Personally, I expected the stories in Kwaidan to instill fear into my spine, to make me recoil away from the pages. There were times where I thought some of the stories were leading up to that, but then was kind of let down by how... Tame the scare was.
I actually found myself comparing the stories in the Kwaidan to a short horror manga I'd read over the summer and the differences were pretty interesting. Sure, they're not the same medium, once is visual and contemporary while the other is far older and only has the written word to rely on, but I liked how different the mood was in both of them (at least to me. Maybe others found the stories in the Kwaidan more bone chilling than I did?). The Manga is called The Enigma of Amigara Fault by the way, and revolves around the story of a fault in the earth suddenly appearing one day with thousands of human shaped holes carved in the sides. The fault draws hundreds of people to the spot and the crowds grow larger and larger every day, but people are also disappearing (some of them claiming that is a hole that is specifically for them, though they can't explain the feeling). You should give it a read, it's pretty spooky.
Click the picture to go to the Manga
The Kwaidan was good, don't get me wrong. I really enjoyed reading the stories in it. Each and every one was so varied and different from the last. I was interested to see how the stories evolved over time and just what kinds of subjects they would cover and I wasn't disappointed in that aspect. Ghosts, demons, suicide, people without faces, reincarnation... Wow. It was a lot to take in and while I wasn't able to read the Kwaidan cover to cover, I'd like to go back and finish it sometime in the future.
I had two favorites in the Kwaidan were "The Story of Mimi-Nashi-Mōïchi" and "A Dead Secret". I was genuinely surprised by how the blind bishi player had his ears ripped off and managed to sit there as still as he did. I thought the twist that the was playing for a bunch of ghosts was really nice, and the language of the story felt pretty peaceful, as if there were nothing wrong. We were lulled into a false sense of security.
In "A Dead Secret" we had the typical tale of a woman, O-Sono, who died and came back to haunt her family every night after that. As it usually plays out in horror media, everybody is afraid of her, believing that the only time a ghost comes back from the grave to walk amongst the living, it's with evil intent and surely they must be cures. Really thought, this one had more of a happy ending, with O-Sono just wanting to clean out some of the secrets she'd been harboring for years (love letters from when she was studying in Kyōto) so that her family won't think any less of her.
Western horror rarely has those types of happy endings. The ghost is almost always malignant, cursing any family who dares to live in their house. The spirits may seem to have good intentions to begin with but there is always an ulterior motive just below the surface. When we watch a Western horror, we assume that the ghosts are evil and something bad is going to happen, and we are pretty much always right.
P.S. I watched The Audition with a friend of mine and he pointed out to me that the movie seemed familiar to him and pulled up a music video for one of my favorite bands, so I thought I'd link it here. It's pretty much a shot for shot of scenes from The Audition:
ENJOY!
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