Kigeki (aka Comedy) is a 10 minute short from 2002. It is, at this very moment, but a google away, to be found in streaming format all over the place, and with decent quality downloadable versions floating around too. It’s one of those immaculate little slices which is unlikely to change your life, but is well worth a shot. I don’t know how well known this OVA is, but if you have seen it, here’s some thoughts.

The bite of comedy is that puts us in our place, reminds us to laugh at people. It strips away our presumptuous sense of dignity and reveals man as basically absurd. So, in Kigeki, the sinister thin man laughs at mortal foibles and puts himself in a position above us all. He has a dignity and a power mere humans lack. The one human face in this story is the girl narrator, an ignorant but plucky peasant. She’s not, so far as we can tell, the butt of the joke, just the audience to his cannibalistic performance.

Kigeki is giving us comedy as Horror. The fear of finding out that it’s all someone else’s joke. Even if our narrator doesn’t suffer, she gets a glimpse of someone looking down on her world. We humans can only give the shadowy jokers some old book we just don’t get, and be allowed to live at their whim.

I have an idea that the full title of the book is in fact ‘Denny’s Cookbook’. It contains nothing of value. The girl picked it because it looked cool, and it just took the thin man that long to smile at her po-faced faith in his coming aid, and thus sympathise with her plight. Which would be why he only really laughs at the end. Of course, that’s just me, really the book is symbolic.

It’s asserted early on that the book may come from another time. Books were the symbol of power in an age when to speak or laugh was taboo. Those times are gone, and the booklover is a relic. He values only that formal artefact which denies human expression. His words are rare and he laughs alone. He stands for those things beyond and above our crude communications, and he’s a monster.

The hardcover book and the ornate castle give us the sense of meeting an elite. A clean and perfect aristocrat in a mythic locale; into which our heroine is granted entrance after falling unconscious in the depths of the forest. It’s a setting that reflects the exaggeration of power and dignity that comes from looking back on the past – hence the fairytale spires. Specifically, it’s the past we’d see if looking back without history books – a peasant’s idea of the past, unknowable and immense.

And this is set in Ireland? I had initially assumed, amidst the Schubert, that we were in Central Europe (perhaps just because I’d find that more exotic). Not that this is a real engagement with Ireland’s history – the soldiers of England aren’t humanised here, they are simply evil, the masked face of the big human menace. Our main man is something more. Beyond our morality. Something to strike an oblique bargain with, the guy who gets the laugh on even the steelclad monsters of the state.

That dark sense of the past has to be seen in terms of an exoticising Japanese portrayal of Europe. Once again we see Japan falling for the charms of a European mythology. The classical music, the knights. It’s like ninjas in Hollywood films. Visually it’s borderline pastiche, though this doesn’t apply to the storytelling. That naive fairytale narration doesn’t ask that we take the story and its setting as anything but a brief conjuring of feeling.

The demon-man wields his long thin sword with a samurai’s grip, as if that Japanese elitist menace were colouring this re-imagining of the European aristocratic monster. It’s that cross pollination of mystical semi-human menaces which shows the sincerity of Kigeki. It borrows the cool-looking European setting but the core of the horror, of meeting the ancient and empowered man, the man who we fear will always get the last laugh, is really something universal.