★Strawberrie★

Today was day of the Japanese Film Fest for the Spring semester at Marshall University. As always they started off with a horror film. The horror film this time was Kwaidan, I advise you not to watch it. Its over two hours long and the film was a little more humerous and boring rather than scary. The film is broken up into four stories: Black Hair, The Woman of the Snow, Hoichi the Earless, and In a Cup of Tea. The first story is basically about a man who left his first wife for a better life but in the end he regrets his actions and later returns to her at the end of the segment. The horror factor about it is when he wakes up the next day and finds he is sleepy next to his dead ex-wife. The one thing left is her silky hair and keeps attacking him.

The second segment (The Woman of the Snow) was more of a sad story rather than horror. The story starts out with two men and later on Yuki (the snow woman) kills him. However she leaves the youngest one (later in the story we find out he was 18 at the time) alive as long as he don’t tell a single soul about that night. Later in the story a young girl is traveling to Edo and the main character (sorry forgot the name) bumps into her. Okay he has a obsession with her feet… all he does is stare at her feet when she was cleaning them and his mother keeps on talking. In the end they fall in love, get married, and have 3 children. One night he tells her about the woman she reminds him and finds out she is the YUKI. She leaves him alive because of the children and walks away from him for the rest of his left.

The third segment Hoichi the Earless is mainly about a young blind man who the spirits called to play some Japanese instrument to them and recit an old battle. The priest later figures out where is going and writes the holy scipt all over his body but forgot to put it on his ears. When the spirit arrives and wonder why Hoichi is not answering him all he sees is ears and decides to take them to his master to prove this is all left of Hoichi. In the end Hoichi loses his ears and continues to play for the spirits.

The fourth and final segment is basically about drinking a spirit. It was quite short (thankfully) and I believe that it was a man who was writing the story drank the spirit because in the end he became the spirit in the water.

Today I meet with my Japanese conversation partner. I feel weird mainly because he’s a graduate student and I felt that I annoyed him when I couldn’t say the dialogue correctly. We now decided to meet on Wednesdays since we’re both free on that time but hopefully our student-tutor relationship is a little bit more comfortable