Demon Pond: An Aquatic, Electrifying, Gender-Bending Folk Horror Fantasy from 1970s Japan

DEMON POND / Yasha Ga-Ike / 夜叉ヶ池

(Masahiro Shinoda, Japan, 1979, 124 minutes) 

Demon Pond is the kind of film that could get by strictly on aesthetic terms. 

 

It's such a feast for the eyes and ears, it almost wouldn't matter if there wasn't much story or if the story didn't make much sense. 

On the contrary, it makes perfect sense, not least since Pale Flower director Masahiro Shinoda treats the text like a poem. There are certain concepts and phrases that are repeated so often they become incantations of a kind, and not in an irritating way, but in a rhythmic, hypnotic way, specifically "demon pond," "dragon god," and the necessity of ringing a bell to keep the god complacent and the pond under control. 

I wouldn't have expected an adaptation of a 1913 Kabuki play to prove so coherent—particularly to those, like myself, who don't know much about Japanese folklore or Kabuki theater--let alone to have much in common with an American neo-noir from 1974 or a British sci-fi film from 1976, but the 1970s, throughout the industrialized world, were marked by high unemployment, rising food and energy costs, and battles over natural resources, particularly oil and steel. It's not completely surprising that cinema across the globe would reflect these concerns, however obliquely. 

Granted, when Izumi Kyōka wrote his original play, the economy was booming, though Japan was also meddling in the affairs of other Asian nations, and he had problems of his own involving poor health and a leaky rental home. Tsutomu Tamura and Haruhiko Mimura adapted his play for the 1979 film, while Keishi Nagatsuka adapted it for a live version filmed by Takashi Miike for a 2005 video release.

Demon Pond revolves around a community's compulsion to control their region's water source by any means necessary, directly linking it with Roman Polanski's Chinatown, in which John Huston's amoral business tycoon will do literally anything to control the flow of water into Los Angeles, and Nicolas Roeg's adaptation of the 1963 Walter Tevis novel, The Man Who Fell to Earth, in which David Bowie's parched alien will travel as many lightyears as possible to slake his thirst. 

In a larger sense, it's a timeless concern since the human body is made up of 50-60% water. When our supply of the stuff evaporates, crops die, livestock die, and we die. That's the state in which Demon Pond begins. 

Our entry into this prewar world is bespectacled teacher and botanist Gakuen (Kurosawa favorite Tsutomu Yamazaki), who travels by train and by foot to Shikami, a remote, mountain village in the former Echizen Province to get a look at its storied Demon Pond. It's a legitimate impetus for his journey, except he also intends to track down Akira (matinee-idol handsome Gô Katô), a colleague who went missing three years before, possibly intentionally, and to convince him to return to modern society.

 

Once Gakuen arrives, it's as if he's entered a reverse Shangri-La, the mythical paradise from James Hilton's 1933 novel, which would inspire major motion pictures both very good and very bad. It's at this point that a clash begins between the modern and the rational and the ancient and the superstitious. 

I don't mean to burden this thoroughly Eastern tale with too many Western references, but in a sense, Gakuen is a sort of Captain Bligh to Akira's Fletcher Christian--Akira, in other words, has gone native--though they're both basically good guys with different belief systems, and they'll join forces when the village turns against them, but more on that later.

Gakuen has to find his friend first, which doesn't happen right away, and Shinoda hasn't even revealed his ulterior motive yet. The teacher explores the village, which appears to be abandoned, before he notices any people, none of whom are especially welcoming; the ongoing drought has put everyone in a foul mood. Gakuen is also thirsty after his long journey, and after wandering through a mist-enshrouded forest, he happens upon a bucolic spring—not the Demon Pond—in a clearing overlooking the village. 

 

There's a cozy cottage on one side and a belfry on the other, but he's mostly struck by the slim back of a woman in a pastel kimono and traditional nihongami hairstyle, leaning over the water, possibly gazing at her reflection.

 

Without turning around, she senses his presence and begins to speak. She has a sweet, halting voice, but there's something otherworldly about it; she doesn't sound male, but she doesn't sound completely female either. 

 

When she finally turns to face Gakuen, he gives a start, either due to her alabaster beauty or to the intensity of her gaze, possibly both. Like Akira before him, he's instantly enchanted by Yuri (Kabuki legend Tamasaburô Bandô), a dreamy, ethereal figure the villagers view with some suspicion. 

The moment I saw her face, it occurred to me that Bandô might be a man. I wasn't sure, and I watched the entire film without making any attempt to confirm my suspicion. Gender aside, it's paramount that the character works, and she does, marvelously. In Kabuki theater, much as in Elizabethan times, female parts are played by men. Yamazaki and Katô were veteran movie and television actors who knew how to perform for the camera, and they're both very good, whereas Bandô was a celebrated onnagata making his screen debut, and he definitely holds his own. 

