The Ballad of Narayama (1958)

By John A. Riley.  Keisuke Kinoshita’s colorful elegy The Ballad of Narayama deals with ubasute, the apparently apocryphal Japanese practice of abandoning elderly relatives to the elements, and about which many legends exist. In a village in the Shinano mountains, where food is scarce, we are introduced to Orin, an […]