The ending of The Ballad of Narayama

There’s a hint of the supernatural in the closing scenes of Imamura Shôhei’s 1983 Palme d’Or winner, The Ballad of Narayama, a film for the most part marked by its adherence to a documentary style of realism that feels more akin to the world of David Attenborough. 

After the aged Orin submits to be carried by her dutiful son Tatsuhei to the summit of Mount Narayama to be left to die in accordance with local custom, the landscape is enveloped by a sudden snowstorm – a seemingly divine act of purification that erases the muddy autumnal colour palette and blankets the littered skeletal remains of those who have passed before. 

Circularity is at the heart of a film that begins with snowbound aerial shots of the hostile and craggy uplands in which the story’s denizens eke out the most precarious of existences. Perhaps taking its cue from Earth (1939), Uchida Tomu’s seminal portrait of rural hardship, The Ballad of Narayama is rich with images of fecundity and decay that unfold across the passing seasons as it details the events of Orin’s final year as she tries to settle her family’s affairs.

Fukazawa Shichirô’s 1956 source novella about a remote village community governed by draconian laws to keep its population in check – central to which is the gruesome tradition of abandoning one’s parents to die on the mountaintop when they reach 70 – derived from myth rather than fact. The author drew inspiration from the folktale Obasute-san (a real mountain with this name, which translates as ‘The mountain where old women are discarded’, is located in the Japanese Alps in Nagano Prefecture). 

Kinoshita Keisuke’s 1958 adaptation adopted a heavily stylised mode of representation, drawing from kabuki. In contrast, Imamura’s radically reworked script, which integrates elements from another Fukazawa story, Tohoku no Zummutachi (The Miserable in North-eastern Japan), is shot with the director’s trademark ethnographical eye for detail, the human elements portrayed as very much embedded within a wider ecosystem. In an early scene, Tatsuhei shoots a hare only for it to be snatched away by a swooping falcon. As spring arrives promising new life, the discarded corpse of a baby is unveiled by the melting snow. In this forbidding environment where food is scarce, the delineation between man and beast is blurred – quite literally in the case of Tatsuhei’s younger sibling Risuke, the malodorous village whipping boy who is shunned by the local female populace and who at one point indulges in congress with a neighbour’s dog. Such scenes of grimy alfresco sexual union are depicted with a ribald eye for the absurdity of the human animal and a similar matter-of-fact frankness as the cutaways to frogs, birds of prey, rats and praying mantises copulating with – or devouring – one another. 

The suggestion is that the harsh codes of village law are the defining aspects of human society. Orin’s own self-sacrifice for the greater good is lent added moral complexity by her earlier complicity in the death of her pregnant daughter-in-law Matsuyan; when Orin sends Matsuyan back to the home of her blood relations, the Ayama family, who have been accused of stealing crops, she does so in full knowledge of the deadly vengeance about to be meted out by the community upon the whole of this extended household of thieves. The shocking brutality of this act of mob rule is in keeping with the director’s vision of the amoral pragmatism of this microcosm of the natural order, locked in its necessary state of mutual interdependence. Still, Imamura alludes to the folktale elements of the legend by portending the family’s demise with a god’s eye view of a house snake, the household’s guardian deity, slithering away and abandoning them to their fate.

Superstition plays a crucial role in this society ruled by nativist systems of ancestor worship and the belief that spirit gods reside in everything. It is what lends the final quarter its most powerful moment. After leaving his mother behind on the mountain, Tatsuhei starts to wend his way back to his family home. En route, the strength of his bond with his mother is thrown into relief when he witnesses the fate of another elderly sacrifice, who cowers and caterwauls like a baby before being cast down the rocky slope by his son – something which is sure to haunt this family for many generations to come. Tatsuhei rushes back and calls to his mother, interrupting her private moment of beatitude as she sits silently awaiting her appointment with the legendary Narayama mountain god, only for her to dismissively wave him once more on his way.