Motive / Reason / Riyu (2004)

During a rainstorm, a man is found dead at the base of a 20-story building. When the police pursue the matter they find an apartment with three dead bodies, which should be simple to deal with except that the three victims are not the tenants of the apartment and are thus unidentified, just like the man on the ground. This leads Obayashi’s Riyu into a complicated but different kind of mystery told through the concept of a TV interviewer talking to various people eventually involved, intercut with flashbacks of events they describe.

We do not follow the investigation by the detectives as we would in a more typical mystery. Nor do we reconstruct the crime itself or the lives of the victims. The case has already been solved by the police, so the real issue is not so much the crime as the social context in which the crime has occurred. The immediate issue is Tokyo real estate in the mid-nineties.

The movie is very specifically set in the summer of 1996 and the TV interviewer is in effect reviving a news story that has now been almost forgotten by the general public. A fundamental part of the Japanese “bubble economy” of the eighties had been increasing property values, which led to increasing investment in real estate. The crime occurs in a twin-towered set of condominiums. The original owners of the condo were a pair of newlyweds whose marriage went on the rocks. The divorced wife sold it to the family still listed on the building records, but they had lost it when they couldn’t keep up the payments. Meanwhile, a speculator named Hayakawa to whom the original family owed their money had actually paid another family to squat there pretending to be the owners until prices rose again. Thus, when a man named Ishida bought it at auction, he could not move in due to various occupancy laws, leading to arguments and his presence at the scene of the crime. At least I think this is an accurate summary but the complexity of the exchanges and Japanese law may mean I left out a step or two.

Obayashi opens the movie with a long history of the neighborhood, which had been one of those old city areas with twisty narrow streets and lots of small family businesses, not poor but nor rich either. It had been rebuilt much as it was even after the firebombing of 1945, but while it could resist the American bombers, it could not resist real estate developers. Now it is dominated by the two condo towers, looming in the photography like strangers from another planet.

Most importantly for the story, the condos brought with them anonymity. No one knows anyone, for everyone keeps to themselves. An entire family could leave and another move in and live there without anyone knowing. The “super” does not have to collect rent, so he has never actually seen the dead people, nor has anyone else on the same floor, and if they happen to meet in the elevator, no one talks beyond basic pleasantries exchanged among strangers. It is a different kind of isolation than the self-imposed secrecy of Nobody Knows, for example, though we have seen it portrayed in earlier movies as far back as She and He.

The one person who seems to know anything about the dead family is the son of the owners on paper, who comes back to his old home to escape his mother and finds there a quiet, kindly family – a wife taking care of her mother-in-law, a husband who dresses for the office every day but spends his time practicing golf swings with his umbrella (apparently another victim of the bubble bursting). The one upsetting factor is the young man who is renting their spare room.

Gradually we piece together most of the events of the night, but more importantly we piece together the background of the potential murderers. The roomer was running away from a girlfriend and their baby, she was trying to find him and bring him back, Ishida had bought the apartment because he thought his own daughter believed he was a failure since she didn’t want to go to high school. The young son had a scam-artist mother who was constantly moving to escape her scams and who showed no maternal feelings for him. But the events of the night still remain partially obscure – we know who killed the residents but we still don’t know the killer’s motive.

Based on a popular novel by Miyuke Miyabe, one of modern Japan’s premier mystery novelists, the movie is clearly divided into chapters with titles of the character interviewed or the events, so presumably this structure comes from the source material. Scenes are often accompanied by sub-titles indicating date, time, and place, which are themselves sometimes obscured by the subtitles for the dialogue. Narrators in each segment often speak directly to the camera, but unlike most such “documentaries,” we see them in their physical context, with the flashbacks and testimony flowing back and forth seamlessly.

However, this is not a Rashomon-like version of events seen from different points of view but rather a piecing together of a puzzle. Each of the various narrators knows only a part of the puzzle, yet as each reveals what they know each is also allowed to develop as real characters in themselves, not just witnesses or stereotypes. This helps keep the enormously large cast clear as the story comes together.

Despite the documentary pretense, it never looks like a TV documentary. Now and again we will see the interviewer or a microphone suddenly drop into the shot to remind us that the speakers are talking to a camera crew (itself seen at the end of one chapter), but we never get back-and-forth questioning. The characters are simply allowed to talk and move around as they wish.

We also get some unexpected details – in the new condo, for example, each unit has a miniature courtyard with low walls, an address nameplate,and a gate before you come to the entrance, just like a Japanese city house, and the children “play” on the balconies as if in a yard.

Presumably, the builders had wanted to emphasize that this was not merely an apartment but rather a private home that just happened to be in this skyscraper.

The novel appeared in 1998 (it has not been translated), so it is curious that it took this long to get to the screen. Japanese film-makers did not usually work like Hollywood does now, taking years to “develop” a novel, but in most cases got a movie version of a popular novel up on screen within about a year.

Riyu is an Obayashi movie, so it is as slick and professional on its surface as it is possible to imagine any movie could be. There is no pseudo-documentary grittiness. In some ways it is like his Sada, weaving together action and direct address, or his Turning Point, told in “20 cinematic fragments.” It is also a Japanese movie, so it is long, over 2½ hours, but this allows the huge cast to both tell and show. And it also allows for a possible ghost in the condo that still can not be re-sold years after it was associated with the tragedy. Because we see and hear narration from a number of characters, there is more sub-title reading than usual, but again because it is an Obayashi movie it is never visually boring. It is also humorless, as befits its subject matter. Nevertheless, the unusual approach to the story keeps it interesting throughout.