fill in the pit, burying the entire family alive. Tatsuhei is seemingly distraught beyond consolation and angry at his grandmother’s betrayal of Matsu, but within a few days he has brought home a new wife.

Orin spends her last year of life tending to the future needs of her family. She arranges through the salt merchant (Norihei Miki) for a new wife for Tatsuhei, a widow from a nearby village, Tamayan (Takejo Aki). Tatsuhei is not particular, saying any woman will do. In contrast to Matsu, Tamayan is a willing worker and quick learner. Orin, who is the best fish catcher in the village, teaches Tamayan her secret technique. Tamayan is a strong woman but, nevertheless, also quite to Tatsuhei’s satisfaction. Orin also intentionally knocks out a couple of her own teeth with a rock so that Tatsuhei will be less upset that she will be going to Narayama while still productive and in good health! Orin also arranges with an elderly widow, Okane (Nijiko Kiyokawa), to sleep with the olfactorally-challenged Risuke so that he will lay off the horse. Even with an old woman, Risuke proves to be so worked up that he has at her three times in the one night.

The final segment of the film is the most moving portion, consisting of the trek of Tatsuhei, with Orin riding on a carrier on his back, along the secret path to Narayama. After a ritual involving the village elders in which the sacred route is revealed, mother and son set off. The rules require that they not speak once they have started along the way, so we watch Orin occasionally guiding her son with her wisdom with hand signals or taps on the shoulder. As they approach the sacred place, there are elements that confer a kind of mystical tone to the proceedings. They walk past a deer, for example, that takes no notice of them. At one moment, Orin seems to have disappeared, as if taken up by the gods into paradise, only to reappear in the same spot. As they draw closer to the peak of the mountain, they pass several partly decomposed bodies of previous “victims” of this particular tradition. There are ravens or crows pecking away at the bodies and even occupying the rib cage of one corpse. Orin indicates by a hand gesture where she wants to be deposited. Tatsuhei is heartbroken but Orin is calmly reconciled. The rules require that Tatsuhei walk away without looking back. He does so . . . . until, after a few hundred yards, it begins to snow. The legends of the village indicate that if snow falls on the day that an old person goes to Narayama, the person will be relieved of all pain. Tatsuhei runs back long enough to yell to his mother that it is snowing! While climbing back down the mountain, Tatsuhei encounters another man from the village who has brought his elderly but unwilling father and watches the man hurl his father down a steep rock ledge because the old man wouldn’t let go voluntarily.

Themes: There is so much that could be said about this film, which is so terribly bleak in its depiction of humanity though occasionally downright touching. The principal theme, I believe, is captured in the phrase living in accord with nature. Usually, when we invoke that phrase, we’re thinking of something positive and in opposition to the violence that human activities (pollution, depleting non-renewable resources) sometimes do to nature. There is also, however, some characteristics that humanity sometimes exhibits that elevate mankind above the birds and the beasts. Nature, for example, is generally lacking in compassion. Nature is sometimes very cruel in the exercise of “survival of the fittest.” Predators not only kill but sometimes literally toy with their victims. Spiders paralyze their prey so that they can devour them alive. Snakes similarly paralyze their victims and then swallow them whole for gradual digestion. Cats will kill a kitten that is born deformed. Non-human primates sometimes murder their own kind and primitive man engaged in vicious activities such as head-hunting and genocides. You might point out that modern man has committed brutal acts even more horrible and massive (e.g., the Holocaust, Hiroshima, the Stalinist purges) and you would be correct. At the same time, modern man (in developed countries) also enjoys a standard of living that allows for such luxuries as compassion, law and order, loving families, rights for children and women, literature, and the arts to a far greater extent than existed through much of history. The trick, I think, is to live in harmony with nature but also to cherish and expand those qualities of human nature that enhance our humanity and separate us from the more cruel aspects of nature.

