Chusei Sone – Windows on Worlds

Chusei Sone’s Angel Guts: Red Classroom (天使のはらわた赤い教室, Tenshi no Harawata: Akai Kyoshitsu) opens with grainy 8mm footage of a woman being gang raped, but this turns out to be a film being watched by the protagonist, Muraki (Keizo Kanie), rather than the one we’re actually watching. Nevertheless, in presenting the footage in this way, the film has made us somewhat complicit in witnessing this woman’s exploitation for the purposes of entertainment. A producer of pornographic magazines, Muraki is captivated by the woman’s ruined innocence and becomes obsessed with the idea of finding her.

Though he says he doesn’t think she belongs in this world, Muraki does not so much want to save Nami (Yuki Mizuhara) as get her to work for his magazine. He declares that years of this kind of work have left him numbed and desensitised. Watching her video was the first time he’s felt moved in years. However, it turns out that this may be because the video wasn’t a movie in which the actress had consented to appear, but raw footage of an actual gang rape committed against a trainee teacher. The implication is that this traumatic incident has numbed Nami in the same way Muraki has been numbed by his exposure to pornography, leaving her with a permanently vacant, inscrutable expression and reducing her to nothing but a sexual object. Though the 8mm “blue movie” is an illegal form of pornography that can be watched only in underground clubs, she claims to have run into several men like Muraki who recognise her and has concluded that the only way to get rid of them is to satisfy their desire by sleeping with them. She says she won’t feel anything anyway, but has scars on her wrist and seems to have turned to potentially dangerous sex with random men as a means of self-harm.

Muraki refuses to sleep with her, but in Nami he seems to be looking for his own buried innocence and masking the shame he feels towards his line of work. His parents think he publishes books for children, he tells Nami, but rants to another woman that his magazines are all the same and he doesn’t know how to make them better. He can’t take the kind of pictures he wants to, because he wouldn’t be able to publish them under the increasingly strict censorship laws. Repeated references are made to the need to avoid showing any pubic hair which is considered obscene under Japanese law, though they’re otherwise free to depict scenes of sexual violence and degradation. Ironically, Muraki is unable to meet Nami at their rendezvous because he’s been arrested for breaking the Protection of Minors Act after having photographed a 15-year-old girl, though Muraki claims he was just trying to help her. He says she told him she was 19, recently arrived from Aomori and had been reduced to shoplifting, so he gave her a job out of the kindness of his heart.

It’s things like this that might have Muraki desperate to prove he’s not “scum” but a good man and an artist rather than a purveyor of pornography and exploiter of women. The film has its cake and eats it too, critiquing female exploitation but simultaneously trading on it, if doing its best to make the viewer feel at least conflicted. Three years later, Muraki is in a relationship with a woman he once exploited who couldn’t let him go and has fathered a child, but the papers are full of news about suicides and domesticity does not seem to him provide much of a refuge. He continues to search for Nami in order to reclaim his innocence, but discovers that she has become a vacant sex worker, ironically working at a bar called “blue” and the plaything of a man in a James Dean-style red jacked who has broken dreams of his own. Unlike Muraki, she has only fallen further, and he is ultimately forced to watch what his business has reduced her to as a group of men set on a captive high school girl like a pack of wolves, ironically echoing the opening sequence. Yet in the end, it’s Nami who frees him by literally showing Muraki the way out of this place as he urges her to leave though she seems to say it’s already too late. Looking at her own distorted image in a puddle, she no longer knows who she is and has no identity that is not forced upon her by a violent male gaze.

Angel Guts: Red Classroom is available as part of The Angel Guts Collection released on blu-ray 23rd February courtesy of Third Window Films.

Japanese cinema of the 1970s fell hard for the prestige murder mystery. Following the success of The Inugami Family, an early and unexpected hit thanks to Kadokawa’s “innovative” marketing strategy, multi-cast detective dramas dominated the box office for the rest of the decade. Meanwhile, ATG had been known for serious and high-minded avant-garde cinema throughout the 1960s but its brand of left-leaning, politically conscious, arthouse-fare was tantamount to box office poison in the increasingly consumerist post-Asama-Sanso world. ATG’s Kindaichi-centric Death at an Old Mansion, updated to the present day, pre-dated Ichikawa’s series for Toho by a whole year and perhaps signalled their resignation to shifting into the mainstream. By 1977, that transition was perhaps complete with former Nikkatsu Roman Porno director Chusei Sone’s adaptation of a classic serial penned by Ango Sakaguchi, an author of the “Buraiha“ school well known for chronicling post-war aimlessness.

