Kokkuri-san/Kokkuri (Takahisa Zeze, Japan, 1997)

The connection between scary ghost girls and teenage girls was established before RINGU: KOKKURI, scripted by Zeze and Kishu Izuchi, is a case in point. Several of the crucial motifs of the teenage-girl thread to the ghost melodramas are already in evidence here. Structured like an art movie, with an elliptical narrative and complex, fragmented flashbacks, KOKKURI deals with the impact of a young ghost girl on a group of high-school girls, Mio (Ayumi Yamatsu), Hiroko (Hiroko Shimada) and Masami (Moe Ishikawa).

Uniquely among the high-school girl films in this book, KOKKURI does not actually show the girls at school. Going to or coming from school, they are frequently in their sailor-suit uniforms, but the school itself is a structured absence – we never even see them do homework. The focal point for the girls is not school, but a late-night radio phone-in aimed at teenage girls, ‘Michiru's Midnight Blue Birds’, which both Hiroko and Masami obsessively listen to.

Mio does not listen to it, because, as Michiru, she presents it. The programme is produced by Mio's older sister Asako (Rika Furukawa), with whom she lives. But Mio has not told her friends that she is Michiru, which is a very strange omission – as if she is afraid the knowledge would disturb their friendship. Although, in an early scene, Hiroko hints that she recognises Mio's voice over the air, this is not alluded to openly.

As Michiru, Mio dispenses sympathetic advice, but she has also constructed a fictitious persona – for example, claiming to lead a sexually adventurous life. Hiroko does not at first admit this, but both she and Masami see Michiru in idealised terms – like an ego-ideal. And so, when Michiru suggests that her listeners play the Kokkuri game, and then send in answers they receive to questions she now asks, the girls enthusiastically take this up.

A traditional form of divination, Kokkuri involves summoning Kokkurisan, an unseen spirit the girls think of as female, through the use of a design similar in layout to a Ouija board. Kokkuri-san's presence is indicated by a delicate wind, and her replies to questions are conveyed, as on a Ouija board, by moving a coin to spell out words, albeit with the same ambiguity over whether those touching the coin deliberately moved it.