Ayakashi is an anthology of, as the title would suggest, classic Japanese horror tales. So strap yourselves in and get ready for a slice of period spookiness.
Specifically, across its 11 episode run, Ayakashi covers three stories: “Tenshu Monogatari”, “Yotsuya Kaidan”, and “Bakeneko”. The last of these is notable because it gives Ayakashi its dubious claim to fame: technically being the predecessor to the show Mononoke, which is often regarded as one of the all-time greats, but is beyond the scope of this review.
The first section is Yotsuya Kaidan, and is something of your traditional ghost story, though framed as being told by a playwright who felt as though he was possessed in order to produce a play of the story.
It begins, as most good ghost stories do, with a sordid tale of murders, mostly centering around a ronin named Iemon Tamiya. It starts with him killing the father of the pregnant wife he’s separated from on account of said father’s objections, which would be bad enough. He hides this, gets with his wife, and goes about his business as a conspirator of his does similarly with a romantic rival and said rival’s girl. Iemon does plenty of thug sorts of things, but the next step in getting a vengeful ghost involves the wife’s poisoning – not by Iemon, per say, but the poisoners are a rich man who sent “medicine” for the wife and his daughter, who wants Iemon for herself.
This ends up being an offer Iemon can’t refuse. On one hand, his wife will be horribly disfigured even if she survives. On another, the old man offers his family’s riches if Iemon will take his daughter. On a third, the daughter threatens to kill herself if she can’t be with her man.
Not that Iemon seems terribly broken up about this whole thing. He goes home, treats his ruined wife like trash, and arranges her death (not that it goes off as he meant), getting married to wife #2 that same night. She moves in pretty much as soon as the body is cleaned up, but wouldn’t you know it, somebody earned a little vengeance from beyond the grave.
When life gives you Iemons, get mad!
She makes him see his new family as his enemies, which of course raises the body count. And the curse is only getting started. Misfortune follows one of Iemon’s conspirators, bringing him and his wife (the sister of Iemon’s wife) to death and setting one more mortal avenger on Iemon’s trail as he tries to outrun fate.
He doesn’t get far, retreating to a familial home where his father and last co-conspirator are killed despite abandoning him, his mother is devoured by curse rats, and Iemon himself is finally killed by that revenge-seeker before himself being eaten to nothing by rats.
It then returns to the frame story where it’s revealed that the play as well appears to be cursed, with many of the staff of its production dying very shortly after its run, even long after the writer/narrator’s death (as he speaks to the audience to explain) making it a Japanese version of The Scottish Play. This even persists to the modern day, and the show uses some real life photography to sell the idea.
The ultimate twist is this: the Oiwa who curses the play and its performances is not any historical person, but the character, cursing the writer who was the true architect of her misfortunes, the curse given power by the audiences who desire such a sordid tale.
I’ve got to admit, it’s a pretty brilliant little twist to add some spice to a basic ghost revenge. But, from there, we move into Tenshu Monogatari, a very different tale.
Said second section involves a haunted castle. We’re introduced to it when a pack of bandits try to make the night there and, in typical horror fashion, discover that being disrespectful horndogs can be a… draining experience.
After they all get axed, we move to the proper story, with a falconer working for a local lord having the special bird he was flying drawn to the haunted castle. He doesn’t go right away, but instead ends up dealing around it and encountering one of the castle haunts outside of her natural habitat. We learn the rules pretty quickly: these haunts are “Forgotten gods” (which differ from generic evil spirits and other supernatural beings). They need to eat human flesh to maintain their strength and power, and become mortal if they fall in love with humans.
Naturally, the Princess of the Forgotten Gods, against the advice of her attendants, seems quite taken with the falconer, sparing him in their first encounter and then seeking him out again. She even steals a kiss, which seems to start the process of changing her nature of being. A couple of other spirits who tried to interrupt the falconer’s encounter explain to him what she was after she runs off from that.
Well, the falconer’s lord sends him back to the castle on pain of death should he fail to return with the falcon. This results in him (and the spirits from earlier, who decided to help) getting captured. The princess frees them, but she can’t give the bird back because it’s the remnant of her mother, who fell for a human, was abandoned by him, and died a mortal.
Resolving this issue, the two of them end up getting together and fleeing to a neighboring domain. This greatly displeases the falconer’s human girlfriend. It also displeases the old lady Forgotten God who had acted as the princess’s chief advisor. Thus, their elopement ends up brief, and they are soon dragged back to the castle and the falconer returned to the human world. There he marries said human girlfriend, but all is not well as she finds a trinket of the princess and convinces the still terrible local lord to go attack the castle, while the pair of spirits inform the falconer that the Forgotten Gods have been rendered mortal and are likely to fall.
This prompts him to declare himself dead to the world and ride off the the castle before the army is fully mustered. He gives himself over to the princess, but of course there’s a whole army on the way that he seemingly failed to mention as part of his motive for returning.
The battle ends up a mutual slaughter. In it, the wife comes to save the falconer, does so, and then loses it trying to attack the princess. Falconer himself loses his humanity, and he, the princess, and the falcon are the only ones left at the end, from either side, as crimson flowers rain over the battlefield. Finally, the spirit duo is seen picking through the wreckage of the burned and collapsed castle, and sees three white birds flying above, suggesting the family of forgotten god and former human might be together in a new form.
