Ugetsu is evocative of the Buddhist universe of Noh drama, where time is a movement of consciousness, memory is as tangible as the present, and the dead return to voice their grief or longing. Blending a tale of karmic law, a ghost story, and a love story, Mizoguchi also refers to other Japanese art forms such as narrative picture scrolls (emaki) in his use of perspective and his signature long takes that move us seamlessly from one scene to the next. In sixteenth-century Japan, with the pandemonium of civil wars a looming presence in their lives, the potter Genjuro and his wife long to be "rich and safe." But artistic vanity draws Genjuro into the paradisiacal realm of a phantom princess. Mizoguchi builds the "other" world entirely out of what he is given in this one: shadows and lighting, decor and texture, and the graceful chicanery of desire.