Probably few of you realize that there is a sense in which the Narayama approach to aging will again become an issue for our modern society, even assuming that we don’t seriously consider euthanasia as a solution to the rising costs of health care or the potential collapse of social security (by which we support our elderly). There will come a time within the lifetime of people who are currently young when science will have developed enough understanding of aging to seriously consider tinkering with it. Most people have no understanding of why humans and other critters age. Think, for a moment, about the fact that different species have different maximum life spans. A mouse treated to the best possible diet and exercise equipment and protected from every infection will still not live past a couple of years. Dogs rarely get to twenty years of age. The fact that life spans differ from one species to another reveals that life span is something that can and does evolve. Each species has developed, over time, a life span that is near optimum for the survival of that species. Why isn’t the maximum possible life span always optimum for a species? When individuals in a species pass their reproductive years and the years required to raise their offspring, they become a deficit for the survival of that species by competing for the limited habitat and resources. Death is a genetically-controlled pruning process that rids a species of those individuals that are no longer contributing to the survival of the species. In that sense, the community depicted in Ballad of Narayama was acting “in accord with nature”, even if inhumanely. What if humanity faces the choice of being able to extend maximum life span in people to, say, 200 years? Imagine how top-heavy human society would become and how massive the burden on the relatively small number of young, productive members of society to support a huge number of elderly people. Human society may have to make a Narayama-like choice and decide that we must not muck around with the genetic aspects of aging for the good of our species – even though it amounts to denying individuals the opportunity to live many additional years.

Another issue raised by The Ballad of Narayama is the issue of respect for other cultures versus standing by one’s own principles. For Orin and, possibly, the film’s director Shohei Imamura, the Narayama legend is a sacred tradition. To many Americans, I imagine that the reaction to the notion is one of abhorrence. I like to consider myself tolerant, respectful, and, even, appreciative of other cultures, but, frankly, there are some issues where I draw the line. I do not, for example, have a tolerant attitude toward repression of women or slavery – regardless of it being a “tradition” in some other culture. I abhor such notions as the binding of the feet of Chinese women or clitorectomies performed in some African cultures – regardless of those being traditional practices in those cultures. In such instances, it’s more important to me to stand against brutalities than to perceive myself as a culturally tolerant person. With respect to Narayama, I can accept a society doing what it has to do to survive, even if that requires some pretty horrendous choices, but when such practices are institutionalized into “sacred legends”, there is the risk that they will persist even if the economic conditions of the society no longer absolutely require such measures.

Production Values: One of the more brilliant aspects of this film is the association through montage editing between nature and human activities. We see, for example, a pair of snakes and a pair of frogs each copulating while Kesakichi and Matsu are having a go at it in the woods. While Amaya’s luckless family is being buried in the pit, we also see an owl devouring an equally luckless field mouse. The Ballad of Narayama is not so much a sociological study of these Japanese people as a zoological study! This film is a tough-minded meditation on the nature of nature and the hard realities of survival and death.

The tone of the film is graphic, vulgar, and realistic. It is painful to watch, at times, but all the more effective because of the pain that it inflicts. We are observing a cruel world and feeling its cruelty. The cinematography is high quality, most especially during the near-mythic journey to Narayama that closes the film. There are a few times when Imamura resorts to surreal elements to give the journey a kind of mystical quality and – frankly – I’ve seen better use of surrealism. It’s o.k., but nothing special. There is plenty of ribald humor that effectively breaks the tension of the film.

The performances are all excellent – the kind that you hardly notice, in a way, because they are so realistic. These seem like real people rather than actors. Ken Ogata is outstanding as Tatsuhei. His others credits include most notably Mishima (1985) and The Pillow Book (1996). Sumiko Sakamoto was marvelous as Orin – really the star of the film.

Bottom-Line: Shohei Imamura is one of only three directors to ever win the prestigious Palme d’Or at Cannes more than once (the others being Francis Ford Coppola and Emir Kustirica). Imamura won the award for this film and followed that up with another for The Eel in 1997. This is a great film that many viewers will find unpleasant viewing. It is a bleak vision of human nature but, unfortunately, all too realistic in capturing our barbaric cruel streak. I don’t recommend it for the faint of heart, but I highly recommend it for those with a sturdy constitution. The Ballad of Narayama is in Japanese with English subtitles and has a running time of 98 minutes.


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You might want to check out these other excellent films from Japan:

The Burmese Harp
Chushingura
Drunken Angel
The Eel
Floating Weeds
Gate of Hell
The Hidden Fortress
High and Low
Ikiru
Kagemusha
Kwaidan
Ran
Rashômon
Red Beard
Samurai 1: Musashi Miyamoto
Sanjuro
Sanshô, the Baliff
The Seven Samurai
Shall We Dance?
Stray Dog
The Woman in the Dunes
Yojimbo

Recommended:
Yes

Video Occasion: Fit for Friday Evening
Suitability For Children: Not suitable for Children of any age