Most Terrible Time in My Life / Waga jinsei saiaku no toki (1993)

I first saw The Most Terrible Time in My Life about thirty years ago as part of an Asian Film Festival long before its official American release and years before I knew anything about Japanese films outside of the art house circuit and sixties chanbara. I thought at the time it was entertaining and a bit oddball but missed its mark as a parody or homage to the hard-boiled private detective genre. Now with a second viewing, I realize I was thinking of the wrong hard-boiled detectives. Despite the main character being called Maiku Hama, it is an homage not to the American detective movie but to the borderless action movies of the late fifties and early sixties.

Maiku Hama, which he continually insists is his real name, is hired to find the brother of a Taiwanese immigrant waiter. This leads him into the middle of a war between two Yokohama gangs, one from Taipei, the other from Hong Kong, because the missing man was a hitman for one of the gangs. Hama finds the man but it turns out that all he has done is set the man up for assassination by his own brother.

As such, it contains a lot of references that I still don’t get, since I passed lightly through the borderless action movies, but there are many pleasures to be found in addition to the mystery. One of these is the appearance of a character called Jo Shishido, played by Jo Shishido (a joke I’m sorry to admit I did not get in 1993), who is Hama’s sensei and who beats him up to try to get him to leave the case alone for his own good. Like any cool detective, Hama drives around in an American convertible, but it is a Nash Metropolitan, about the least cool car ever driven on screen. His office is in a movie theater, where his clients have to buy a ticket to the movie before the little old lady at the door will let them in. The theater is showing The Best Years of Our Lives, which then flips over to become the title of our movie.

Hama loses a pinkie not under yakuza orders but in a fight where it is accidentally sliced off, then has to be rescued before a dog eats it, and when sewn back on will not bend. Thus, he spends much of the movie wearing the standard yakuza bandage on his hand but with one finger sticking out rather than missing, and one of the running jokes is the number and size of the bandages he sports in the course of the film.

Like so many of Nikkatsu’s borderless action B features, it is in black and white widescreen, and there are specific references that I can spot to Suzuki’s and Ishii’s rail yard scenes in particular. His occasional partner is a cab driver who changes hats as he changes jobs to be an investigator or safe-cracker or just drinking buddy.

The theater has a gigantic Cinemascope sign on its front indicating the late fifties. Like any good Sun Tribe young man, he often travels around in his Hawaiian shirt, or in a wide lapel suit with the wide tie and a pork-pie straw hat of the mid fifties. The hitman’s wife wears those crinoline skirts so common in the fifties. The Nash company went out of business by the mid-fifties, and the gangsters are driven around in the requisite Cadillacs. Men’s suits vary but most men’s suits just look like men’s suits, so we are probably supposed to be in the fifties. But then again, this is a Kaizo Hayashi movie and exists not in reality but in movie-land, just as did the borderless action movies churned out by Nikkatsu.

As his search continues, however, the movie grows darker and less jokier, with the double-crosses continuing until eventually he is left with only a room full of bloodstains.Thus, it is not all fun and games, even for those who pick up more specific references than I do.

Hama has no girl friend, nor does he have a woman who loves him in vain or a suspect in the case who falls for him, very rare for American detective movies but not all that unusual for Japan. It is also quite unusual for both its time and for the borderless action era films in that most of the characters are Chinese, from Taiwan and Hong Kong, and much of the movie is conducted in one or more of the various Chinese languages. They are gangsters, however, far from the immigrants struggling to be accepted who are found in other movies of the era, ironically calling their gang “The New Japs.” The only “traditional” immigrant is the hitman’s wife, whom he met when she was a prostitute.  While Chinese in heritage, she is a Japanese citizen who speaks no Chinese at all. Initially, they communicate by writing in Kanji on a mirror, which is comprehensible to both Chinese and Japanese speakers.

All in all, it is a solid noir detective movie, even if you know little about the borderless action films; however, if you are familiar with them in some detail, it will provide a second level of pleasure. The movie was sufficiently successful to lead to several sequels that kept Hayashi busy but essentially sidetracked this movie-maker most entranced by Japan’s own film history.