Masahiro Shinoda’s Demon Pond (Yashagaike) is a lavish 1979 production that made a splash for the Shochiku Studio but has gone largely unseen since its theatrical release. Criterion now offers a 2021 restoration produced by Shochiku for its centenary, and it marks the film’s digital debut in the West.
Still alive at 93, Shinoda is among the most important filmmakers who came to the fore during Japan’s New Wave of the 1960s. As film scholar Dudley Andrew explains in a bonus segment on the Blu-ray, Demon Pond belongs to a later series of films indebted to traditional Japanese theatrical styles, presenting them without apology in terms of cinematic artifice.
The opening credits of Demon Pond introduce us to Yamasawa (Tsutomu Yamazaki), a scholarly, hunched-over figure wearing western attire. We first see him on a wooden train, looking paradoxically modern and quaint, rattling along with his nose in a botany book. Later, he walks across a swaying bridge and soon arrives in a parched desert area of cracked ground. Oddly, a western-looking baby doll lies on the ground in the middle of nowhere; a doll prop will appear later in the plot.
Andrews points out that this opening journey of Demon Pond symbolizes the crossing from the real world into a fantastic world, especially the bridge symbolism. Nevertheless, even the opening scenes on the train have a faintly unreal quality. Masahiro Shinoda would be aware of the use of trains in Japanese fantasy, such as Kenji Miyazawa’s classic fantasy novel Night on the Galactic Railroad (Ginga Tetsudō no Yoru, 1927).
When Yamasawa finds himself in a mountain village in a green forest, it appears deserted. The first people he sees are in a funeral procession, their faces painted white. He’ll learn that they’re moaning about a two-year drought. He quenches his thirst at a stream and bathes his eyes in it during a twilight of extravagantly false colors. Since the source is the demon pond, a famous lake on the border between two regions, perhaps the water allows him to see the supernatural.
These opening elements are clear signs that Demon Pond takes place in an Expressionist, symbolic, unreal world, a world channeling traditional Kabuki theatre. We’re told it’s 1913, the year of Kyoka Izumi’s original play. While Masahiro Shinoda’s film steers largely clear of politics of the Taisho Era’s modernization or any forecasts of the military movement of the following Showa Era, contrasts are presented between the villagers’ traditional superstitions and the western-dressed elite, especially the hypocritical Diet Member whose arrival is greeted so fulsomely.
Now that Yamasawa has bathed his eyes, he abruptly comes upon a woman seen only from the back at first. He thinks there’s something odd or supernatural about her. She is Yuri, a double for Princess Shirayuki, the pond’s dragon princess, who is bound by an oath not to flood the village as long as the great Buddhist bell is struck thrice daily. Both female characters are played by Tamasaburo Bando, Japan’s most celebrated onnagata of modern times. That is, he’s a male actor who specializes in female roles.
Yuri lives with her husband, an outsider who came to collect old legends and decided to stay and ring the bell. He’s Akira Hagiwara (Go Kato), coincidentally an old friend of Yamasawa, “like a brother.” Yuri is alarmed that the visitor will steal her husband back to the modern city, and Yamasawa intends to do so as soon as he recognizes Akira and decides his old buddy must be under a spell. While one or two characters hint that Yuri is supernatural, which would channel another famous legend about a snake woman, Demon Pond doesn’t commit itself in that direction.
Meanwhile, there’s the world of supernatural creatures called yokai, various animal spirits in elaborate makeup and costumes attending to the Princess and her ethereal entourage. These are presented frankly in theatrical style, mixing the fantastical with comic relief. They reinforce the legend that the Princess cannot leave, no matter how much she wishes to, as long as the bell keeps its end of the bargain, and even though she doesn’t care about the humans, those “monkeys without tails”.
The drama of Demon Pond boils down to whether Akira will abandon Yuri or whether their love can withstand the social forces that will try to tear them apart. It may count as a spoiler to know that the climax is a colossal explosion of miniature and matte effects that may serve as a historical metaphor for Japan’s future. A bonus segment discusses how the effects were achieved.
The in-your-face theatrical and cinematic artifice of Masahiro Shinoda’s Demon Pond is matched by an in-your-ear artifice in terms of obviously electronic music by Isao Tomita, very much in late 1970s Moog synthesizer mode. One of the score’s oddities is how these bloops and bleeps are made to channel well-known European pieces by Modest Mussorgsky (especially Night on Bald Mountain) and Claude Debussy, thus literally synthesizing traditional Japanese theatre and folklore with both classical European and cutting-edge musical strands.
Since Western cinema and theatre, at least in recent centuries, don’t have the straight-faced tradition of cross-dressed actors taken for granted in some Asian traditions, centering Demon Pond on Bando’s dual roles may give Western viewers a cross-cultural charge unanticipated in Japan. Still, Andrews states that the closeup panoramic kiss between Yuri and Akira would have been noticed even in its native country. That’s one of the ways it’s possible to read a transgressive subtext into the doomed lovers, a point linking Demon Pond to Masahiro Shinoda’s most famous film, the also theatrical Double Suicide (1969).
Shinoda and his star, Bando, supervised the digital transfer of the 4K restoration, and it looks and sounds up to Criterion’s criteria. Since Shinoda is among the many great directors underserved on Region 1 discs, we hope this restoration foretells its own new wave.
See also this clip from Demon Pond on Criterion.