Kaibyô nazo no shamisen

Seijiro is a shamisen player for a kabuki troupe (a shamisen being a type of stringed instrument). He is engaged to Mitsue, a sociopathic actress. Seijiro's kindly behaviour towards his cat seems to prove good karma when the cat (Kuro) brings home Okiyo, a kindly and beautiful lady from a higher caste, with whom he forms a friendship. For this gesture the cat is murdered by Mitsue. Movies with ghost cats are apparently a genre in Japan, the only one I had previously been aware of is Kaneto Shindo's Kuroneko, but this is an early example

A number of scenes feature subsequent hauntings by the cat's ghost. The special effects in these moments unfortunately come across as fairly ludicrous. The ending of the movie revolves around a kabuki performance that's fairly unintelligible to a modern audience and some frankly pretty unwatchable action/horror scenes.

All that said though, I felt that the movie was very beautiful at points and was rather elegantly framed and shot. I think what I love about black and white cinema is busy frames full of detail, and the contrast of light and shadow in these busy frames. This movie, especially in the first half, is quite voluptuous and ornate, and shows a very idealised form of Japanese life, it's easy to sense that the Japanese are a people who turned living into an art form.

Sumiko Suzuki is a performer, who grows jealous of her shamisen-playing lover. They believes he is paying too much attention to aristocratic Kinue Utagawa, who rescued his cat. So she kills the car and Miss Utagawa disappears. Then, however, eerie things happen. When she plays the shamisen, lights go out, and she sees a bakeneko a malign spirit in the shape of a cat; a ghostly Miss Utagawa also appears. As she. Grows more erratic, people begin to take notice and come to some vengeful conclusions.

My reading indicates there was a spurt of horror movies that began around 1936, and Miss Suzuki was a leading actress in many of them. About 1940, Japanese censorship began to crack down on the genre.... although many of the elements were incorporated into children's fantasy stories. Like many horror movies, this requires some familiarity with the surrounding legend. However Kiyohiko Ushihara plays nicely with the lighting and optical effects to achieve a sense of weirdness. Perhaps he was associated too much with the disfavored genre. His directorial career, which had been going since 1921, was slowing down. This was his last movie until he made another in 1949, and then no more. He died in 1985, aged 88.