![]() ![]() Hearn had long made a journalistic career of exploring the cultural geography of wherever he happened to be posted, and the final chapter of his life in Japan coincided with an emergence of Western interest in the remote nation’s aesthetics. The ghost stories (and entomological essays) of ‘Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things’ represented part of Hearn’s dispatches from Meiji-era Japan, where the Greek-born, UK-raised, America-based writer settled in 1890, marrying a local woman, fathering four children, and becoming a naturalised citizen (and Buddhist) before his death in 1904. ![]() This credit sequence (intercut with cast and crew names typewritten on quality paper, as though a book) serves multiple functions: it marks director Masaki Kobayashi’s transition from the monochrome of his previous work to a striking use of Eastmancolor’s full palette its admixture of different, clashing colours foreshadows the film’s merger of the material and spirit worlds and, most of all, it points to the film’s literary origins, being adapted by screenwriter Yoko Mizuki from a collection of short stories by Lafcadio Hearn. Kwaidan opens with ink: first black ink swirling in clear liquid (on a white background), and then vortices of different colours, eddying and mixing into rich chromatic layers. ![]()
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