Takemitsu's Wuthering Heights

Not so many people know that the great Japanese composer Tōru Takemitsu (1930-1996) is one of the composers that have translated the Brontë words to musical notes. Probably eclipsed in the Brontëites memories by the soundtrack that another notorious Japanese composer, Ryuchi Sakamoto, made for the 1992 film version of Wuthering Heights, the soundtrack of Arashi Ga Oka (aka Onimaru) is not as well known as it deserves.

Arashi Ga Oka is a film directed by Kiju Yoshida in 1988 freely adapting Emily Brontë's novel.

In medieval Japan, Onimaru, a young vagabond is adopted by the Yamabé family, priests responsible for assuaging the anger of the Mountain of Fire. But Onimaru disrupts the hierarchies and the challenges the region's secular rites. He falls in love with Kinu, the Yamabé's daughter, who marries the inheritor of the families rival to escape her destiny as a priestess. Torn apart by his thwarted passion, Onimaru becomes the Lord of the Mountain in order to win back his beloved. But Kinu dies and from that moment on Onimaru plunges into a cruelty which is only equalled by the love he still feels for the deceased.

The music of Tôru Takemitsu is described like this in the recently published (in the US) book, The Haunted Weather: Music, Silence and Memory by David Toop:

In Onimaru, Kiju Yoshida's melodramatic 1988 version of Wuthering Heights, Takemitsu begins with shakuhachi, strings and lush brass voicings reminiscent of Gil Evans: wind and the scream of rats and crows sweep them away: as the narrative plunges deeper into inhuman misery, so the score narrows its scope to a metereological rumble, interspersed with sparse koto, solo shakuhachi or electronically treated alto flutes, often falling silent in deference to a threnodic moaning landscape of wind, water and haunted birds. Even the horses seem to be mouthpieces for demon tongues.

You can find more information about the film and, particularly, the score in this interesting article by Phillip Brody published in Japanese Horror Cinema, Edinburgh University Press.

By the way, in 2003 the Japanese singer Chihiro Onitsuka released a song named Arashi Ga Oka in her album Beautiful Fighter. Although we suppose it is also inspired by Emily Brontë it's not related with the 1988 film.

Categories: Music, Wuthering_Heights, Movies-DVD-TV