 

In case you're wondering how the performance was received in the States, Janet Maslin, for one, was impressed. As she wrote in 1982, upon the film's New York premiere, "Mr. Bando, known simply as Tamasaburo in Japan, is a female impersonator of astonishing subtlety. As Yuri, the village woman, he is delicate and demure, speaking in a soft, feminine voice that is perhaps the most convincing part of his impersonation," adding that "he painstakingly imitates the manner of a woman and does it so unobtrusively that the audience may have to remind itself that this is no actress."

If Yuri didn't look completely female to me, this plays to the film's strengths, because the character's androgynous affect adds to her mystique. Is she human...or something else? Is she good...or bad? 

 

Like Margo (below) in Frank Capra's 1937 version of Lost Horizon, will she age rapidly and die instantly if she leaves Shikami? After all, Shinoda suggests she's rooted to the land in a way the other villagers aren't. 

 

At first, Gakuen seeks simply to rest and replenish before continuing on to the Demon Pond, but he's intrigued by Yuri, who is opaque in her responses, revealing almost nothing about herself. 

 

She means to be polite and hospitable, but it's clear that she would also like him to leave. It was unclear to me at this juncture whether Gakuen represented a threat to her livelihood or whether she represented a threat to his, but once he realizes he's being watched, the teacher uses delaying tactics to uncover what she's hiding, which leads him to her husband, a white-haired gentleman who rings the bell three times a day to keep the village from flooding. 

In short order, he finds that it's his old friend in disguise. Akira removes the wig, and tells his story. Unlike most plays, Shinoda uses brief, effective flashbacks throughout the film to fill in the characters' backstories; it's one of the ways he keeps things cinematic--the stunning cinematography from Noritaka Sakamoto and Pale Flower's Masao Kosugi is another. 

Like Gakuen, Akira entered the village as an explorer. En route to the Demon Pond, he met Yatabei (Jun Hamamura), who had been ringing the bell three times a day for 50 years. The bell keeper takes a shine to Akira, tasks him to carry on the tradition, and then dies. Akira feels obligated to honor his commitment, and when he meets and falls in love with Yuri, that's the end of that. He sets down roots, and despite their status as outcasts, puts aside all thoughts of returning to his humdrum life. 

 

The more the men reminisce, the more antsy Yuri becomes. She knows what Gakuen is up to, and doesn't want to lose the love of her life, not least since he's also her protector. When Akira agrees to accompany Gakuen to the Demon Pond, she fears he won't return. Fortunately, he does--but not quickly enough.

Lest that scare you away, rest assured that the villagers don't kill Yuri, but they do put her life in jeopardy. After gathering together to determine what to do about the drought, a fat-cat politician convinces his unworldly, uneducated constituents that a flood is the only solution, but it doesn't occur to them to question exactly what that entails. A flood isn't simply a heavy rain, but they've never experienced one before, and nor are they convinced that daily bell-ringing has kept one at bay--though they're willing to take the risk. Further, if the land surrounding the village isn't without water; they haven't found or sought a way to harness it, relying instead on rainwater wells rather than a modern plumbing system. 

Knowing their plan might fail, they decide to up the ante with a sacrifice. Naturally, only the most beautiful virgin will do. At first they settle on the daughter of Yoju (Hatsuo Yamaya), who Shinoda previously depicted poaching a fish from Yuri's property, but he and his wife insist that the village's young men have been having their way with her. This elicits snickers, not at the idea of a sexually-active young woman, but because they know just how aggressive their sons can be, and what they describe sounds more like rape than consensual sex. Not exactly a charming lot. 

 

Yoju then suggests the beautiful Yuri, which gives everyone pause. She may be married, but because they doubt her humanity, they agree that she's the perfect choice. It isn't stated explicitly, but they seem to think that her relationship with Akira is more spiritual than physical, even as they know she didn't emerge from the ether. Like everyone else, Yuri once had a mother and a father, except both had died before the story begins, and aside from the fact that she doesn't talk, dress, or move like the other village women who eschew her refined ways, she and her husband don't have any children in an era in which that would've been considered unusual, if not suspect. 

More unusually, Yuri spends her time alone talking to a porcelain doll she cradles like an infant. We can interpret all of this as we wish, and the villagers don't remark on any of it, but Shinoda prioritizes showing over telling, and I never felt he was winking at the audience about Bandô's gender. The screenplay doesn't suggest that Yuri could be a man or even a true androgyne, and nor does the actor play her that way; she's a woman, full stop, though just when it seems as if her relationship with Akira exists on a higher or alternate plane, the two share a long, passionate kiss. 

