Castle of Sand / Suna no utsuwa (1974)

As in most countries, movies in Japan had often depicted police and criminals. However, the modern police procedural was still a very new idea in the seventies, with Castle of Sand possibly the first Japanese movie to follow a case from the police point of view in a step-by-step investigation process such as might actually have been followed by real policemen. Even within that new approach, the mystery as such is given away to the audience long before it is to the policemen, so the suspense becomes not Whodunit but Why on Earth did he do it?, a question not fully answered even after the arrest. Before we are done, we have another in the long genre of Japanese movies that suggest “no good deed goes unpunished,” for the victim had been killed while trying to convince the killer to visit his ill father.

All this takes 2½ hours in what are in effect three movies woven together – the police investigation of a murder, the killer’s life between the murder and his discovery, and a flashback to the killer’s childhood. Adapted from a novel by Seicho Matsumoto, whose works seemed to bring out the best in Nomura’s film-making, it is one of those movies that ought to be boring and yet is for the most part fascinating.

Tetsuro Tanba as the detective pondering the case

When we say police procedural, we are talking procedure in detail. We see every train ride, every station, every walk or ride to and from the station, almost every interview the detectives go through, including the numerous dead ends just trying to identify the victim. Once his name is known, there are more trips, more interviews, more poring through records that continue until at last a name of a probable killer and a potential motive surfaces.

Since Nomura reveals the killer himself about a third of the way into the movie, it is no spoiler to say that it is a famous composer/conductor Eiryo Waga. But then we knew that before it was revealed because of the casting of Go Kato.

Go Kato

From the moment he is noticed in the background of a bar, certainly by his  similar casually underlined appearance in a second bar, we know he is going to be a major character, if not the killer then the key witness, simply because there is no other reason for the character to be pointed out to us by name or for him to be played by someone like Kato. This is, by the way, one of the best uses of Kato’s persona, his international movie-star face combining with his closed-down emotional expression to give us a genuinely tortured young man who seems to have everything and yet has nothing.

Yasushi Akutagawa provides not only a big-bodied score but also a full piano concerto in the vein of Rachmaninoff for Waga to premier in the final scene.* This is intercut with scenes of Waga’s childhood as he wandered the backroads of Japan in the early forties with his leper father, narrated by the inspector as he explains the results of his investigation to the rest of the  detective team. Because of the music, these flashbacks are almost without dialogue, with the haunting face of Yoshi Kato (no known relation) providing the real emotional power of the movie as he tries to care for his son on the road and then is taken away to hospital, leaving the son behind.

Yoshi Kato

Unlike our contemporary police procedurals, there is no attempt to provide Detective Imanishi with a tortured private life that somehow parallels the case; aside from his penchant for writing poetry, as played by Tetsuro Tanba he is simply a good detective willing to do the slogging grind required by his job and by such a case, even using some of his vacation time to follow a lead.

Much of the solution hinges on family registers, many of which had to be reconstructed after the bombing and fires of 1944-45. This led to much confusion and sometimes to actual fraud, as seen here and in other movies.

Because Tanba travels to many parts of rural Japan and because the flashbacks take the leper and his son through many other rural sites and seasons, the photography gives us some gorgeous scenery that sometimes seems more like travelogue than drama. As often happens in Japanese studio productions, pretty much everyone at hand, no matter how famous, will make a cameo appearance; Ken Ogata as the victim in flashbacks, Kiyoshi Atsumi (already well-established as Tora-san) as a movie theater owner, Shin Saburi as Waga’s future father-in-law, and Chisu Ryu as an old friend of the dead man, plus a passing raft of familiar character actors.

The flashback scenes with father and son are quite moving, but it does take a long time to get to those. We can’t quite call it a suspenseful movie, but at the same time, we can’t really dismiss it simply because it doesn’t look like we expect a police procedural to be. The movie was extremely popular and Japanese critics also regarded it very highly, placing it #2 on Kinema Junpo’s yearly list and at #20 on the 2009 all-time poll. Personally, I don’t think this is even Nomura’s best movie, but then I don’t think Vertigo is Hitchcock’s best even though Sight and Sound‘s critics’ poll now tells me it is the best movie ever made. But one of the pleasures of watching movies from other nations, particularly from Japan, is the recognition that they see things differently there. Even familiar Euro/American film genres become fascinating through their unfamiliarity in Japan.

* As someone who has spent many years in orchestras and watched many, many fake musicians in movies, I was pleasantly surprised to realize that the orchestra was actually playing the music we were hearing, that finger movements and bow strokes actually fit the notes being heard, something very rare in movies. Given the unusual mix of ages and genders among the players (for the date), this may well have been the orchestra Akutagawa himself founded originally with amateurs, though the subtitled credits do not tell us who they were. Kato, of course, does not play the piano part, which is quite difficult and is shown in close-ups of anonymous hands or of Kato’s face with hands blocked by the piano itself, but remarkably, when he is seen conducting, his movements and timing are also as correct as the actions of the instrumentalists, something almost unheard of in movies where stars play conductors who simply wave their arms at random. In addition to the surprise of seeing this unusual level of realism, it also tells us that most of the concert scenes were shot live, that Akutagawa wrote the music before the movie was shot rather than in the week or less normally given to the composer after editing, and that the flashback scenes were shot and edited to fit the pre-existing music, which may explain the great length of the flashbacks.