The Mystery of Rampo

I’m lucky enough, I guess, to have been a fan of the film’s core inspiration: the life and works of Edogawa Rampo, the man who was to 20th-century Japan what Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and (to a fair degree) Stephen King were and are to modern English-speaking audiences. One of his chief inspirations was Edgar Allan Poe, from whom he (rather cheekily) derived his pen name but also the other man’s nose for human frailty and foibles, and he wrote voluminously in Japan for decades without his work ever receiving much attention elsewhere. I devoured the only two editions of his work currently available in English (Japanese Tales of Mystery and Imagination and Black Lizard), along with other films that drew on his work for inspiration (Rampo Noir), and wanted more. And now I can add Mystery of Rampo to that list, which adds wonderfully to the man’s legacy without being redundant or insulting (as was the case, sadly, with the lamentable Blind Beast vs. Killer Dwarf).

Rampo’s also one of those movies that’s notoriously hard to describe. It is not a biography except in the sense that it uses some of the bare circumstances of Rampo’s career for inspiration. It’s best thought of as a meditation on Rampo’s works, employing references to his stories and their themes—and ultimately the man himself—to conjure up the mood they create and also to dwell on their implications. What does it mean to be someone who is persistently fascinated by human evil, who fashions it into popular entertainments and then finds himself drowning in the very thing he made into his métier?

Not that Rampo (veteran actor Naoto Takenata, also seen in another Rampo adaptation, Gemini) is thinking explicitly about any of these issues at the start of the film. He’s just fallen victim to the censors of a militaristic Taisho-era (pre-WWII) Japan, who have denied him permission to publish his novel Enter Otose. It’s a mystery, as many of his stories were most broadly classified, but almost guaranteed to be banned thanks to generous helpings of decadent sexuality and amorality. The plot of the novel concerns a woman who may or may not have suffocated her ailing husband in a memorabilia chest; in one of the movie’s many fanciful touches, the plot of the book is re-enacted for us in a gorgeous animated segment that opens the film proper.

Rampo’s problems aren’t limited to government Comstockery; he feels downright unwelcome in his own life. At a posh reception for a film based on one of his stories, he takes the stage to deliver a speech and is almost completely ignored. The film itself inspires nothing but loathing in him. He’s most comfortable when holed up in his study with his endless shelves of books, pen skipping across the paper, writing about the kinds of profligacy he would rather not experience personally. And then one day his editor waves a newspaper clipping under his nose about a woman, Shizuko (Michiko Hada) who killed her husband in precisely the manner described in his unpublished book. Has she broken free from the confines of his fiction and entered the real world, or is something else even weirder happening?

Against his better judgment, Rampo visits Shizuko, and discovers a melancholy woman with a great hunger for companionship—or at least, that’s what he wants to see. He shunts aside the other mental images he has of her smothering her husband to death and presses on to learn more about her. In secret he sends her the manuscript of his unpublished novel, and from there the two grow progressively more obsessed with each other. Or, rather, he grows that much more obsessed with her, and soon finds himself sliding in and out of a story he’s writing involving her and his longtime protagonist Detective Kogoro Akechi.

Many of the characters in Rampo’s own stories are exposed to dreadful things and then have to grapple with their own ambivalent feelings about it—murderers who are hounded by guilt, or “innocent” people who are not really that innocent and who discover this when they mistakenly dip their toe into dark waters. There’s scarcely a scene in Rampo where the characters aren’t being wrung dry for those feelings. At one point Rampo (in the guise of Akechi) spies on Shizuko being seduced by another of his own characters while a pornographic movie is projected across both of their bodies, and it serves nicely as an encapsulation of the movie’s approach as a whole. For all of his mining of the more perverse sides of human behavior, Rampo has been least aware of his own propensities for such things. If all of these characters are him, then he no longer has the luxury of distancing himself from his impulses through his fiction.

Rampo had a strange production history, the details of which I originally came across in Thomas Weisser’s Japanese Cinema: Essential Handbook. Producer Kazuyoshi Okuyama (probably best known for bankrolling Takeshi Kitano’s earlier films—Violent Cop, Boiling Point, Sonatine) hired noted television director Rintaro Mayuzumi to complete the film, but when Okuyama saw the finished result he was unimpressed and shelved it for almost two years. Mayuzumi launched a legal battle to get the film released, and in the meantime, Okuyama turned the movie into a pet project of his. He ended up reshooting nearly half the film from scratch (among the new scenes was the show-business party near the beginning), re-editing the rest, adding in the more surreal touches and the opening animated sequence (directed by Yasuhiro Nagura*), and commissioning a new musical score. Mayuzumi was ultimately able to get his version shown in theaters, but it folded quickly and as far as I know isn’t even available in video in Japan itself. Okuyama’s version—released just in time to commemorate Rampo’s 100th birthday in Japan—is the one most commonly seen, and apparently the obsession Okuyama brought to the project filtered into the movie in a wholly constructive way.

* Both the IMDB’s “Alternate Versions” note for Rampo and Weisser’s book say “Nagura” (I’m assuming the IMDB material was derived from the book itself). There is no “Yasuhiro Nagura” listed in the IMDB itself, but there is a Yasuhiro Nakura, an animation director who has worked on a number of other memorably surreal and beautiful films. His credits include Osamu Tezuka’s Metropolis, Tenshi no Tamago, Night on the Galactic Railroad, The Girl who Leapt through Time, Castle in the Sky and the almost totally-unseen animated version of The Tale of Genji, the mere soundtrack for which has changed hands for over a thousand dollars a copy.