At first I thought the actors might be miming, like Will Smith in Fred Schepisi's John Guare adaptation Six Degrees of Separation--who agreed to play a gay character on screen, but refused to kiss costar Anthony Michael Hall--but as the camera moves from the back to the side and then right up next to the couple, it becomes clear that they're really kissing. 

 

Since Bandô was a Kabuki superstar, I doubt it harmed his reputation, but it may have represented a risk for Katô, though I don't know if it caused any controversy. At least Demon Pond saw release in 1979 rather than, say, 1959. Japanese cinema was hardly tame in the 1970s what with the bold visions of Shinoda's New Wave peers Shōhei Imamura and Nagisa Oshima, even if societal norms weren't progressing quite as rapidly. 

Before the villagers arrive at Yuri's cottage with their torches, much like the witch-hunters of 17th-century Salem, Shinoda introduces the animistic  creatures of the Demon Pond in an elaborate sequence that plays like a cross between Powell and Pressburger's take on Jacques Offenbach's The Tales of Hoffmann and "The Devil in the Dark" episode of Star Trek. 

 

In other words, it splits the difference between the fantastical and the stage-bound, and the glorious score from composer Isao Tomita, a master of Moog and Mellotron, even evokes Jerry Goldsmith's haunting Trek theme when he adds a ghostly choir. At other times, Tomita specifically references Modest Mussorgsky and especially Claude Debussy, much as he had done on his landmark 1974 album, Snowflakes Are Dancing.

 

At first, the artifice disappointed me after all those realistic locations, but I warmed up to it. If Shinoda had constructed the entire film in this lysergic manner, Demon Pond might have developed a cult following like Nobuhiko Obayashi's immortal House from two years before. He's gathered every kind of creature, from anthropomorphic crabs and catfish, slathered them in greasepaint and Sigmund and the Sea Monsters-style costumes and surrounded them with gnarled coral foliage, and yet the ground is clearly a wooden stage coated with black semi-gloss.

The real star of the underwater show, however, is Yuki, the dragon princess--played by Tamasaburô Bandô in glamorous garb, including a glittering gold crown. By ringing the bell three times a day, Akira has been keeping his wife and fellow villagers safe, but unbeknownst to him, he has also been keeping the princess imprisoned. Yuki has a love of her own, but she can't fly away to be with him unless Akira stops ringing the bell. Taken literally, this arrangement confirms Yuri's earthliness, while also suggesting a psychic connection between the two women, since they look alike, their names are similar, and of course, they're played by the same actor. 

I won't say what happens to Gakuen, Akira, or Yuri, only that the ringing stops, unleashing the kind of tsunami that could stop Godzilla in his tracks. This shouldn't come as a spoiler, since the film has been leading up to it for almost two hours, hence the repeated warnings about the bell's magical properties. The bigger question is how it affects everyone, both above and below the water, and whether or not Shinoda was able to pull it off. 

 

Considering that the new Criterion Collection release comes with an entire featurette about Nobuo Yajima's effects work with miniature sets and optical printing, it's fair to say that he does. Though computer-generated imagery can provide more photo-realistic phenomena, practical or analog effects provide a tactical quality that computers can't quite duplicate. What started as a folk horror fantasy with a psychological thriller vibe shifts into full-on action-adventure-meets-disaster movie mode once all watery hell breaks loose. 

While Demon Pond was in production in Japan, an American actress named Dena Dietrich was starring in a nine-year series of television commercials for Chiffon margarine that are imprinted on the psyche of every viewer glued to the tube in the 1970s, because although we may not have been paying much attention to the product she was shilling--I wasn't, at any rate--her catch phrase became an instant and enduring classic: "It's not nice," she cautioned mock-ominously, "to fool Mother Nature." 

In a manner of speaking, that's exactly what the villagers do. Decades, possibly even hundreds of years before, representatives of the real and spiritual realms had formed a covenant. By messing with a protocol designed to keep things in alignment, they set a demon loose. 

Demon Pond, which is filled with water imagery, uses the substance to symbolize life and death. As long as we have it, we live, but if we lose it, we die, except the film's true subject is love. We can literally live without it, but is that really living? In Masahiro Shinoda's lush, romantic, bigger-than-life take on Izumi Kyōka's text, the answer is a resounding No.

 

Demon Pond, in a 4K restoration overseen by Shinoda and Tamasaburô Bandô, is out now on The Criterion Collection. 

 

Extra features include an enlightening interview with scholar Dudley Andrew on Shinoda's career and an essay on the film from critic Michael Atkinson. 

 

Images from Janus Films (Bandô as Yuki and as Yuri with Gô Katô), the IMDb (Tsutomu Yamazaki and Mexican-American actress Margo Albert), Japononfilm (Yuri with doll), Reactor (William Shatner in "The Devil in the Dark"), and Festival de Cannes (Yuki and the creatures of the pond).