Set in the summer of 1947, Case of the Disjointed Murder (不連続殺人事件, Furenzoku Satsujin Jiken, AKA Unrelated Murder Cases) is a classic country house mystery in which a series of high profile writers are invited to a mansion owned by a wealthy family, the Utagawas. Only, as it turns out, many of the letters of invitation are forgeries or have been doctored so that several unexpected guests have arrived including dissolute artist Doi (Yuya Uchida) whose presence is particularly awkward because he is the former husband of the host Kazuma’s (Tetsuro Sagawa) new wife Ayaka (Junko Natsu). Soon enough, one of the guests is murdered, and then another, and still more, seemingly for no real reason. Amateur detective Kose (Kazuya Kosaka), one of the “unexpected” guests, tries to piece the crime together to prevent its expansion but finds himself outflanked by a lack of material evidence.

Sakaguchi’s original tale ran as a newspaper serial which promised a cash prize for anyone clever enough to identify the murderer(s) before the truth was revealed as it eventually is in true country house mystery fashion with the detective explaining everything in a lengthy monologue while all the interested parties sit around a dinner table. The gamified nature of the serial is perhaps the reason for the large cast of characters comprising of Utagawa family members, the literary house guests, and staff all of whom become mixed up in the ongoing crime drama which Kose comes increasingly to believe is engineered rather than random as it might originally seem.

The “supposed” random chaos of the the “unconnected” murders is a key part of Sakaguchi’s interrogation of post-war anxiety. For a time it seems as if these mostly quite unpleasant people have taken the opportunity of being trapped within a claustrophobic environment to air out their own grievances with each other in an atmosphere already tainted with violence and resentment. Meanwhile, the moral corruption of the Utagawa household continues to come back to haunt them in the sexual transgressions of the late grandfather who apparently fathered several illegitimate children in addition to those from multiple marriages. The half-siblings bring additional strife into the Utagawa home in Kazuma’s incestuous desire for his half-sister Kayoko (Hitomi Fukuhara) who returns his affections and even hopes to marry her brother, while he has also transgressed by “buying” Ayaka from her venal first husband Doi.

As in most Japanese mysteries, however, the motives for murder turn out to be banal – simply monetary greed and seemingly nothing more even if backed up by a peculiar kind of romanticism. Such unbound desire for riches is perhaps another symptom of the precariousness of the post-war world in which individual survival is all in a chaotic environment where financial security is more or less impossible for those not already born into wealth. Kose begins to solve the crimes through the “psychological traces” the killer(s) leave behind, the various ways in which “scenes” are calculated and contrived but fail to entirely mask the truth which lies behind them.

Which is to say that the mechanics behind the killings ultimately become secondary to their psychological import in which Kose analyses superficial relationships to uncover the depths which underpin them and their implications for a conspiracy of crime. This persistent amorality in which human relationships and connections are subverted for personal gain is yet another example of post-war inhumanity in which the corruption of the war has destroyed the “innocence” of pre-modern Japan and provoked nothing more than a moral decline born of a confused anxiety and a generation struggling to adjust itself to a new reality.

Death at an Old Mansion aside, the ‘70s mystery boom had a peculiar obsession with post-war crime in the comparative comfort of the economic miracle. 30 years on, society was perhaps ready to ask more questions about an intensely traumatic moment in time but equally keen to ask what they might say about another anxious moment of social change only opposite in nature. No longer quite so burdened by post-war regret or confusion, some began to wonder if consumerism was as dangerous as poverty for the health of the national soul, but nevertheless seem content to bask in the essential cosiness of a country house mystery in which the detective will always return at the end to offer a full and frank explanation to a roomful of compromised suspects. If only real life were so easy to explain.

Original trailer (no subtitles)

Tag: Chusei Sone

Angel Guts: Red Classroom (天使のはらわた赤い教室, Chusei Sone, 1979)

Case of the Disjointed Murder (不連続殺人事件, Chusei Sone, 1977)