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Consider the Dies Irae. Eight dire notes to remind you that you are going to die. This musical phrase from a 13th-century plainchant about Judgment Day booms famously over the opening helicopter shot in The Shining. Versions of the melody appear in everything from The Seventh Seal to various installments of the Friday the 13th series. It’s a peculiarly Christian concept—death, dressed in a finishing spice of judgment, turns out to be an appetizer, and the best or worst is yet to come. It’s a peculiarly Western slice of music—a rational melody inches slowly downward, giving birth to the original earworm. But there are other musical ways of capturing death—one involves silence, and another chaos. Japanese composer Toru Takemitsu uses both in a trio of ghost stories made for different directors, evolving an unnerving aesthetic that culminates in the 1978 masterpiece Empire of Passion.
Takemitsu, one of the 20th century’s most important composers of concert music, moonlighted as a writer and a film composer. It would be difficult to imagine the Japanese New Wave of the 1950s and ’60s without him. A rabid film fan, he composed music for nearly 100 pictures, preferring to work with challenging directors like Masahiro Shinoda, Hiroshi Teshigahara, and Masaki Kobayashi. Though his name isn’t generally associated with horror, Takemitsu was responsible for scoring a few standouts in the genre. He collaborated with Teshigahara on four screen adaptations of Kobo Abe novels, three of which—Woman in the Dunes (1964), The Face of Another (1966), and The Ruined Map (1968)—qualify as existential or identity horror, while the first—Pitfall (1962)—is an unsentimental ghost story. Comparing Pitfall’s soundtrack with those of two succeeding ghost stories—Kwaidan (1964) and Empire of Passion—highlights the restless invention of a composer whose haunting soundscapes were a result of experiments with Western and Eastern musical styles.
Takemitsu initially foreswore traditional Japanese music, responding in part to the role his country played in World War II, and instead studied Western music, moved particularly by the modernist work of Olivier Messiaen. His escape from Japan drove him further into the European avant-garde of the ’50s: he began to experiment with musique concrète, creating new rhythms and harmonic effects by first recording and then manipulating everyday sounds like temple bells, birdsong, and dripping water. This electronic treatment of sound for radio programs sowed the seeds for later film experiments like Kwaidan, which blurs the line between score and sound design. But the real turning point for Takemitsu came in the early 1960s when he experienced Jon Kēji shokku (“John Cage shock”), a term coined to describe the effect that the American composer’s work, deeply influenced by Japanese music and Zen philosophy, had on Japanese composers. It was a roundabout way of coming home.
Takemitsu began to musically explore the Japanese concept of ma, a word that translates as “space” or “emptiness” but carries a sense of “silence,” meaning the space between individual sounds. The Western tradition of music has a way of wrestling silence into submission—a glance at any typical orchestral score reveals how silence is yoked to melody, compressed into brief control-freak “rests” that sit like bricks on the staff. Endless melody and harmony blend orchestral instruments in a beautiful way that nonetheless makes it difficult to appreciate distinct voices. Takemitsu chose instead to highlight the timbre of individual instruments, using silence to draw out vivid tone colors, to often sinister effect in his films.
Pitfall was one of the earliest films to bear the fruit of Takemitsu’s breakthrough. In a ghost story relying more on an uncanny sense of dread than actual scares, the hero investigates his own death after dying in the first act. Takemitsu creates suspense in the murder scene with the sound of a prepared piano (an old John Cage favorite), a piano whose sound has been altered by placing objects like screws and erasers between its strings. As the killer stalks our hero into the tall grass, we hear irregular, percussive rhythms from the piano, accelerating like a single clunky engine, then culminating in a massive dissonant chord as a knife is thrust into the hero’s belly. Intervals of silence heighten the suspense and allow each tone enough time to fully decay, while the unpredictable timbre of the piano as the hammer strikes its muffled strings provokes a sense of unease.
