Overwrought imagination? (Singapore)

When I was at Raffles aged 17, I went to see a Japanese film with classmate Seok Leng.  As it was around 3 o’clock in the afternoon, we were the only 2 people in the cinema.

The story was set in mediaeval Japan. 

A powerful warlord (I think) had taken a fancy to a blind man’s sister. The warlord’s brother-in-law was worried about his sister’s position being threatened and wanted to remove the blind man. Invited blind man round for a game of Go, the black and white stone board game. 

Go (pronounced “gor”) is “圍 wei2 / to-surround” in Chinese. You win when you’ve surrounded your opponent’s stones, hence 圍.

The baddie removed one of the blind man’s stones (the blind man remembers every move in his head), then when the blind man put in the last stone for completing the surrounding, the baddie said no there’s still a stone missing. Blind man said there was meant to be a stone in that spot — the baddie said, “how dare you accuse me of cheating”, drew his sword and killed him. Dropped the body down a disused well.

The sedan chair went back to the blind man’s house empty. The sister suspected something, but being a woman she couldn’t go to the palace to find out why her brother hadn’t returned.

She went to the temple with a cat, prayed to the gods to help her find out the truth and avenge her brother, then told the cat to drink her blood and do the job for her as cats can climb over walls and enter places a young woman cannot. Then she killed herself. The cat drank her blood so her spirit entered the cat’s body.

The film then has the cat entering the palace and (after doing various things killing some people or something), the cat’s spirit then transfers to the body of the baddie’s sister. She starts to look and behave cat-like: her eyes, her sitting by the koi carp pond, sticking her hand into the water to catch the carp and eating the carp raw.

Seok Leng was getting more and more frightened, covering her eyes with her hands. Then she jumped up and said there was a cat in the cinema. I said, “What’s a cat doing in a cinema?! Your imagination is overworked!” She said she did see a cat. 

After a while, having told Seok Leng she was too wound up by the film, I saw the cat: it was weaving its way between the sections/blocks of seats, appearing in the aisle now and then, which was when Seok Leng saw it: a sort of “now you see it, now you don’t” way, teasing her.

(Singapore), 1971)