Kuroneko

In this film, a Japanese ghost story from 1968, a pertinent question is asked. What if the evil cat-demons you, as a samurai, have been commissioned to kill are in fact your late wife and mother? Furthermore - this being the case - to what extent are they still your late wife and mother? As the hero at one point puts it - 'Are you my mother or are you a cat?'  What to do? If only Dear Deidre was around then. As it is, the answer served up by the film is this: sleep repeatedly with the wife, but hack off one of Mum's arms. Then - the problem being essentially insoluble - lie down to die and let the falling snow cover your body.

The film has some striking scenes, but at other times is rather stiff and stagey (the influence of the Noh plays, according to the notes handily supplied by the BFI). I saw it book-ended by the heads of two (perhaps it's fair to say excessively tall) people sitting right in front of me. They didn't obscure the subtitles, but I still felt that my experience was slightly diminished.  It isn't really fair to resent people for having heads, yet this is the position I found myself in. Was it too much to hope that the heads would detach themselves from their bodies and fly away, as is the wont of some demons' heads in Japanese folklore?

In Rokuro Kubi, from Lafcadio Hearn's Oriental Ghost Stories (as recently read in the very affordable Wordsworth edition) a wandering priest finds the heads of the family who have put him up for the night 'flitting around' in a nearby grove, 'eating worms and insects'. Sad to say, nothing like this has yet happened to me, but if it does you'll be the first to know.