Honestly, while I see how it fits with the others, this story is less of a horror tale. Other than the little introduction where some bandits die horribly in a way very reminiscent of horror archetypes, it’s more of a classic myth arc, and a lot of focus is put on the relationship between god and human, and what that means for the lovers. There’s not really a spooky or oppressive atmosphere, and I think it’s placed in the middle to act as something of a breather. It’s also the most straightforward of the stories, lacking the meta-fictional twist of Yotsuya Kaidan
On to Bakeneko
So, you’re likely to notice right away that the art style for this one shifts. The first two stories mostly like the early-mid 2000s offering that they are. They’re not poorly animated, not at all, and there’s a certain charm to some of the style and technique that they use that has since fallen out of favor. But if you scroll up and take a look at the stills, they’re really not anything different than what you would expect.
Now take a look at Bakeneko
The entire story is drawn like this. It’s a watercolor painting come to life, with idiosyncratic characters and a profusion of dutch angles that combine with the storytelling and ambiance to create a deeply uncomfortable atmosphere before anything evil has actually happened.
Everything about Bakeneko feels different. It approaches visuals differently. It approaches dialogue differently. It outright seems like it’s cut from an entirely different cloth than the other eight episodes of Ayakashi. I would say it feels older, perhaps? The characters speak more naturally, rather than reciting dialogue with purpose, and as much is conveyed in what’s not said as what is. You tend to see these techniques in older pieces of visual media. For instance, if you watch both the 1995 Ghost in the Shell and the 2017 American version, there are some similar scenes, but the 1995 one is a great deal more quiet and leaves more to implication. You see the same thing in much older Hollywood movies, compared to more modern ones, though in that case the turnover in what you generally expect probably falls a good deal earlier.
But what about the content?
Bakeneko, you might expect, would concern a cat monster of the same name, but that wouldn’t be obvious until the end of the first episode of three. Instead, it concerns a mysterious medicine seller, who comes to an aristocratic household on the day of its young lady’s intended wedding, only for the woman to be struck dead in a mysterious fashion.
The household members hold the shifty guy, but then evil things keep happening, with some sort of invisible force attacking and ultimately being revealed to have killed one of the servants. The medicine seller slips his bonds and does some magic, setting up ofuda seals to ward out the hostile presence. He explains that this invisible threat, yowling and shaking the house as it tries itself against the barrier, is a Mononoke, and in order to exorcise it he’ll need to learn its Form, its Truth, and its Reason. And a close encounter has provided the form, that of the monster cat. Learning the rest, however, requires delving into the family’s sordid history and enduring a psychedelic feline hell.
After many lies and half-truths, a cat demon rampage, and most of the responsible adults going insane and trying to kill each other, we finally get the true story pretty much from the Bakeneko itself, how the now-old lord of the house abducted and abused a village girl, whose only friend and reason for living was a cat that escaped when she was ultimately beaten to death, which has now come back for justified terrible revenge against the household. This knowledge lets the medicine seller unsheath his sword and take on his photo negative self to have a kaleidoscopic final battle with the creature. Defeating the spirit and laying what’s ultimately just an ancient cat to rest. In the aftermath, the house is ruined and the two vaguely helpful and likable members are resolved to depart, leaving the old man to his madness and the Medicine Seller to witness the girl and her cat, as spirits, departing to a better place.
Thus ends Bakeneko, and with it Ayakashi.
I don’t want to say too much about Mononoke here. That’s a topic for somewhere later down the road (no, not next week). But I do think it’s kind of sad that Ayakashi doesn’t have any real manner of recognition on its own merits.
All three stories had their highlights, and did interesting things. The most basic, Tenshu Monogatari, is delightfully mythic in its nature. It feels legitimately timeless and big despite being only four episodes to chronicle the decline and fall of the Forgotten Gods and the love between mortal and divine. It has its elements of basic moralistic ghost story, but also some delightful complexities. I enjoyed how the falconer’s human wife was portrayed, and how his ultimate slide into something that was no longer human lead both to grief and ultimately as close to a happy ending as could be had. Yotsuya Kaidan of course seems even more basic at first, but then deploys a rather brilliant twist that uses an otherwise unobtrusive frame story to totally recontextualize everything that’s been shown. And then there’s Bakeneko.
Having not really done a post-script on Bakeneko yet, let me come out and say that it’s easy to see why this material is so memorable. To be honest, there are a lot of ways in which the animation is cheap. It’s flat colors, for the most part, and relies heavily on mysterious swirls, fades, screen-shakes, and other tricks to avoid showing tricky movement that’s too difficult to animate. They know where to spend effort, what has to be clean and clear to see to look good… but they don’t have all the effort in the world to spend. The result, however, is mesmerizing, and a perfect example of how clever artistry can do more with less.
To the story, Bakeneko is told more strangely, but it still has the same ghost story heart of Yotsuya Kaidan, with something evil happening because someone or something was terribly wronged in the past. In this case, though, we have a paranormal investigator type, here to save the day or at least lay the spirit to rest, whether or not its behavior is deserved. The conceit of needing to know the full story in order to actually defeat the monster is a clever one, forcing things to come out and treating it as a ghostly phenomenon rather than just a beast. What could have been a basic survival horror bit is massively elevated by pure style and cunning substance.
Thus, Ayakashi as a whole is this 3-for-1 pack of period tales that, while not uniformly horror, do veer into the dark and spooky. While I’ve called Tenshu Monogatari the most basic, I do think that it’s actually Yotsuya Kaidan that’s the weakest viewing experience, which means that determines the floor of my judgment. And Yotsuya Kaidan was still perfectly serviceable, or really a little north of there. When Tenshu Monogarari is good and Bakeneko is clever and unique, I feel like that pulls the grade for Ayakashi as a whole up to a very respectable B+. If you’re in the mood for some spooky shorts, I’d seek Ayakashi out and give it a watch.