The Japan Society Review 40
Book, Stage, Movie, Arts and Events Review

Issue 40 Volume 7 Number 4 (August 2012)

Filming History
Michael Sullivan explores a Kurosawa controversy
The Cultural Cross
Fumiko Halloran follows a falling starIn this issue we focus on various aspects of the Japanese
movie industry with some stimulating reviews of recent
books. Michael Sullivan examines All the Emperor’s Men whichcharts the legendary director Akira Kurosawa’s incursion into
Hollywood. In an in-depth book Hiroshi Tasogawa details
Kurosawa’s traumatic involvement in a fractious partnershipwith 20th Century Fox. Kurosawa was slated to direct Tora
Tora Tora, which was supposed to tell the story of Pearl
Harbor from both a Japanese and American perspective.
However, miscommunication, cultural misunderstandings
and completely different working practices crippled the
production. Next Roger Macy casts a critical eye on Jasper
Sharp’s encyclopedic work Historical Dictionary of Japanese
Cinema. Sharp produces a comprehensive study of Japanesecinema, with some 320 pages devoted to selected main entries,
and the remainder to the fact-packed appendices. We next lookat the fascinating World Film Locations: Tokyo edited by Chris
MaGee with contributions from 18 writers including MaGee
himself. This book takes us on an eighty-year historical journeyof movie making in the capital. The wonderful thing about film
is its power to preserve a world that no longer exists and thisvolume allows the reader to glimpse the ghosts of Tokyo past.
Along with several articles the work covers 45 scenes fromdifferent movies that have featured Tokyo along with photos,
maps and a short description. The first section covers the period
1929-1960, which I found particularly enlightening, taking
the reader back to prewar Tokyo. For example, one surviving
movie fragment from 1929 shows lively vistas of the capitalthat vanished long ago. In the section covering 1961 to 1978

the reader witnesses the metamorphosis to mega-metropolis
and there are also vivid reminders of major events in Tokyo’s
history such as the 1964 Tokyo Olympics. Fumiko Halloran looks
at a thought-provoking book on the international Japanese
movie star Yoshiko Yamaguchi who was popular not only in
Hollywood but also in both Japan and China from the 1930s to
1950s. Fluent in Mandarin and trained by a Russian opera singer,
Yamaguchi lived a complicated life with several identities. Ina gripping memoir My Life as Li Xianglan, Yamaguchi tells of
the terrible conflicts she faced with a career spanning both
China and Japan at a time of conflict. Susan Meehan gives
us her take on Bonsái, the awarding-winning Chilean movie
directed by Cristián Jiménez. The narrative flips back and forth
over an eight year period; initially centering on the university
romance between Julio and Emilia. Bonsái is a youthful andwhimsical production inspired by literature with Proustespecially looming large. The movie has what the director
calls a ‘Japanese sensibility.’ We next glide into the increasingly
popular movie/book realm with a look at Keigo Higashino’s
novel The Devotion of Suspect X which was also a highly
successful 2008 movie directed by Hiroshi Nishitani, starring
Shinichi Tsutsumi and Yasuko Matsuyuki. The prize-winning
author Keigo Higashino perfectly illustrates the current trendof successful novels being transformed into hit movies and theblurring of the boundary between the movie and book worlds.
Sean Curtin, August 2012

1) All the Emperor’s Men
2) Historical Dictionary of Japanese Cinema
3) World Film Locations: Tokyo
4) My Life as Li Xianglan
5) Bonsai6) The Devotion of Suspect X.................................................

................................................................................................................................................................................................

