Empire of Passion: Oshima's Ghost-Story Companion

Nagisa Ōshima had just made the most notorious film in Japan. In the Realm of the Senses went to Cannes in 1976, got its director prosecuted at home over the published screenplay, and permanently fixed his reputation as the man who broke the last door down. The obvious follow-up was another provocation. What he made instead was a ghost story set in a Meiji-era village, and it won him Best Director at Cannes in 1978.

Empire of Passion — Ai no Bōrei, closer to “phantom of love” — is usually filed as the sequel that wasn’t. Same producer, Anatole Dauman. Same lead actor, Tatsuya Fuji. Same subject, more or less: two people whose desire for each other eats everything around it. The difference is that the earlier film ended in a locked room and this one ends in a village where everybody can see, and where something in the woods has an opinion.

A rickshaw man, a well, and a village that talks

The setup is old as the hills, which is the point. Seki is a woman in her late thirties, married to Gisaburō, a rickshaw puller — a good man, dull, on the road most nights. Toyoji is a young ex-soldier back from the Russo-Japanese conflicts with nothing to do and no fear of anything. He wants her. She lets him. In 1895, in a village of a few dozen households, that is a matter of public record within about a fortnight.

They kill the husband. They put him down the well. And then the film does the thing that separates it from every other adultery-and-murder story: it stays. Nobody flees. There is nowhere to flee to. Seki and Toyoji remain in the village for three years, farming, drinking, being asked politely and repeatedly where Gisaburō has got to, and inventing an increasingly threadbare story about him going to Tokyo. The tension in Empire of Passion is bureaucratic before it is supernatural. The neighbours are not suspicious in a dramatic way. They are curious in an ordinary way, and ordinary curiosity, applied for three years, is unbearable.

Then the ghost turns up, and he is a rickshaw man still, doing what he did in life.

Why it works: the well, in three dimensions

The well is the best-directed object in Ōshima’s filmography.

He shoots it from above, looking down into black water. He shoots it from below, from inside, looking up at a coin of grey sky with faces around the rim. He shoots it in autumn, when the leaves come down and fill it, and in winter, when it takes snow. The film returns to it perhaps a dozen times, and the geometry changes each time. That vertical axis becomes the film’s whole moral structure — everything the lovers want is on the surface, and the thing they did is directly beneath their feet, in the water the village drinks from.

The leaves are the masterstroke. Toyoji has to keep going back to clear them, because a well full of leaves gets dredged, and a dredged well gives up its contents. So the murder generates housework. Every autumn, forever, this man has to climb down into the hole with his victim and tidy. Ōshima found the one detail that makes an act of passion into a job, and the film is merciless about it.

Cinematographer Yoshio Miyajima shot this, and the pedigree matters — he had photographed Kwaidan for Kobayashi in 1964, which is the most beautiful ghost film Japan has ever produced. Miyajima brings the same painterly control here and then withholds it. Most of Empire of Passion is muddy naturalism — grubby interiors, wet fields, faces lit by one lamp. He saves the stylisation for the hauntings, so that when the film goes strange it goes strange against a documentary background. A ghost in a beautiful film is decoration. A ghost in a film about mud is a problem.

Tōru Takemitsu’s score works by subtraction. Long stretches carry no music at all, only weather and the village. When he does come in, it is percussion and biwa-adjacent texture, sparse enough that the arrival of sound reads as an intrusion. Takemitsu had scored Kwaidan too, and he is doing the opposite job here — there, the music built a world; here, it punctures one.

The performances

Kazuko Yoshiyuki plays Seki and she is the film. She is playing a woman who is not remotely a femme fatale — she is tired, practical, a bit ground down, and she makes a catastrophic decision for reasons that are entirely legible. Yoshiyuki lets you watch her age three years in real time under the weight of a story she has to keep telling. It is a performance of maintenance: the maintenance of a lie, the maintenance of a household, the maintenance of a face.

Tatsuya Fuji, coming off In the Realm of the Senses, plays Toyoji as a young man with no interior at all. He is appetite with a haircut. The casting is a deliberate rhyme — audiences in 1978 knew exactly what Fuji had just done on screen, and Ōshima uses that recognition as shorthand.

