Yashagaike

It's never a good thing when a mob of villagers approach with torches, is it? I loved the setup to this which had a teacher arriving to a remote, eerie place without much dialogue - the spiky trees, suspension bridge, and curvy houses all set the scene. And in case the villagers at the funeral weren't odd enough, a woman whips her breast out and squirts some milk into his eye to help him with some dust that's bothering him. Then he learns of the legend that a bell must be run three times a day in order to keep the dragon god who resides in the demon pond at bay, lest the town be flooded and everyone perish. Nothing can go wrong with this requirement, can it?

The problem I had with the film was its lengthy, laborious middle section, one that seemed to crawl along at a snail's pace. That was despite the sudden and bizarre appearance of a crab-man and catfish-man, the latter of whom reminded me of the cowardly lion from The Wizard of Oz with his facial expressions. There just wasn't enough to this fable for it to be told over 124 minutes, and in the meanwhile, most of the aesthetics in the scenery I had liked early on had been replaced with sets that were less appealing to me. Kind of a struggle to get through, but a nice finish.

Myth and superstition hold center stage in Masahiro Shinoda's fantastic tale of a haunted mountain lake in the remote Japanese hinterland, home of the beautiful Dragon Queen and her myriad spirit consorts. While investigating an obscure reference on a pre-war map of the region, a traveling schoolteacher happens upon a nearby village where the inhabitants suffer a terrible drought rather than disturb the underwater demon, whose release is checked by the ritual sounding of a sacred bell. The film moves from magic realism to theatrical stylization and back again as the boundary between the natural and the supernatural slowly narrows and disappears, until the ignorant and bitter villagers finally unleash an apocalypse which has to be seen to be believed. It's an accomplished and often extraordinary blend of mystery, legend, humor and horror, featuring an appropriately odd (but now sadly dated) Moog synthesizer soundtrack by Isao Tomita.

Others here have described the film more than adequately, all I have to add is that of Feb 2021, Shochiku have announced that it will be digitally remastered and re-issued. I hope I get a chance to rework the subtitles!

Back in those days, when videotape wasn't readily available, we sat in a screening room, watched the film, made notes and received an audio tape of the dialogue to work on back at home - using audio cassette player, the original (often uncorrected) Japanese script and a typewriter. As you can imagine, it was difficult, if not impossible to remember all the actions and nuances that must be addressed to make the subtitles work seamlessly, especially since Japanese can be very vague at times, often leaving out the subject, or the object of a sentence, so he/she, or here/there, that/this must often be guessed at. It was always a painful experience to watch the complete subtitled film, surrounded by the producers and usually the director, continually wincing at what must have looked like simple translation errors.

Anyway, I hope you enjoy the remastered masterpiece by often underrated genius of Japanese cinema, Shinoda Masahiro.

Melancholy is the key word in this perhaps most beautiful yokai movie. The yokai (incarnated spirits of nature) may play second fiddle to a more down-to-earth plot about friendship versus love, but the fantastic atmosphere is there from the start. Handsomely shot outdoors, the valley (and of course, the eponymous pond) remain the main centre of interest, if only visual, as well as its ultimate fate. Plus music by Isao Tomita. Lovely movie. Give it a spin.

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YASHAGAIKE (Demon Pond) has been missing from the Home Video Market for far too long (as in forever). How very strange that one of the few examples of Bando Tamasaburo's art, and perhaps his most accessible to the west, is so little known. I first saw this film on the late-lamented "Z Channel" in Los Angeles in the early 1980's and have always wanted to become reacquainted with it. If memory serves, it was such a surprise to see so many genres, visual styles of scenery, costume, lighting and period assembled with such naiveté in one film. Perhaps that is one of the reasons that it is not readily available. Also, my one viewing on television gave the impression of already fading non-technicolor processing. I hope that this is wrong. Yet, anyone who has seen "Das Geschriebene Gesicht" by Daniel Schmid (only available on PAL at the present), or Tamasaburo's collaboration with Yo-Yo-Ma in his Bach series will be anxious to see anything by the great Kabuki onnagata. Perhaps "Natassia" will appear some day.