To enter Keisuke Kinoshita's The Ballad of Narayama (Narayama Bushikō), one must first take an aesthetic leap of faith. One must accept artifice not as a limitation, but as language itself. Because what Kinoshita orchestrates in 1958 is not a chronicle of despair; it is a total Kabuki work, a masterpiece of anti-realism that uses the most extreme stylization to achieve the deepest emotional truth.

From the very first shot, we are warned. A curtain opens, not on a village, but on a stage. The snow is obviously fake. The lights do not simulate the sun, but project cones of expressionist color—cobalt blue for the night, fiery amber for the interiors. A kuroko (the stagehand dressed in black, conventionally “invisible” in Japanese theater) moves objects and changes sets, a constant memento mori of the narrative construction. And, above all, there is the joruri, the storyteller, who introduces us to the legend with a rhythmic song. Kinoshita is not trying to deceive us into believing that we are in a remote village in Shinshu. He is shouting, “This is a performance! This is art! Now, pay attention.”

This formal choice is not an aesthetic whim; it is the philosophical heart of the film. The subject matter is absolute horror: Ubasute, the ancient (and perhaps legendary) practice of senicide. In this village isolated by hunger and time, the unwritten law is ironclad: when an elderly person reaches the age of 70, the eldest son must carry them on their back to the summit of Mount Narayama and abandon them to the frost and the elements. It is not murder, it is economics. It is an act of Malthusian social Darwinism, brutal and necessary, to ensure that there is enough food for the next generation. Telling this story with naturalism (as Imamura does) transforms it into an anthropological document. Telling it with Kabuki aesthetics elevates it to Greek tragedy, to a universal myth about the conflict between giri (social duty) and ninjo (human feeling).

It is a world governed by a logic that is alien to us. The entire community is complicit in a system of survival that has redefined morality. Food theft is not a minor offense; it is a capital betrayal. The punishment for the thief and his family, carried out by the entire community, is one of the most chilling sequences in the history of cinema, precisely because it is presented not with anger, but with the cold necessity of an agricultural ritual. Human life has a purely utilitarian value. And in this context, the approach of Orin's (played by a sublime Kinuyo Tanaka) 70th birthday becomes the central event.

The greatness of Orin's character, and of Tanaka's performance, lies in her chilling pragmatism. She is not a resigned victim. She is a matriarch who accepts the law because she understands it. Her main concern is not death, but ensuring the continuity of the family. She must find a new wife for her widowed son, Tatsuhei (Teiji Takahashi), and she must ensure that he is ‘man’ enough to perform the final rite. The film subverts all our expectations: it is the mother who pushes for her own end, it is the son who trembles and tries to delay the inevitable. Tatsuhei is the bearer of modern humanism, of the filial love that we consider “natural,” but which in this context is a luxury, a dangerous weakness.

The most shocking scene, the one that defines Orin's character, is the act of self-mutilation. To conform to the status of “useless” that justifies her departure, and to shame her rebellious grandson Kesakichi who mocks her for her health, Orin deliberately breaks her (still healthy) incisors against a stone. Kinoshita does not spare us the sound, the shock. It is an act of supreme will, a physical sacrifice that precedes the spiritual one. She is preparing herself, and her family, for the necessity of her absence. The new wife, Tama (Yūko Mochizuki), who accepts this logic and admires her mother-in-law, is the only one who understands her greatness.

Kinoshita, one of the “Big Four” (along with Kurosawa, Mizoguchi, and Ozu), is perhaps the most chameleon-like. Here, he abandons the neorealism of his post-war films for an aesthetic that is purely pictorial. Shot entirely in the studio, the film uses sets that scroll horizontally, like an ancient painted scroll emakimono, creating a sense of perpetual, cyclical travel. The cinematography (by the great Hiroshi Kusuda, who often worked with Ozu) uses the primary colors of FujiColor not for realism, but for symbolism. The backdrops are painted with deliberate flatness. When Tatsuhei carries Orin on his back, they are not walking through a forest, but through a series of living paintings.

The lighting is pure expressionism. The characters are often isolated by a spotlight against a pitch-black background, as if the village existed in a cosmic void, illuminated only by the flame of their despair. It is a profoundly Brechtian effect: the Verfremdungseffekt (alienation effect) is total. The kuroko who place the basket on Tatsuhei's back, or wave branches to simulate the wind, prevent us from falling into easy sentimentality. They force us to think about the meaning of the ritual, the structure of the legend, rather than passively feel the tragedy.

Yet, paradoxically, this artificial distance amplifies the emotion. The final journey to the mountain is one of the most heartbreaking moments in cinema. As they climb, the set design becomes increasingly abstract, almost monochromatic. They pass through the seasons—a theatrical trick made possible by the moving set—until they reach the desolate summit, a lunar landscape dotted with skeletons and crows. It is the village's Golgotha. Orin's composure as she gives her last instructions to her tearful son (“Don't turn around until you're at the bottom of the valley”) is devastating. And when Tatsuhei, distraught, begins his descent and the snow starts to fall (obviously artificial, yet perfect), the music of Chūji Kinoshita and Matsunosuke Nozawa explodes in a lament that pierces the screen.

Kinoshita dares to end with a meta-cinematic punch in the stomach. After Orin's abandonment and her stoic acceptance of death arriving with the snowflakes, the camera moves away from the summit... and shows us a modern train speeding through that same valley. With a single cut, the director tears us away from the legend and throws us into 1958 Japan. The question he poses is deafening: are we really so different? Have we overcome these brutalities, or have we simply masked them with technology and modern economics? Is Ubasute over, or do we practice it in more “civilized” forms in our nursing homes?

The Ballad of Narayama is a work of almost unbearable formal beauty, an essay on the cruelty of necessity. By rejecting realism, Kinoshita has created the most real nightmare of all, a timeless allegory about the thin veneer of civilization that covers the abyss of our biology. It is proof that artifice, in the hands of a master, is the sharpest tool for engraving truth.