Movies: Jigoku (Hell)

The story seems simple enough at first. We meet Shiro, a young man in college with what would seem to be a bright future ahead of him. He’s engaged to a lovely young girl whose father is one of his professors, and who also thinks the world of him. Shiro’s troubles in life stem from his diabolical friend, Tamura, a ne’er-do-well who’s more interested in sampling the pleasures of life now than holding out for anything resembling responsibility. Worse, this friend of his manages to somehow know about the worst of everyone around him: he knows that Shiro has gotten his girlfriend pregnant, and that his prospective father-in-law might have done some pretty indefensible things of his own in World War II.

One night they’re out driving, with Tamura at the wheel, and they run over and kill a neighborhood tough guy who had one too many and wandered out into the road. Shiro’s buddy doesn’t savor the idea of losing the best years of his life for the sake of some drunken yakuza, so he speeds off. When Shiro tries to confess to his girlfriend, the cab they’re in slams into a telephone pole and she’s killed. Tamura, not surprisingly, finds this an entirely appropriate way to handle the situation: the one other person who knows about his perfidy, and his illegitimate child, have both been dealt with pretty cleanly. Shiro is anything but relieved.

Things grow steadily worse. Shiro’s own mother falls ill, and he goes to visit her in a dingy rest home, where he finds his father having an affair with one of the servant girls. The place has the sleazy atmosphere of a cheap brothel, and is crawling with unpleasant types: One of the other tenants, Ensai, an older man who paints pictures of the inferno (shades of Portrait of Hell, a movie which very much recalls this one in spirit and tone), is a convicted art forger, and the doctor running the place is thinning out the food to stretch his meager budget. There is also a young woman there who looks shockingly like his dead girlfriend — and another woman, her father’s lover, who begins instantly vying for Shiro’s own attention.

I imagine it is no secret at all to learn that we follow several of the major characters from here, through death and into hell itself. This is where the movie’s production design and lurid, strongly-colored photography all get pushed to the fore, as the camera is plunged into one Grand Guignol setpiece after another. Torture, evisceration, drowning, freezing, burning — but as we find out, the most gruesome torture of all is being tantalized with the possibility of redemption and never having it. Most of this part of the movie is strongly reminiscent of the phantasmagoria of Kwaidan — especially in terms of the sets and costumes and lighting, all of which were in turn inspired by noh theater and stage drama. I enjoy this sort of thing more than the bland, pasted-together CGI look most movies use today to show us something otherworldly and fearful.

I now have to dive into true spoiler territory, so skip ahead if you want to see the movie first. Most intelligent readers will wonder if Shiro and his friend are really the same person. There are strong hints of this throughout, and the movie more or less tips its hand by the twenty-minute mark. The dead gangster’s mother and his former girlfriend are hatching a revenge plan of their own as well; when the girlfriend sleeps with Shiro’s buddy and finds his student ID, Shiro’s name is in it. So how is it that people respond to them as two people, and not one? The main clue for me is the opening scenes, in which we see Shiro already in the underworld, lamenting his fate. Everything we see afterwards, then, is his memory of what has happened — which he has creatively revisited to split off his evil deeds into their own independent persona, the better to abandon responsibility for them. Whether that other half of him can be sent to hell in his stead is an open question. Other movies have pulled a stunt like this before — the awful High Tension comes to mind, and the questionably-important Fight Club — but Jigoku makes it work by seeing it as a crucial strategy of the story and not simply a gratuitous twist.

One creative reading of the film casts it as a frankly conservative personification of Japan’s own struggle with its spirit in the postwar years. Tamura is “Western”, with his loud shirts, his sunglasses, his pointed shoes and his disdain for authority, tradition and family ties. Shiro, with his buttoned-up dress blues for school and his wooden geta, represents the embodiment of proper ideals: respect for elders, responsibility, and a sense of honor. It wouldn’t be the first time a movie intended as popular entertainment in Japan used such a fairly brazen thematic strategy, either. I thought of — don’t laugh — Matango, the Ishiro (Godzilla) Honda / Toho horror production that showed a band of rich and spoiled weekenders falling under the spell of hallucinogenic (?) fungus that transformed them into hideous monsters. It wasn’t hard to read the movie’s algebra, though: the real “drug” in the film was the intoxicating power of money and materialism in a postwar Japan that rebuilt itself from nothing in a little over a decade — a point of view Honda hammered home with his opening and closing shots of one of the malformed survivors bathed by the glitzy neon of Tokyo’s skyline.

Jigoku was directed by Nobuo Nakagawa, who also created a slew of other extremely influential and important Japanese horror productions, many of them infused with the same sense of dread and surreal beauty. Its production was a kind of hell as well: the cost of the film mounted astronomically, until Nakagawa was forced to cover a good deal of the budget out of his own pocket, and the elaborate depictions of the underworld in the latter half of the movie took months to create — no small consideration given that most Japanese films at the time were written, shot, edited and released in the space of about two to three months. On top of everything else the releasing company, Shintoho, went bankrupt before the movie was complete, and the film wound up going unreleased for years until Toei snapped it up and put it into theaters. It sparked controversy immediately, partly because Nakagawa merged a frankly Christian morality with Buddhist concepts of karma, but also because it contained plenty of then-gratuitous nudity, violence (especially in the final sequences) and stark terror.

Japan has been remaking its own films as aggressively as the West has, and Jigoku has been remade at least twice. The second version, in 1979, was directed by Tatsumi Kumashiro (who directed the landmark pinku eiga production The Woman with Red Hair that same year) and starred none other than Mieko Harada — she who so unforgettably filled the “Lady Macbeth” role in Kurosawa’s Ran — and Renji Ishibashi in a vaguely similar story with even more updated (read: explicit) sex and gore. The third version was an unforgivably embarrassing 1999 cheapie directed by none other than the grand master of Japanese terror and torture, Teruo Ishii, and which sank to new lows by trying to spin in “socially relevant” subplots about child molesters and the Aum Shinrikyo cult. He has done better elsewhere, and so can we. The original Jigoku remains a masterpiece.