Forget cinema as a window on the world. Forget mimesis, the illusion of reality that has obsessed the seventh art since its infancy. Masaki Kobayashi, the master of humanist drama and ferocious social critique with works like Harakiri and the monumental trilogy The Human Condition, makes a radical abjuration with "Kwaidan" and immerses himself in a universe where the camera is no longer an eye, but a paintbrush. This is not a horror film in the visceral, adrenaline-fueled sense that the West has accustomed us to; it is an aesthetic hypnosis, a séance conducted in an art museum, where the ghosts are composed of the very stuff of dreams: pure color, distilled sound, and chilling silence.

Shot on colossal soundstages (the hangar of a former airport, to be precise), the film is one of the most sumptuous and deliberate anti-naturalistic constructions in cinema history. The backdrops, immense hand-painted canvases depicting apocalyptic skies, spectral forests, and unnatural horizons, never try to deceive the viewer. On the contrary, they exhibit their sublime artificiality. We are closer to an emakimono, an ancient illustrated narrative scroll, brought to life, or to the stagecraft of Nō or Kabuki theater, where every gesture is codified and every visual element is a symbol. Kobayashi does not want to show us feudal Japan as it was, but as it was dreamed, feared, and recounted for centuries. The film thus becomes an archaeology of fear, an immersion into the Japanese collective unconscious filtered through the eyes of an exile, the Greco-Irish writer Lafcadio Hearn, whose collections of ancient legends form the work’s literary basis. A fascinating cultural short-circuit: a Japanese director reinterpreting his own tradition through the lens of a Westerner who had been bewitched by it.

The four episodes that compose this cinematic tapestry, formally distinct but thematically cohesive, explore the consequences of breaking a pact, of transgressing an order (social, natural, spiritual). In Kurokami (Black Hair), a penniless samurai abandons his devoted wife for a marriage of convenience, only to discover, years later, that horror can nestle in the most absolute fidelity. The homecoming is a masterpiece of restrained tension, where dust and cobwebs are not just set dressing, but the physical manifestation of time and remorse. The betrayed bride's black hair becomes a Lovecraftian entity, a living tentacle from the netherworld that envelops the traitor in a shroud of poetic justice.

With Yuki-Onna (The Snow Woman), Kobayashi literally paints on screen. The episode is immersed in a blinding white, a primordial void broken only by the black of tree trunks and the red of blood. The set design becomes expressionistic, almost abstract. The sky is not an atmospheric sky, but a psychological canvas. A cosmic, scrutinizing eye opens within it, a surrealist detail that seems lifted from a Dalí or Max Ernst painting, but which Kobayashi bends to a purely Japanese sensibility: it is Nature itself that observes, impassive and divine, the human drama unfolding before it. The promise extracted from a young woodcutter by the glacial Yuki-Onna becomes a sword of Damocles hanging over his domestic happiness, demonstrating how the supernatural is not an external intrusion, but a fundamental law of the world, invisible until it is broken.

The pulsating heart of the work is Miminashi Hōichi (Hōichi the Earless), a spectral epic that stages the battle of Dan-no-ura, one of the most traumatic events in Japanese history. Hōichi, a blind balladeer, is summoned night after night by a mysterious samurai to perform his ballad on the fall of the Heike clan before a court of nobles. The revelation that his audience is composed of the restless ghosts of the drowned warriors is one of cinema’s most sublime and terrifying moments. There is no violence, only an infinite, tangible melancholy. To protect him, the monks cover Hōichi’s body with the sutras of the Heart Sutra, transforming his skin into a living amulet. The tragic oversight of his ears is a stroke of narrative genius: the spirit can only touch that which is not protected by the sacred word. It is a potent metaphor for the power and peril of art: the artist is a medium, a channel who gives voice to the dead, but this power exposes him to mortal risk, leaves him vulnerable, and marks him forever.

If the first three episodes are masterpieces of pictorial narration, the fourth, Chawan no Naka (In a Teacup), is a meta-textual enigma that anticipates postmodern vertigo. A samurai sees the face of another warrior reflected in his teacup. Every time he drinks, the face reappears. The story breaks off abruptly, and the camera reveals that we are witnessing the tale of a 20th-century writer, who is in turn visited by the very spirits he is trying to conjure. The film folds in on itself; the narrative frame dissolves. It is a Borges-esque move, a game of mirrors that questions the very nature of the horror story. Who is the real ghost? The character in the story, the writer who tells it, or we, the audience, who in the darkness of the theater seek a safe thrill only to find our own face reflected in the abyss? Fear, Kobayashi suggests, lies not in the supernatural event, but in the very act of telling and listening to it—a ritual that can summon real presences.

Cementing this visual cathedral is the sonic score by Tōru Takemitsu. To call it a "soundtrack" is reductive. Takemitsu sculpts silence. His is a work of subtraction, where isolated sounds—the creak of wood, the plop of a drop of water, the plucked notes of a biwa, inhuman electronic fragments—pierce the silence like lightning on a moonless night. It is a sound design that does not accompany the image, but interrogates it, contradicts it, and unveils its invisible and terrifying subtext.

"Kwaidan", which cost a fortune and nearly bankrupted the studio that produced it (forcing Kobayashi himself to sell his home to finance its completion), is a landmark work. It rejects the conventions of its time to create a unique language, a synesthetic experience where cinema becomes painting, theater, and musique concrète. It is the cinematic equivalent of a Mark Rothko color field painting: it does not represent an emotion, it embodies it. It does not tell a ghost story, but rather evokes their very essence. This is a film not to be simply watched, but inhabited. A ritual from which one emerges changed, with the persistent feeling that, perhaps, somewhere—in a teacup or the reflection in a puddle—another face is staring back, waiting to be told.