Space setting: imprisonment

The action is recurrently seen from behind a wall or wooden panels, giving a sensation of imprisonment (i.e. Onimaru whipping Cathy/ Kinu the daughter, seen from behind the yard wall).

The audience is placed as an intruder peering, while vision is impaired by an element in the

foreground. The space is quite oppressive, with walls limiting it, and quite deep, as the main action happens in the background. In many scenes, we have a burning candle in the foreground, while characters are in the back. This may be an influence of Japanese traditional painting, which has similar distribution of space. The oppressive interiors contrast with the open pans of the landscape. Characters are first seen as little figures, but then the camera goes near them. This composition of the frame is very similar to the one used in WH1970 and Abismos.

Framing is equally oppressive in the city, which the two adult protagonists visit instead of invading Thrushcross Grange as children. This location is not a civilized space, but as

unwelcoming and dangerous as the slopes. It is presented in the mist, while some monks

(announcing the end of the world) keep walking across. The villagers look like a bunch of animals.

In a later scene, Onimaru (now a powerful samurai) gets out of the brothel and confronts them, throwing them coins, which they collect. Their behaviour resembles the beggars at the church in Abismos. Instead of being bitten by a dog, Kinu/ Cathy incites Onimaru to steal something to eat.

They are stoned by an angry mob, suspicious of the shamanic family of the mountain. Onimaru shields Kinu with his body and fights the villagers with a stick (he uses it as if it were a sword, prefiguring the one he will have later as a samurai). They cling in an embrace, showing how close they are. They are seen from the interior of the buildings, whose walls seem to entrap them: the wooden windows resemble a jail. This framing is reversed in the interior scenes, where characters inside the house are seen from outside the windows (which serve as barriers), a similar point of view to the one in WH1970.

6.4.2.4.2.1. Nature: the volcano

Similarly to Abismos, all the characters in Onimaru seem to be moved by violent impulses, which are accentuated by the desolate, wild landscape in which the film is set. Brophy describes how characters are positioned as figures, either “within the chiaroscuro interiors of the East/ West mansions” or “the unforgiving volcanic landscape of the Sacred Mountain (also called “fire

mountain”)” like “delicate gestural shapes” (153). Like in the Mexican version, characters seem lost within the huge scenery. This is a dangerous space, full of birds of prey, like the white ones flying around Shino/ Frances’s dead body. For Catania (1999), the aural motif of unseen birds (ravens and owls) is associated to the characters’ doomed fates (31). As a reflection of the landscape, humans also behave like predators. While all the deaths in the hypotext were caused by illness, in this hypertext they are violent killings (except Cathy/ Kinu’s). Shino and Isabella/ Tae are raped before dying (killed in one case, suicide on the other). Like in the hypotext, death is omnipresent and common. It is also an obsessive topic in the films directed by Yoshida (Jauberty; Copperman).

Many Japanese films set in the Muromachi period have the slopes of a volcano as scenery (Collick 39). The sleeping volcanoes in Onimaru, not yet in eruption, recall an idea already present in the setting of both Abismos and Hurlevent: the passions keep burning underneath an apparently calm surface. It is also coherent with Brontë’s setting (remember Skelton 337). The volcano slopes also have associations with the Buddhist warrior Hell, where the dead souls of samurai fight

eternally in a landscape littered with fires and volcanoes (Collick 39). The final sword fight between Onimaru/ Heathcliff and Yoshimaru/ Hareton works as a visual representation of this idea. As we mentioned before, Hindley and Heathcliff’s first fight for power in the hypotext happened because of a horse (WH 80), a fight from which Cathy was excluded. In a similar way, in Onimaru, horses appear as a symbol of power and virility. It is just the men who ride them. Like in WH1992, Onimaru rides a black horse. Old Yamabe/ Mr. Earnshaw arrives back home on his horse, with child Onimaru/ Heathcliff walking next to him. Women do not ride; they walk covered under a lamp screen-veil, probably to protect the skin from the sun.

6.4.2.4.2.2. Music: the sounds of nature

The power of nature in this transposition is evoked through the soundtrack. Music (called hayashi) and dance play a significant role in Noh theatre⁹⁸, while the learning of the utai-bon (the books of Noh songs and chants) was considered an indispensable part of the education of aristocrats (Nakamura 120). If film uses music mirroring the characters’ mind (Cathy’s split mind in WH1939, Cathy the daughter’s tune in WH1992), this is also characteristic of Japanese Noh

