The Hidden Ghost Story: Ishiguro, Ugetsu and Troubled English Belief

Anni Shen discusses the motif of Japanese ghosts from a perspective that differs from that of Kato. Whereas Yasujiro Ozu’s and Akira Kurosawa’s impact on Ishiguro’s fiction has been noted in other studies, Shen directs our attention to another contemporary Japanese filmmaker, Kenji Mizoguchi, and his hitherto overlooked influence on Ishiguro. Shen refreshingly reads Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant as a literary work that combines intertextual and stylistic echoes of Mizoguchi’s ghost film Ugetsu Monogatari. She argues that in writing The Buried Giant, Ishiguro does not simply borrow a ghost narrative from Mizoguchi’s Ugetsu but rather decentres Britain’s collective identity and history, which have privileged Christianity over pagan beliefs, by means of integrating an Eastern cosmology underlying Mizoguchi’s film and Asian folklores into his own novel, thereby presenting an alternative way of reconsidering Britain’s national belief.