Blessing Bell / Kofuku no kane (2002)

In one of the oddest starring roles in history, Susumu Terajima slowly emerges from the shadows beside  a railroad track and walks through a series of strange encounters without saying a word until at last he goes off screen and tries to tell his wife what happened to him. Writer/director Sabu had used the structure …

D-Slope Murder / Murder on D Street / D-Zaka no satsujin jiken (1998)

Though looking like a sequel to Akio Jissoji's Watcher in the Attic, the D-Slope Murder dramatizes the very first story featuring Edogowa Rampo's Detective Akechi. Thus, we see the very beginnings of Japan's most popular detective, later rivaled only by Kindaichi.* The female owner of a bookstore decides to sell some fakes of a famous …

Watcher in the Attic / Yaneura no sanposha (1994)

Edogawa Rampo's works provided such a fertile ground for Japanese film and TV that it is hard to sort out how many of his works have been filmed. Watcher in the Attic, for example, had itself been made at least twice as pinku films before Akio Jissoji's version appeared. Of the adaptations of Rampo's stories …

Poem / Uta (1972)

The post-Shogunate end of the “Old Japan” has been overtly treated in many ways in many different movies and might even be seen as a running theme under the surface of almost every movie made in the country. Seldom has the topic been treated so openly and yet so obliquely as in Poem, which spends …