Word: kobayashi
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...Kobayashi lavishes all his technical skill on making the limited number of scenes expressive of the implied greater whole. In Black Hair, for example, we see the samurai and his second wife together only once, but a scene of the woman slapping her sleeping husband is so constructed that their relationship is defined without ambiguity. The devotion to detail makes individual scenes become stylized pageants. Rhythms between sound and image and contrasts between sets of extraordinarily evocative color photography manipulate our expectations so that we are drawn along in a kind of measured processional...
...KOBAYASHI is looking for something more in his ghost stories than horror. His end is not an emotional recoil through shock but a sensuous participation in the imaginary. He appeals to our fascination not our fears, with the result that he achieves that rare creation, a fantasy without pretension...
...Hoichi the Earless, the third film, is the longest, the most complex and the most successful of the four. The film is in two parts. In the first we hear the recitation of a ballad relating a famous battle between two Japanese dynasties, while on screen Kobayashi fades back and forth between a pictorial representation of the battle and actors performing it. There is an almost faultless synthesis between the haunting of the biwa, the incantatory recitation, and the elaborate pageantry of the image. Kwaidan is reputed to have had one of the highest budgets in Japanese film history...
...hundred years after the battle. He is a blind, self-effacing young man, the only character in the four films who is sufficiently developed to completely win our sympathies. Hoichi is caught between allegiance to the priest he serves and the spirits who summon him to sing each night. Kobayashi permits here the introduction of all manner of implied themes-the autonomy of art, tensions between organized religion and spirituality, illusion us, reality and so on-but these are all carefully subordinated to the thoroughly human struggle in Hoichi. Kobayashi seeks not an intellectual but an emotional response...
INEVITABLY, the last film, In a Cup of Tea, comes as an anti-climax, a problem Kobayashi tries to escape by emphasizing the comic. A palace guard swallows his soul and spends the night chasing teasing apparitions. The film does work as a playful mockery, but we have moved in too many directions in the course of the four films to appreciate it properly. It's almost as though each film succeeds too well on its own terms to allow the diversity Kobayashi wants...