Director Masaki Kobayashi gave Takemitsu a free hand in scoring Kwaidan, an anthology of four ghost stories, after their shared success with Harakiri (1962), a samurai period piece featuring Japanese traditional instruments. That musical choice seems obvious in hindsight but was revolutionary at the time (for comparison, the 1950 score to Kurosawa’s Rashomon, another period piece, sounds a lot like Ravel’s Boléro). Takemitsu took his traditional instrumentation further in Kwaidan when he put the biwa (a Japanese four-stringed lute) in the hands of soon-to-be-earless Hoichi, who plays it while chanting a war story to a court of ghosts and the dead child emperor Antoku. As the story is staged on-screen, the normal sound of the biwa succumbs to a wash of noh chanting, electronically treated (as in the composer’s earlier musique concrète experiments) so that it draws the viewer along with Hoichi into a hypnotic, spectral space. In the earlier tale of yuki-onna (the “snow woman”), Takemitsu slows down the music of a shakuhachi (a Japanese end-blown flute made of bamboo) until it sounds like wind wailing across the snow.
Takemitsu’s most disorienting effect in Kwaidan is his use of asynchronous sound. In one climactic scene, a samurai stumbles through his ruined home, haunted by his dead wife. The diegetic track is muted and replaced with the processed sound effects of wood being chopped. Silence looms in the way it did in Pitfall, but here the effect is one of uncanniness rather than suspense. There is a sense that the action on-screen might be the source of the jarring cracks of sound, but the timing is off. Who’s making this noise? Is it the ghost within the confines of the story, or is the film itself haunted? Death, otherwise known as silence, seeps into life, and the weird sounds that Takemitsu creates only reinforce its unfathomable presence. The notion of death-in-life is one that the composer would take to its chaotic psychological extreme in his final ghost story.
In one of his essays, Takemitsu says that he was attracted to Nagisa Oshima’s films because he was a director who could see “death in living reality.” Empire of Passion is a culmination of work from two artists who depict outsiders going against an oppressive world and suffering death—first social, then physical—as a consequence. Set in a small mountain village in 1895, the story concerns Seki and Toyoji, two lovers who conspire to kill Seki’s husband and toss him down a well. The action unfolds with the doomed noir inevitability of The Postman Always Rings Twice, but in this case the drunk husband returns from the dead. The world closes in on Seki and Toyoji as they face gossiping villagers, disdainful landowners, incompetent investigators, and their own guilty consciences, along with a ghost who is as pitying as he is accusatory.
Takemitsu captures the chaos that surrounds the lovers by blending Western and Eastern musical styles. “We have to do him in,” says Toyoji, introducing the murder idea to Seki as they sit by the fire. Cue the soft horns and strings—so humdrum is this music we could be watching an episode of Columbo. But then music creeps in from another world—rumbling woodwinds, tone clusters in the strings, and tumbling bits of tuned percussion. Takemitsu even uses a custom-made waterphone—or that’s what it looks like in Charlotte Zwerin’s documentary Music for the Movies: Toru Takemitsu (1994)—a resonating instrument whose steel rods, when bowed or struck, produce a blood-curdling sound that will be familiar to anyone who has seen Poltergeist or The Amityville Horror. Against this eerie sonic backdrop, a single moment of beauty: Toyoji tells Seki that he can’t live without her and the shakuhachi plays a shrill, heartrending melody. To my ear, it sounds like the “Hell’s Picture Scroll” theme, a motif Takemitsu uses seven years later in the castle raid scene from Ran (in an uncharacteristic but gorgeous “Mahlerian score” demanded by director Akira Kurosawa). This single moment of beauty amid chaos captures the miracle of the film: the passion of Seki and Toyoji will survive until the tragic end.
The climax of Empire of Passion takes place in the mud at the bottom of a well. A ghost drops autumn leaves and blades of grass from above on the two lovers, who are digging desperately to recover the corpse, to move it and escape detection. In a moment that would make Lucio Fulci weep for joy, two blades of grass pierce Seki’s eyeballs and blind her. There is no music, and no sound but Seki’s screams. Takemitsu once famously vowed to dedicate his life to choosing sound as something to confront the silence: “That sound should be a single, strong sound.” Sometimes, the sound with the most meaning is a single scream that blossoms, lingers, and then decays. 🩸
a writer living outside Philadelphia, is currently working on a horror project set in western Pennsylvania. He co-wrote the movie Anamorph, starring Willem Dafoe.
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