The village is the third performance. Ōshima fills the frame with neighbours who have no names and no arc, and gives them one function: to notice. They notice that Gisaburō’s letters from Tokyo never arrive. They notice the new roof on Toyoji’s place. They notice that Seki has stopped going to the well. Nothing is ever said outright, because the Meiji village had no vocabulary for accusing a neighbour of murder and every vocabulary for making her aware that she had been weighed. Ōshima came out of the Japanese New Wave with a lifelong argument about social pressure as a machine, and this is the most patient demonstration he ever filmed. The supernatural eventually arrives to do what the village has already been doing for three years, only faster.

The collector’s cross-reference

The bones here are Zola. Thérèse Raquin is the same machine: lovers murder the husband, dispose of the body, and then discover that they have to live with each other afterwards, which turns out to be the actual sentence. Ōshima has read it. So had every film-maker who made a version of The Postman Always Rings Twice.

The Japanese ancestor is the kaidan tradition — the vengeful-spirit story where the ghost’s claim is a moral debt rather than a random malice. Empire of Passion is a straight kaidan wearing naturalist clothes, and it descends directly from Ugetsu, where Mizoguchi established that the most devastating Japanese ghost is a domestic one who simply wants you to come home. Set it beside Onibaba, Shindō’s reed-field film from 1964, and the family resemblance is total: rural poverty, sexual hunger, a hole in the ground with a body in it, and a landscape that keeps score.

Downstream, the well is everywhere. When Nakata sent a camera down a shaft twenty years later in Ringu, he was drawing on a tradition that Ōshima had already given its most rigorous treatment. For Ōshima’s own preceding scandal, see In the Realm of the Senses.

The case against

It is slow in a way that will lose people, and the slowness is load-bearing, which makes it hard to defend to anyone who has bounced off it. The middle hour is largely two people being asked questions and answering badly, and if the accumulation of dread does not take hold, there is very little else on offer.

The bigger honest problem is the comparison the film invites and cannot win. In the Realm of the Senses is a nuclear device. Empire of Passion is a well-made ghost story by a great director, and the Cannes prize has always looked slightly like an apology for the year before — the festival rewarding the film it could safely reward. Ōshima’s own reputation has never quite let this one stand alone.

The verdict

Take it as a kaidan and it is one of the best of the sound era: rigorous, cold, beautifully photographed by a man who had already made the definitive ghost film and knew how to make an ugly one. Take it as a sequel and it will disappoint you. Criterion have kept it in circulation alongside its more famous sibling, which is the right home for it; the boutique labels carry the Ōshima run and any of those transfers will do the leaves justice.

Watch it in winter. It knows what it is doing with snow.

Spoilers below

The ghost is the film’s best joke and its cruellest idea, and it takes a while to see why.

Gisaburō comes back as a rickshaw man. He does not scream, does not accuse, does not point. He turns up in the road at night and offers Seki a ride, exactly as he did for a living, and he asks her, mildly, for a cigarette. The dead husband haunts his wife by continuing to be her husband. That is the whole horror. He wants the marriage back. He is not owed vengeance in his own view — he is owed dinner.

What it does to Seki is total. She starts confessing to a man nobody else can see, in a village that is watching her talk to empty air, and her visible madness becomes the evidence the neighbours had been lacking. The ghost convicts her by being tender.

The ending is Ōshima at his bleakest. The well is dredged, the body found, and the pair are arrested and tortured by the authorities — the film shifts, in its last movement, from the supernatural to the procedural, and the state turns out to be worse than the ghost. Toyoji has his eyes destroyed. The blinding is the film’s closing argument: he took a woman with his eyes, he kept the well clear with his eyes, and the state takes them. Seki, left in the dark with him, is finally alone with the person she chose.

Ōshima structured the whole film as a descent — down the well, down the social ladder, down into a cell — and the last shot leaves them at the bottom of it, still together, which was what they both wanted the entire time. He gives them exactly what they asked for. That is the punishment.