Zero Focus / Zero no shoten (1961)

Yoshiko Kugo

One week after her marriage, a young wife sees her new husband off on the train, supposedly to wrap up business at a branch office of his ad agency before moving permanently to Tokyo. He never returns and she sets out to find him. Before she’s done, she uncovers a web of secrets and murder in a small town.

Such a plot is hardly rare in European and American films, though even there it is relatively  unusual for the “detective” to be a woman. More often, the woman hires a Philip Marlowe to do the search. Even so, I don’t recall another Japanese movie with either a man or a woman tracking down a missing relative before this date, certainly not one this well made.  Yoshitaro Nomura’s best movies usually involved the revelation of a secret, but few were as moody and brooding as this one. Even the final reveal scene is played on top of  a seaside cliff with waves crashing below rather than in the more traditional room full of suspects. This sense of foreboding is underlined by a superb score from Yasushi Akutagawa, known primarily for his films with Ichikawa, that could hold its head high in any Hitchcockian film.

Set primarily in Kanazawa on the western coast, Zero Focus stays in black & white to increase the sense of darkness at the core of the mysterious disappearance. It is the kind of movie that can’t be summarized, since part of its pleasure comes from the gradual revelation of the truth. When you begin to watch it, you almost automatically think of Hitchcock, but Hitchcock manipulated his audience and set up suspense by placing his principals in peril. That is not the goal of Nomura or of Seicho Matsumoto, whose novel was the basis of the movie. The young wife here is not in peril, even on the cliffside. Though there are enough plot twists for three imitations of a Hitchcock movie, the movie is really about something else entirely.

The secrets the wife (Yoshiko Kuga) discovers all can be traced back to the Occupation and to the past of two women the husband meets in Kanazawa whom it is eventually revealed he first knew when he was a policeman in Tokyo in 1950. Both women are ashamed of the past and desperate to hide it. Ironically, no one else seems to much care once it is revealed, but it has haunted both women for years, even though they have made new lives far away from Tokyo, and their fear and shame leads to murder and suicide. We seem to have reached the time when everyone wants to forget the recent past, or pretend that it never happened at all.

This attention to character and the effects of the past on the present rather than the puzzle was something of a new idea in Japanese crime fiction, usually accredited to Matsumoto’s works in the mid-fifties. He has been compared by people more knowledgeable than me to Simenon and there is that kind of feel to this particular example. It certainly was something that attracted Nomura, who filmed over a dozen of Matsumoto’s works. As often happens with mysteries, the one who asks the  questions remains the most mysterious. The characters who reveal themselves as we watch are the other two women, Hizuru Takachiro and Ineko Arima,

Hizuru Takachiro

Ineko Arima

while Kuga simply remains the exterior of the Yoshiko Kuga we have known for a decade without much hint of the emotional young woman she could play.

One of the oddities of the film itself is that after Kugo solves the mystery, she gets the right killer but all the wrong circumstances. For those looking only for a suspense movie, this is something of a letdown.  The killer does not try to justify herself or to claim it all started with an accident; she wants only to set the record straight, to explain how things really happened. This desire for complete detail seriously harms Nomura’s serial killer Scarlet Camellia, but also serves to make Stakeout a fascinating film. I think it adds an important layer to the story here, but those who want the story to end when the killer is exposed will find it an unnecessary epilogue.

A young woman marrying a man about whom she knows nothing is hardly unknown in English literature and films (think Rebecca), but somehow it seems a surprise in a world of arranged marriages. As Americans, we tend to think of such marriages as forced marriages, where one or both are pressured or even ordered into a marriage to unite lands or businesses or to bring in an heir through marriage to the boss’s daughter, or simply to make sure that one or both of them doesn’t marry someone far beneath them socially.  But where there is force, there is knowledge of the partner’s background, if not necessarily of their true personality. Here, it is clear that no one is forcing either person into the marriage, but at the same time neither family actually knows anything about the other. The marriage is arranged by a go-between, as we have seen in many films, but they have only the go-between’s word that each prospective spouse is a good choice. For Kugo’s family, the criteria appear to be only that he have a good job and not be so old or ugly that Kugo will reject him as she has previously done to other prospects. His criteria are never mentioned. Only after the husband goes missing does Kugo and her family start asking about his family, his past, or his work before his current job, or even if he is already married. (As it happens, he is, though the police call this a “common-law marriage”* in the subtitles. Nevertheless, you’d think the go-between at least would want to check something that significant. After all, his brother knew about the other marriage before the “real” marriage was celebrated).

A sidelight on the difference between Hollywood and Tokyo is that one of the characters commits suicide by driving her big American car off a cliff into the ocean. Here, this is done off screen and reported in voice-over. No Hollywood film-maker would or could have resisted showing the drive and the shot of the car flying over the edge (usually with an inexplicable explosion in mid-air). Is it cultural reticence? Or is it just that the film’s budget didn’t stretch to wrecking a car, especially an expensive American import?

All in all, this is the type of Japanese movie that is both fascinating and frustrating to watch. It keeps looking as if it will be a mystery-thriller, a form well known throughout the world, but somehow manages to never quite fit into that pattern. And as in so many Japanese movies we have seen about contemporary society, there seems to be a whole other movie going on under the surface.

(Post revised 6/12/19)

• * I assume this means that he is living with her as his wife but has never actually listed her in the town’s family register. (The main character of Imamura’s Intentions of Murder is a wife who discovers she is not on the family register and spends a good part of the movie trying to get that changed so she can be sure of keeping her son.)