Enter blog entry here As I have already stated in an earlier posting, the central figure of Edo Gothic is the ronin, or masterless samurai, whose lack of status is the key motivational factor in the narrative of violence and vengeance that defines the genre. The archetypical ronin of Edo Gothic has to be Iyemon in ‘The Ghost Story of Yotsuya’, whose desire to regain his lost status leads to the murder of his beautiful but sickly wife, Oiwa, in order to marry Oume, the daughter of a rich Samurai, and by doing so to regain his position in the [Feudal] social order. As such, the loca

  Last time I mentioned the two most archetypical stories, embedded within popular mythology and folklore that are representative of the wronged/suffering woman who is the central character in Edo Gothic. We saw a permutation on the first, that of Oiwa, in my discussion of The Ghost Story of Yotsuya. I argued that her suffering, like the suffering of all female protagonists in Edo Gothic, functions to complete the story within the concept of mono-no-aware as identified by Kawaii in her discussion of Japanese fairy tales. These tales are therefore inherently tragedies, based around tradit

As I mentioned in my last posting, Edo Gothic can be defined in terms of specific character types. The central characters are the deceitful Samurai (often as a ronin, that is a masterless Samurai) and the wronged woman, who suffers at the hands of the male antagonist.  The woman's suffering is key to the genre, and as I suggested is connected to what Kawaii identifies as a key feature in Japanese fairy tales, the sense of 'mono-no-aware', a sense of transitory nature of life and sadness connected to a wider understanding of beauty (or awe), an aesthetic which is completed wh

The term ‘Edo Gothic’ is one that I adopted in my forthcoming book, Introduction to Japanese Horror Film (EUP: 2008) to describe a sub-genre of the Japanese film, which was at its height from the late 1950s until the early 1970s. Key films are Tales of Ugetsu (Ugetsu monogatari, Kenji Mizoguchi: 1953), Ghost Story of Yotsuya (Tokaido Yotsuya kaidan, Nobuo Nakagawa: 1959) and Hellish Love (Seidan botan-dôrô, Chusei Sone: 1972). In my book, I define ‘Edo Gothic’ in the following terms: ‘Edo Gothic films were traditional and tended to reinforce conservati