The Ballad of Narayama
When “The Ballad of Narayama” (“Narayama
Bushiko”) came up, I invited my wife and son to join me watching a Japanese
anime movie. I was however doubly misled. The cover was cartoonish and the
movie I had found was the 1958 version of the story. When I finally found the
1983 version, it was not anime and most certainly not cozy family fare. “The
Ballad of Narayama” is a very brutal movie and I am glad my son did not get to
watch it.
We are in a small village in a mountainous region
of Japan sometime in the nineteenth century. Life here is hard and always a
hairbreadth away from disaster. Orin (Sumiko Sakamoto) is the matriarch of one
of the families and we follow her through most of a year while she is trying to
prepare for ubasute. In this village (and likely the region) the belief is that
when people turn 70, they must journey to the top of a holy mountain and there
be left to die. Orin seems to long for this to happen despite her good health,
so much that she knocks out some of her teeth to convince her son that she
needs to go to the mountain.
Her
preparations include finding a husband for one of her son and a woman for her
other son to lose his virginity to. She must train her daughter in law all her
household tricks, such as how to catch trout and she must ensure the family
have enough food to survive the next year.
These preparations are secondary though to
the general portrait of life in the village, and this is a portrait that does
not pull any punches. Excess children are killed so not to feed them, we see a
baby emerge in the stream as the snow melts. An entire family, children and
pregnant woman included are culled by being buried alive on the pretext that
they stole food, but really to make the harvest last a full year. Women can be
sold and are therefore valuable and sex seems to be the only marginally
pleasant pastime of these people, which is therefore eagerly practiced. It is a
life very close to nature, at the mercy of nature, really, but a life that also
strips people of their humanity.
In this light, the ubasute of Orin is not
just a religious practice, but both a relief from the pains of life and a means
to avoid being an unproductive burden on the village. These two items are of
course combined as it is an embarrassment and a pain to know you are a useless
extra mouth to feed. Some of the old people refuse to go to the mountain and it
is clear that they live in shame and suffers the scorn of the rest of the
village.
It is a hard and merciless movie. The brutality
brings the points home very effectively, but it also makes it a very
uncomfortable movie to watch. The culling of the family was extremely shocking,
and I had to take a break from the movie at that point. Thankfully I was watching
the movie alone. The production value is very high, and the convincing realism
simply adds to the brutality.
It is only a month since I was in Japan for
my summer vacation and part of it, I actually spent in the very mountains
around Nagano where this was filmed. The thing that stroke me, especially out
there in the mountains, was how few young people there were. Japan has become a
country of old people with fewer and fewer people to support the older
generation. I have no idea if ubasute in any form is still practiced, but I did
get a very clear impression that the old generation does not want to be a
burden, that they continue to work, practically till they drop. Plus eighty-year-olds
driving taxi and carrying around your luggage. Very senior train station staff.
Great-grandparent baristas in coffeeshops treating the customers as if their
grandchildren are visiting. They are wonderful, these old people, but I sense
the sadness of the brutal reality that makes it necessary that they must
continue. On the other hand, it may well be the very fact that they are still
working that makes them youthful enough to do it.
In this strange and somewhat twisted way, “The
Ballad of Narayama” feels relevant today. With not enough resource, there is no
room for unproductive mouths.
“The Ballad of Narayama” won the Palme D’Or
in 1983 and I can see why. This is very much a Cannes movie. I know I should
recommend it, but I do not feel like watching it again.
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