Week 3 Kwaidan Stories

This week’s reading was interesting to me because I have never read Asian supernatural narratives before. I ended up reading all of the recommended short stores. After reading them and watching the movie I noticed that they don’t really focus on evil like many other horror books and films, they focus more on morals. In the short stories they only hurt the character if they did not keep their promise, if they don’t keep their promise something and will happen to them.  I didn’t notice any murdering or hurting others just because like most scary films and stories. In the movie I wouldn’t consider the woman of the snow to be evil because she only killed that man because he would die anyways from old age and being too cold in the snow. She was very set on morals and she held Minokichi to his promise to never speak of that evening she killed the man. Minokichi of course did not keep his promise so she ended up leaving him after having 10 years with him. The worst part of it all was that she left her kids whom I think in a lot of ways made her out to be a terrible person. While I was watching this I did consider her kind of evil until I sat down and thought about the moral of the story and why she acted the way she did.

I didn’t expect to enjoy this weeks reading as much as I did, I had never thought about reading anything like this before. The film was really interesting too, I would like to finish watching the entire movie to see how her character progresses, as (evil) as some would say.  Our version of horror or gothic is defiantly different; we have a different way of expressing it through our films and books. We focus more on it being scary instead of it having a moral story. I rarely find a scary movie with a huge background and moral story background within the film. I would be interested in reading more Asian super natural stories in the future.