Murder on D Street (1998)

directed by Akio Jissōji

Japan

95 minutes

3.5 stars out of 5

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The murder in Murder on D Street doesn't occur until well over halfway through the film. As with most murder mysteries, following the murder there is an investigation (here conducted by Edogawa Ranpo's detective character Kogoro Akechi, played by erstwhile Yasunori Katō Kyūsaku Shimada, nearly unrecognizable with a goatee), but even this is decentralized from the plot. The murder and subsequent investigation, in fact, feels like it derails the plot; it interrupts what had been a perfectly good sequence of voyeuristic glimpses into the weird little private lives of some somewhat well-off business owners ca. 1927.

Hiroyuki Sanada plays Fukiya, an art forger, who is possibly the closest thing we have to a "protagonist". Fukiya is hired to produce sophisticated forgeries of classic pornographic art prints for Tokiko Sunaga, the wife of a ramen shop owner (Yumi Yoshiyuki) - herself later revealed to have been the model for the original artist. Fukiya, somewhat abruptly, murders his client after she discovers that Fukiya had been sneaking a little too much of himself into the forgeries he was giving her: painting a small mole - his own - onto the faces of the women in the prints. What exactly his motive was, though, I can only assume; we don't, if I'm remembering the film correctly, ever see that Fukiya has discovered that Sunaga has discovered what he's done with the prints (although she has). He simply decides that she has to die.

We're introduced to Akechi, again, well over halfway through, and this is not the smooth, confident Detective Akechi of later adaptations but a disheveled recluse living alone surrounded by stacks of novels in a room he doesn't pay the rent for. The reason for Akechi's seemingly having fallen into a deep depression is not explained by the plot, nor is his springing into action with no trace of his temporary ennui after the murder is committed. It's almost like - and this is about to bring me to my main point about this film - the murder activates him. He becomes a detective again because the plot needs him. Because the viewers need him. The Akechi we see in his dirty rented room is the offscreen, off-page Akechi; he only becomes Akechi when he has something to investigate.

What I took away from this movie was that it was a study of art and literature and how the act of reading something that someone else has written or viewing something that someone else has drawn carries with it an inherent perversion, an inherent voyeurism. The characters in Murder on D Street encounter the fantasies of others within novels and paintings and then replicate them in their own lives: Fukiya becomes the subject of the paintings he's faking, paintings in which Sunaga became the subject of torture scenes from a play that the artist Shundei painted her into. We can read a weird book or watch a weird movie and become aware of the internal lives of others in ways that are not acceptable to demonstrate openly in polite society. So much of Ranpo's work seems to reflect this: intellectual characters with secrets, violating societal norms with each other.

When you watch a Jissōji movie, you kind of know what you're going to get: disorienting camera angles framing nearly every shot, a pervasive and discordant soundtrack even during innocuous scenes, a stance on eroticism where it's almost impossible to tell if the director is condemning or celebrating it, and characters who feel as if they're completely unaware they're fictional. Murder on D Street features an interesting framing device where we occasionally see the set as a paper diorama assembled and moved by someone clearly from contemporary times, rather than the early Showa era where the film is set. Using this device Jissōji reminds us that everything we're seeing is a façade, but he also invites us to be participants. The murder feels unimportant, but everything else is.