Ugetsu Monogatari has been widely acclaimed as a masterpiece of the Japanese cinema since the moment in 1952 when its director, Kenji Mizoguchi, won a Silver Lion award for the film at the Venice Festival. Western audiences immediately recognized the pictorial beauty of Ugetsu and the lyrical power of Mizoguchi's camera movements, but most viewers have found the film's narrative elements puzzling and unsettling. Ugetsu seems to move between two radically...