La freccia e il cerchio
anno 4, numero 4, 2013
pp. 146-148

Giorgio Amitrano
Japanese Visions:
Viewing the Mirror through the Mask

   Following the urgent call of one image that kept haunting my memory, I have long searched for a film I watched as a child, whose title or director’s name I could not recall. The only thing I knew for sure was that the film was Japanese. What kept leading me back to that image, in an obsessive way, was the fear it caused me, a fear that renewed itself at any given memory, inexhaustible source of charm and dismay. A woman was unable to take off the demon’s mask glued to her face. When the mask eventually broke, the face, up to that moment kept hidden, appeared disfigured and covered in blood.
   In our digital years my research would have been faster. Today, merely by entering the key words “mask”, “film”, “Japan” and “demon” on a search engine, I would soon find out about the movie. But those were analogical times, so I managed to get an answer only years later, when I recognised a photograph in a book on Japanese cinema. This is how I learned that the title of the film was Onibaba and Shindō Kaneto the name of its director. In time, I even managed to watch the film, and I finally came to reposition around the original nucleus of horror all the other elements my memory had not retained. The story was set in 14th century Japan, a period of civil wars, and portrayed a type of mankind that hunger and hardships had turned brutish. Shindō had been Mizoguchi’s assistant for years, but in Onibaba he distances himself from his master’s elegant descriptions, in order to show a world ruled by primitive violence.
   Two women, mother and daughter-in-law, live on killing and preying on passing samurai. One day a man who survived the war informs them that the son of the elderly woman, and husband of the younger one, has died. When the man settles in the women’s neighbourhood, their little world falls apart. As the man and the young woman become lovers, the elderly one is overwhelmed with jealousy, afraid that she will soon lose support from the daughter-in-law and be forced to fight for survival all alone. In order to punish the young woman, the mother-in-law wears a mask torn from the face of a samurai she has killed, and, using the terrifying mask, ambushes her. However, the mask sticks to the face of the woman who, unable to take it off, confesses the truth to her daughter-in-law and begs for help. The young woman, failing to tear the mask off with her hands, takes a hammer and hits the old woman’s face with violence. Here comes the image that got imprinted in my memory. When the mask breaks in two, the emerging face is bleeding and ravaged by leprosy: an even more terrifying mask than the one which covered it.
   The whole sequence is highly dramatic and scary (in cinema repertories Onibaba is often quoted as “horror movie”), and the most distressing moment is when the mask breaks and reveals the existence of yet “another mask”. This is when an unexpected vertigo is produced, a sudden loss of sense of reality, which enriches fear with an even more unsettling form of bewilderment. If a mask hides another mask, the fracture that reveals the existence of a new mask could generate an infinite chain of identical images. Such images are similar to reflections between parallel mirrors: a vortex in which the true identity of a person is sucked up and lost forever.
   The mirror is an object that features in Japanese literature since its beginning, but prospective mirrors are the sign of a typically modern sort of disquiet. In his story The Mummy, Nakajima Atsushi uses this image with effects similar to those I found in Onibaba. The protagonist, a Persian officer, during the invasion of Egypt by Cambyses, seems to recognise in an Egyptian mummy his body in a former life. The feeling of déjà vu is followed by a vision of himself in a past life, while, standing in front of the mummy, he tries to recall his former reincarnations. Here his vision doubles into another one, and soon the soldier finds himself contemplating a vertiginous abyss, where each image unfolds disclosing the one hidden underneath.

Would that repetition of memories, multiplying to infinity — like two mirrors facing each other–, continue to duplicate in a never-ending vortex?

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