``Yatsu Tomb Village'' (1977 edition) What happened in the midst of the Yokomizo boom and Kadokawa films? [That's when movies were born Vol.3 middle part]

The origin of "The Village of Eight Graves" - "The Record of Japanese Grudge"

Tracing the origins of The Village of the Eight Graves with Hashimoto Shinobu, one comes across the screenplay for Nihon Onnenki, written in 1973. This was a project considered by Hashimoto Productions shortly after it was established, and depicts the quarrels and hatred between men and women in the Heian, Muromachi, Sengoku, and modern eras. Although it is an omnibus format, it is assumed that each era will be depicted with the same cast, and the directors considered were either having each episode directed by members of Hashimoto Productions - Hashimoto, Nomura Yoshitaro, Moritani Shiro, and Oyama Katsumi - or having Hashimoto direct all of the episodes. Although it will be a bit long, I will summarize the plot of the modern part of the work here.

Ryosuke, who works as a test driver for an automobile company, has just married Kikuko, the daughter of the company president. He enjoys eating the fried tofu that she serves, so much so that people worry that he may be possessed by a fox. Ryosuke begins to have visions of passing a white fox while driving on the test course. After this happens several times, he begins to see a large fox's face floating up across the entire slope of the course. It is Kikuko, smiling with her fox face. Shaken, he begins to consider divorce. When Ryosuke confides in his company boss about his intention to divorce, he consults with Yasuhira, a design engineer who is close to Ryosuke, and tries to dissuade him from the divorce. However, Yasuhira knows that Ryosuke is in love with a young woman other than his wife.

Without even bringing up the topic of divorce with Kikuko, Ryosuke drives his beloved woman in his test car from Tokyo to Wakasa to meet her parents. However, while driving through a village on the Tanba road from the north of Kyoto to the Sea of Japan, the car falls off a cliff and Ryosuke is killed. Upon hearing the news, Kikuko and Yasuhira rush to the village, but Ryosuke's body is trapped under the steering wheel and they are unable to retrieve his body. Ryosuke's accident occurred on a slope overlooking his hometown. Yasuhira deduces that the accident may have occurred when Ryosuke unconsciously approached the village due to an animal's homing instinct, but Kikuko reveals that Ryosuke was not born in this village and has no relatives. A man who claims to have raised Ryosuke in this village appears and says that 30 years ago, he picked up Ryosuke, an abandoned baby, at this very place where the car fell off the cliff.

Eventually, the car with Ryosuke's body is pulled up the cliff, but suddenly the car starts to shake violently, the doors open, and Ryosuke's body in his racing suit falls vertically to the site of his old grave. After everything is over, Yasuhira and Kikuko are reading the weekly magazine article about the accident while on the Shinkansen train, and they rejoice that everything has gone according to plan. They had plotted to bring the two of them together, and had set up a trap in the test car. Across the aisle, sitting in the seat behind them, Ryosuke is covered in blood and wearing a racing suit. However, he disappears in an instant and turns into a young man in a suit who looks very similar to Ryosuke, and he continues to stare at Kikuko's face in the magazine.

The modern part of "Nihon Onnenki" combines mystery and the occult, depicting the village of his birth, the secret of his birth, and the genealogy of vengeful spirits that continues even after the incident. It can be said to be the prototype of Hashimoto's version of "Mura of the Eight Graves," so if we assume that "Mura of the Eight Graves" was written by reusing the essence of this work, it is not unnatural that it deviated from Yokomizo's original work.

It is generally said that the quality of Hashimoto's work declined after "Mt. Hakkoda" was his final shining moment. If you compare his subsequent works, "The Village of the Eight Graves," "Phantom Lake" (1982), "The Heat Haze of Love," and "The Journey: The Village's Best Hanging Tree" (1986), it is not hard to understand what he is trying to say. In particular, in "Phantom Lake," which he also directed and which is still often ridiculed as a cult film, the heroine, a prostitute searching for the killer of her beloved dog, finally finds the culprit and settles the matter at the end of a spectacular Lake Biwa marathon showdown. At that moment, the legendary editing that changes to a space shuttle launch scene astonished the audience so much that it is said to have surpassed the famous montage in "2001: A Space Odyssey" (1968) in which a thrown bone is replaced by an artificial satellite, and the film shows a strange deviation throughout the film.

However, Hashimoto also presents a similar perspective in "Mt. Hakkoda," which depicts a snowy mountain disaster in the Meiji era. The proposal for the film, written by Hashimoto in 1974, begins with the opening line, "In April 1961, Major Gagarin shouted loudly from the Soviet Vostok 1, which had just left the Earth. (The Earth is blue!) This was the beginning of the space age." After a lengthy discussion of the universe and the soul, the story of Mt. Hakkoda finally appears. As can be seen from the aforementioned "Tetsuwan" and "Nihon Onnenki," Hashimoto's perspective makes extraordinary leaps in time and space, and "Maboroshi no ko" is the culmination of this. In the preliminary script for the film, there are statements that suggest the director was deliberately committing the crime, such as "I want to make a thoroughly absurd story" and "Even if there are some flaws (omitted) I want to pursue something eternal," which shows that this is not some kind of mutant strange work.

Similarly, "The Village of the Eight Graves" is a story that would have been easier to set in the past, but because Hashimoto wrote the script, occult elements were added, and by deliberately setting it in the present day, it can be seen as an attempt to dock it with the writing style that Hashimoto has cultivated.

The Village of Eight Graves actually exists