Revisiting the Tale of Obasute in the Japanese Imagination

In 1983, Japanese director Imamura Shôhei's film The Ballad of Narayama (Narayama bushikô1) gained international recognition by winning the Palme d'Or prize at the Cannes Film Festival. The film was based on a well-known Japanese novel of the same name, written by Fukasawa Shichirô in 1956,2 depicting a rural village where an elderly woman, Orin, stoically prepares to make her final journey to a sacred mountaintop where she will await death, after the village custom. The earthy realism of the film's portrayal of the harsh world of the farming village both shocked and touched critics (Kehr, 1997: 85-86; Lardeau, 1997: 157-158; Tesson, 1997: 159-163). Imamura's film was not, however, the first to adapt Fukasawa's novel for the screen. Earlier, in 1958, Kinoshita Keisuke had also directed a film3 based on the same novel, in a very different style which incorporated elements of traditional Japanese theatre.