NOTE: The below Blu-ray captures were taken directly from the Blu-ray disc.

ADDITION: Radiance Blu-ray (September 2026): Radiance have transferred Kon Ichikawa's The Inugami Family to Blu-ray. Radiance rendered The Inugami Family to a dual-layered Blu-ray with a very high bitrate, in its original 1.5:1 aspect ratio, sourced from the 4K digital restoration Kadokawa carried out in 2021. The restoration was managed by Imagica Entertainment Media Services, with consultation from KON Pro and Chizuko Osada, Ichikawa's longtime editor, and cooperation from the Japan Foundation. Osada's involvement matters. This is a film whose look was always carefully engineered, and the restoration has the feel of one supervised by someone who knew what it was supposed to look like. The result is excellent. Kiyoshi Hasegawa's deliberately narrow, autumnal palette of browns, ochres, faded golds and dense blacks is reproduced with a restraint that resists any temptation to brighten or modernize it. The film still looks like 1976, which is exactly right. Grain is intact, fine and organic, heavier in the low-light interiors of the Inugami house as it should be, and the generous bitrate handles it without strain, with no sign of the waxy smoothing that ruins so many Japanese restorations of this period. Black levels are deep and stable. In the scenes where Hasegawa lets a room sink slowly into darkness, the gradations hold and shadow detail doesn't crush into mud. The shifts in visual register come through distinctly: the harsh, high-contrast monochrome of the witness reconstructions, the soft tinted flashbacks, and the flash-frame inserts. The gray-blue lake exteriors look cold and flat, as intended, and the unnatural white of Sukekiyo's mask is as disturbing as ever. The Mincho-type credits are razor sharp. There is no damage of note. Detail in faces, fabrics and the dark wood of the house is a clear step up from any previous edition, contrast is faithful, and the image has real depth in Ichikawa's receding tatami compositions. Like the label's other releases, this is a superb 1080P presentation, and it does full justice to Kadokawa's restoration.

NOTE: We have added 82 more large resolution Blu-ray captures (in lossless PNG format) for DVDBeaver Patrons HERE

On their Blu-ray, Radiance use a DTS-HD Master 1.0 mono track (24-bit) in the original Japanese language. It's a clean, well-balanced track that serves the film's sound design, which is built on punctuation and silence rather than spectacle. Dialogue is clear and consistent, from Koji Ishizaka's mild, faintly comic murmur to the controlled ferocity of Mieko Takamine's delivery. The quiet passages in the house carry the small sounds Ichikawa uses so effectively, like footsteps on tatami, sliding screens, rain and wind across the lake, and there's no intrusive hiss to spoil them. Yuji Ohno's (Proof of the Man, and known for his work on Lupin the Third,) score is the track's glory, and it sounds wonderful here. The famous "Love Theme" swells with good range and warmth for a mono source, strings and keyboards full-bodied without distortion. The sharp, short stings that accompany Ichikawa's shocks land with real bite. The koto cues, carrying extra weight given the heirloom's role in the story, are crisp. Radiance offer optional English subtitles on their Region FREE Blu-ray.

The Radiance Blu-ray has assembled a generous package, and it approaches the film from several complementary angles. The new supplement is a 23-minute interview with film scholar Aaron Gerow (author of Visions of Japanese Modernity: Articulations of Cinema, Nation, and Spectatorship, 1895-1925,) filmed exclusively for Radiance in May 2026, on the game-changing impact The Inugami Family had on the Japanese film industry. Gerow is one of the best English-language authorities on Japanese cinema, and he's ideal for explaining how Haruki Kadokawa, a publishing outsider, used the film to break the studios' grip and launch the media-mix model of cross-promoted books, films and music. The centerpiece is Secrets of Kon Ichikawa's Visual Style, a 44-minute archival documentary produced in 2023 by Ichikawa's biographer Yuuki Mori (Films of Kon Ichikawa, 1994), in which the director discusses his career and his famous visual style in great detail. Anyone interested in Ichikawa should treat it as essential viewing, and it's accompanied by 8 minutes of outtakes combining making-of material with more of the Ichikawa interview. Next is a 1/2-hour retrospective making-of documentary produced for the Japanese Blu-ray release, with interviews with Ichikawa, Koji Ishizaka and editor Chizuko Osada (47 Ronin, The Burmese Harp, The Makioka Sisters). Osada's contributions are especially welcome given her close collaboration with Ichikawa and her role in the restoration. Ishizaka gets a 1/4 hour archival interview of his own, discussing his portrayal of Kosuke Kindaichi and his return to the role in the many murder mysteries that followed. A dozen-minute featurette shows the 4K restoration process carried out by the Kadokawa Corporation, with useful context for the image quality. The theatrical trailer and teaser round out the disc. The package includes a reversible sleeve (see below) with original and newly commissioned artwork by Time Tomorrow and a limited edition booklet with new writing by Yuka Kimbara. This is a limited edition of 3000 copies in full-height Scanavo packaging with a removable OBI strip that leaves the case free of certificates and markings.

Kon Ichikawa's The Inugami Family has the most conventional of propositions: a dead patriarch, a poisoned will, an isolated lakeside mansion full of heirs who hate each other, and a detective summoned to watch them die one by one. Yokomizo built the novel on the frame of the Golden Age English mystery. He loved Agatha Christie and John Dickson Carr, and the resemblance to The Hound of the Baskervilles has been pointed out often enough. A studio journeyman could have filmed it as a handsome, efficient puzzle. Ichikawa films it as though the puzzle were the least interesting thing about it, and that turns out to be the right decision, because the mystery on the page covers something older and uglier than who inherits the silk fortune. What sits under it is lineage. Sahei Inugami built his empire through appetite and ruthlessness. His three daughters are the children of three different mistresses he never married, and he loathed all of them. The will is his last act of cruelty: the fortune goes to Tamayo, an outsider, on condition that she marry one of his three grandsons. The style is what makes the film singular. Ichikawa trained as an animator before he became a director, and he cuts The Inugami Family with a graphic artist's impatience. Scenes are broken by bursts of still frames, single images that punch into the action for a fraction of a second: a face, a hand, a corpse, the lake. Koji Ishizaka's Kindaichi is a deliberate anti-hero among detectives: rumpled, scratching his head in a shower of dandruff, cheerful, perpetually underestimated by the police and by the family. He is closer to Columbo than to Holmes, a man whose shabbiness is part of the method. Commercially, The Inugami Family is remembered as the start of the Kadokawa era, the first feature from an outsider producer who broke the studios' hold on Japanese film by marketing books, films and music as one product. But its survival as a film has nothing to do with the business model. Ichikawa took a pulp mystery and made it into a portrait of a family, and by extension a nation, defined by what it inherited from a monstrous past. Radiance's Blu-ray is outstanding. Kadokawa's 4K restoration, supervised with input from Ichikawa's editor, respects the film's grainy, autumnal 1970s look. The uncompressed mono gives Ohno's music its full due, and the supplements cover the film's industrial significance, Ichikawa's visual method, and the production itself in real depth. At 3000 copies it won't last long. Our highest recommendation.

Gary Tooze