Shohei Imamura's Ballad of Narayama (Narayama bushiko, 1984) is an adaptation of a short story by Shichiro Fukazawa, the story based on a folk legend. This film deservedly won the Cannes Film Festival Golden Palm.

One of the first images we have is of a newborn infant abandoned & dead in a muddy field. There is annoyance at the intrusion of so small a corpse, but no one feels the need to find out who killed her child. Infanticide is normal for these people, & only thing untoward is that the remains were left in a neighbor's field.

The story regards the last days of the aging Orin (Sumiko Sakamoto) who despite her good health tells her son (Ken Ogata) she has now reached that age when it is time to be taken to the throwing-old-people-away place atop Mount Nara, to be discarded before she is a burden on her family.

This may or may not actually have been just such a tradition at some point in ancient Japan -- more likely not -- but in a culture that hugely values filiel piety it is certainly a powerful idea that aging parents could be discarded in a chilly mountain location to die of exposure. It is perhaps even sometimes a fantasy of guilty pleasure of escaping one's lifelong obligations toward aging parents & grandparents.

Set in a timeless rural region untouched by the swift modernization of the Meiji Era, life is harsh particularly in winter, & village traditions are equally harsh in response. An entire family is buried alive when caught stealing limited resources. The elderly are thought undeserving of a portion of rare winter provisions.

In a world where many would die but for the sacrifice of a few, such callousnous is just about credible. Here is a people for whom suicide, self-sacrifice, murder & capital punishment are blended into indistinguishable acts taken as moral & proper even though unfortunate. Their human world is both as sensual & as violently grotesque as the animal world, where there is no actual cruelty but only a natural balance of mating & birthing, slaying or dying.

Small, often grotesque occurrences decorate the deliberately paced film. The abject beauty of the village & the forest is contrasted to such strange human behavior as having sex with a dog.

Tatsuhei loves his mother to distraction & is horrified by the decision she has made. He makes every possible excuse not to discard her, explaining her value to him & pointing out how healthy she is. Orin to convince him she is not all that healthy attempts to bash her own teeth out with a rock.

Eventually Tatsuhei in obedience to his mother straps a rustic pack to his back & Orin sits in it so that her son can carry her to the discarding place of Mount Nara. Along the way Orin appreciates the beauty around her. Another son with an aged mother is encountered along the same path, with the mother screaming & begging not to be discarded & her son eager to be rid of her.

But for Orin it is an event with eerie dignity, & she faces the end of life without trepidation, believing deeply in her village's traditions & in the good that will result for her family. She is left alone in a mountain clearing of corpses & bones, sitting peacefully as a bodhisattva, awaiting a death that is apt to take quite some while, while new snowfall begins to fall upon her.

There is poetry & strangeness to Ballad of Narayama that places it far outside the bounds of modern morality, but which provides much to think about from the perspective of our own cultural assumptions of life & death, right & wrong.


The same tale had earlier been adapted to the screen by Keisuke Kinoshita. This earlier Ballad of Narayama (Narayama bushiko, 1958) is gorgeously filmed in black & white, with Kinuyo Tanaka as Orin & Teiji Takahashi as Tatsuhei.

Kinoshita chose to give the presentation a kabukiesque artificiality with shamisen accompaniment. The story has much less reality than in Imamura's color version & of course lacks the erotic component of the later film yet.

Kinoshita's theatric distancing & unreality of the material, together with a higher degree of Romanticism, helps underscore the allegorical significance of Orin's "choice" of death, a choice none of us ultimately can refuse to select.

Ironically, by presenting the tale with less realism, Orin's experience becomes universal rather than culturally specific or exotic. The result is if possible even more lyrical than Imamura's film, in a completely different tempo.

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