98 For information about the use of music and dance in Noh theatre, see Nakamura 223 – 225.

aesthetics. The actors’ entrance music (there are two main types, called shidai and issei) goes to great pains to create an appropriate mood to each play and character (Nakamura 223). The hayashi is chosen to create an image of the character in the mind of the viewer before the curtain is raised to reveal the costumed actor (224). Onimaru’s score (analysed in detail by Brophy) does not employ any of the four typical musical instruments used in Noh (kotsuzumi [small hand drum], otsuzumi [large hand drum], taiko [floor drum], fue [flute]), but conserves the same evocative power. When Cathy/ Kinu reflects on her imposed fate of becoming a vestal virgin (and therefore losing Onimaru/ Heathcliff), the wind (which keeps blowing in the background through the hypertext) sounds mournfully (Catania [1999] 26). Uncommonly for Japanese cinema, Onimaru’s score is performed by an orchestra, together with highly skilled performances of biwa (lute), shakauhachi (flute) or shimasen (guitar) (which sound discordant to a Western ear). The solo instrumentation of traditional Japanese instruments is used “to embody the psychological stature of its characters”:

Onimaru is associated to growling low frequencies (drums, cellos, oboes) and a low shakauhachi [flute]; Kinu is represented by a blend of koto⁹⁹and harp and a high shakauhachi (Brophy 155).

However, the soundtrack in Onimaru is not only related to the human characters, but also to the scenery. The instruments reproduce the sound of nature, with shakauhachi “like whistling kettles”,

“timpani like rolling boulders”, “horns like tuned wood resonance”, which conjure “a spectral being living and breathing” (Brophy 151). Unsurprisingly, Brophy considers this soundtrack “the prime signifier of the Gothic in the film” (152). It is a reversal of the dominant logic of western cinema, as not only the human characters, but the landscapes (“non-human”) are given musical representation (153). This conceptual technique (which Brophy calls a “quasi-spectral

compositional approach”) is typical of much Japanese cinema, where land is “inextricably linked to the psyche” and “spiritual tenets” place the human and the non-human on a coexistent plane of energy. The orchestra sounding “like howling wind” over the outside images of the Sacred Mountain “both simulate wind and invoke the power of this volcano”, while the silence of the mansions’ rooms amplifies the characters’ emptiness. The traditional Japanese paper walls and wooden floorboards allow the sounds of nature outside to filter and flow throughout (154). This score links to the Gothic elements in the hypotext, as the houses and landscape appear as living entities, which reflect their inhabitants.

99 The national instrument of Japan, made of wood, with a set of thirteen strings that are strung over thirteen movable bridges along the width of the instrument.

6.4.2.4.2.3. The two households: Higashi-no-shou (Wuthering Heights) and Nishi-no-shou (Thrusscross Grange)

Iwakami has pointed out that the first translation of Victorian novels into Japanese (made in the late nineteenth century) encountered problems because words such as “home” had no corresponding in Japanese at the time. She explains that, in feudal Japan, there was no idea of

“home”, but only of the household where the patriarch had absolute power over the other

members of the family (95). The continuous samurai swordfights over control of the manors in the hypertext (first embodied by Takamaru Yamabe/ Mr. Earnshaw and then by the other male characters) work as a more violent depiction of the inheritance plot in Brontë’s novel: Cathy the daughter (who cannot inherit because she is a woman) encourages Hareton to claim what is his. In Onimaru, her counterpart Kinu the daughter gives Yoshimaru the sword to fight for his

inheritance.

The Yamabe/ Earnshaws are a shaman family who guard the white snake god shrine, so the villagers prefer to keep their distance from them. In a similar way to the hypotext, this is such a desolate country that the inhabitants of the two mansions have never met, despite using the same graveyard (whose name is Yobutsugatari/ Alley over the Wind) (Collick 41). These two households do not look very dissimilar to one another: Higashi-no-shou (East Mansion) is Wuthering Heights, while Nishi-no-shou (West Mansion) is Thrushcross Grange. Both have the same typically

Japanese architectural style: space horizontally distributed, with sliding panels instead of doors. The portals are seen in frontal view, from a low angle, on top of a hill. At the beginning of the film, old Sato/ Nelly receives a blind biwa-hoshi/ Lockwood¹⁰⁰ at Nishi-no-shou, which is about to collapse because it is old. Like in the patterns of the Western Gothic, the decay of the house reflects the decadence of the inhabitants.

Burch talks about the influence of Japanese traditional architecture on Japanese cinema. As we see in this transposition, space is mainly rectangular, formed by intersecting horizontal and vertical lines (199). There is a predominance of frontal views and long-shots in interiors in the editing. Space is two-dimensional and there is absence of close-ups. As Burch explains, typical Japanese houses are rectangular spaces, practically devoid of furniture, so the unity of the space can be better shown in film by using this deep focus technique (118). This composition of the frame also has its roots in Japanese picture gardens, a traditional painting technique which would try to create the illusion of a three-dimensional space (119). It also resembles Wyler’s democratic point of view: we have an example of this influence in the scene of Onimaru’s return: Onimaru is

100 A biwa is a string instrument, similar to a lute. The player is called biwa-hoshi.

on the foreground, talking to Mitsuhiko/ Edgar, Tae/ Isabella is on the second level, listening, while a sliding panel shows little Kinu the daughter playing in the garden on the background.