Ugetsu.

I just watched the film Ugetsu for the first time in many years, as part of my Mizoguchi retrospective, and found it just as great as I remembered (starring both Machiko Kyō and Kinuyo Tanaka — the only such film, as far as I know, although Tanaka later directed Kyō in The Wandering Princess). As every schoolboy knows, it’s based on Ugetsu Monogatari, “a collection of nine supernatural tales first published in 1776”; Wikipedia explains the title thus: The word Ugetsu is a compound word; u (雨) means “rain”, while getsu (月) translates to “moon”. It derives from a passage in the book’s preface describing “a night with a misty moon after the rains”, and references a Noh play, also called Ugetsu, which also employs the common contemporary symbols of rain and moon. These images evoked the supernatural and mysterious in East Asian literature; Qu You’s Mudan Deng Ji (Chinese: 牡丹燈記; a story from Jiandeng Xinhua, one of Ueda’s major sources), indicates that a rainy night or a morning moon may…

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