Goryeojang (1963) is one of Kim Ki-young's less talked-about films. Perhaps one of the reasons for this relative neglect is that it bears a series of unmistakable resemblances to Kinoshita Keisuke's renowned Japanese film Ballad of Narayama (Narayamabushi-kō, 1958). However, as we shall examine here, the former is anything but a copycat project, riding on the coat-tails of a more internationally successful Japanese film. A comparison of Goryeojang and the two cinematic adaptations of Ballad of Narayama by Kinoshita and Imamura Shōhei (1983) allows for a rare occasion through which we could observe three master filmmakers addressing a common subject matter but taking very different approaches in entirely distinctive historical and cultural contexts, analogous to the way the cinematic adaptations of Shakespeare's Macbeth, by Orson Welles, Roman Polanski, and Kurosawa Akira, are all strikingly distinctive from one another.

Goryeojang is situated in the filmography of Kim Ki-young as following on the heels of his acknowledged masterpiece The Housemaid (Hanyeo, 1960) and The Sea Knows (Hyeonhaetan eun algoitta, 1961), a powerful commentary on the Japanese colonial experience and the problematic (mis-)reckoning of its legacy in the postcolonial era. As Yi Yeon-ho ultimately admits after trying to construct a taxonomy of Kim's cinematic output, it is nearly impossible to find any auteurial coherence in the conventional sense in his films. Yi argues that Kim's works are instead marked by distinctive, aggressive manifestations of thematic, stylistic, and genre-traversing perversity, a sign of their refusal to conform and something especially remarkable under the restrictive and oppressive cultural conditions of the Park Chung Hee dictatorship.

Instead of focusing on the ideological proclivities or political meanings of Goryeojang—Is the film a critique of modernity or capitalism? Is it sufficiently “progressive” or “populist” from the contemporary Korean viewer's point of view?—I would like to present an interpretation of this remarkable cinematic text through an extensive comparison with two Japanese versions of Ballad of Narayama. An avid follower of world cinematic trends as well as a connoisseur of Japanese theater and cinema, Kim Ki-young was clearly aware of Fukazawa Shichirō's (1914–87) novel, Ballad of Narayama, and its 1958 cinematic adaptation, which competed at the Venice International Film Festival and was the official selection for a Japanese entry for the category of Best Foreign Language Film in the thirty-first Academy Awards.