This is a lovely and little known film version of the most popular Japanese "chiller," the Yotsuya Kaidan story of the ghost of Oiwa, whose husband, the impoverished samurai Iyemon, murders her in order to marry a wealthy merchant's daughter. Oiwa's ghost has come back, with her bulging, disfigured face, her balding head, to haunt many a woodblock print and Kabuki stage. This film is a woodcut come to life, with a wonderfully detailed evocation of Edo streetlife, shot through screens and wooden posts and bamboo umbrellas; and all the horrific splendor that art and tradition have accorded to the ghost of Oiwa, not to mention to Iyemon as he murders his way to the top. Snakes and flying balls of fire wend their way through the film as they have in a thousand retellings of this classic tale. It is a story rooted in feudal politics, but as it develops--following Iyemon's growing abhorrence of his wife, in perennially ill health after giving birth to their child; his desire to marry another to better his position; his perverse reconciliation with Oiwa as he poisons her; his frantic psychological torture of this woman who, for the sake of her child, refuses to die--it builds inexorably to a resounding women's revenge tale. Indeed, revenge is written in images of a woman's pain--of clumps of hair, of bloody fingernails, of horrible facial disfigurements; yet critics also attribute such passionate ghosts to the terrible otherness of woman that plagues man's guilty subconscious. (See July 23 for Keisuke Kinoshita's version of Yotsuya Kaidan.)