Contents

EditorSean Curtin

Managing Editor
Jack Cooke
Staff Reviewers
Susan Meehan and Michael Sullivan
Special Reviewer
Hugh Cortazzi
New reviewswww.japansociety.org.uk/resources/the-japan-society-review

All the Emperor’s Men
by Hiroshi Tasogawa
Applause Books, November
2012
336 pages, $29.99 / ￥2,770
ISBN: 155783850
Review by Michael Sullivan
In a career spanning over 50 years Akira Kurosawa (黒澤明) directed over 30 movies, in all likelihood everyone
has seen at least one of his movies, whether it is the
epic Ran (乱) or the classic Seven Samurai (七人の侍).
He was a huge influence on the history of cinema
and in 1990 he was awarded the Academy Award forLifetime Achievement. In this book Hiroshi Tasogawa
details a period of Kurosawa’s life during which he
was involved in the 20th Century Fox productionof Tora Tora Tora (トラ・トラ・トラ). It was envisionedthat this movie would tell the story of Pearl Harborfrom a Japanese perspective and from an American
perspective. However, when it came to shooting themovie Kurosawa was dismissed within weeks and themovie subsequently completed by different directors.
In the months that followed it became apparent that
there was no clear answer to what had happened as
different sources claimed that Kurosawa had beensick, hadn’t been sick, betrayed or even ousted by a
Hollywood conspiracy.
Hiroshi Tasogawa graduated from Waseda University in
1958, he has been a reporter for NHK and the AssociatedPress, and was a professor of media at Tokai University.
During the two years of Kurosawa’s involvement in
Tora Tora Tora Tasogawa worked as an interpreter for
Kurosawa as well as a translator of the screenplay. In thisbook he details the events of those years and attempts
to shed light on why this partnership ultimately failed
and why all those involved ended up with a different
idea of what went wrong.
The book describes all the facts in vivid detail andserves as bit of a window into the mind of a great
director like Kurosawa, it also considers the inherent
miscommunication that can occur between two very
different cultures such as the East and the West as well
as how different methods of working can lead to great
misunderstandings. A lot of the book details the buildup to the shooting of the movie and the amount ofwork put in by Kurosawa, as we follow events along
two important facts become clear: Kurosawa saw thisas a chance not only to present the Japanese versionof events but also to present the tragedy of admiral
Yamamoto (Commander-in-chief of the JapaneseNavy), and that while Hollywood appreciated the films
that Kurosawa had directed, they hadn’t actually done
a lot of research on his work methods. This would
prove to be a fatal flaw, especially when the producers
and 20th Century Fox representatives were faced with2

behaviour and shooting delays which seemed crazy.
Further flaws in the partnership become clear when
Tasogawa looks at the contract and reveals how what
Kurosawa thought was his role and what 20th Century
Fox were actually expecting him to do were quite
different on some very key points including overall
direction, editing and even whether this was a coproduction or a purely 20th Century Fox production.
This book describes in great detail the huge amount ofwork that had to be done before a movie could evenreach the stage of shooting, it is a real revelation on
aspects such as the screenplay, casting, budget andespecially the heart and soul that Kurosawa put into it.
It is a real page turner, and in particular the insight into
Kurosawa’s character has left me wanting to watch hismovies again in order to better understand the man
behind the movie, and to watch Tora Tora Tora again
in order to consider for myself what the movie might
have been like with some of the cut scenes described in
Tasogawa’s book, which within a Japanese perspectiveof the events that led up to Pearl Harbor would havepresented Kurosawa’s depiction of the tragedy ofadmiral Yamamoto.
It seems that many problems can arise not only between
two very different cultures using different languages,
but also from a basic level between a director who wasan artist and a film company that was a business. In
the end the film Tora Tora Tora which was completed
didn’t include scenes that Kurosawa felt were key tothe story and we can only wonder what could havebeen if he had managed to stay in the director’s chair.
Tasogawa makes it clear that he can see the irony thata movie about the many misunderstandings that took
place before and during Pearl Harbor would itself suffera similar series of misunderstandings.
Note
Also see our earlier review of Hiroshi Tasogawa’s
Japanese version of this book in Issue 17 (December2008) “Kurosawa Akira vs. Hollywood. ” The Japanesebook was very popular and won several awards.
Kurosawa Akira vs. Hollywood, by Hiroshi Tasogawa,
Bungei Shunju, 2006, 486 pages, hardback ￥2476,
ISBN-13: 978-4163677903, review by Fumiko Halloran

A film poster for Tora Tora Tora
Issue 40 Volume 7 Number 4 (August 2012)

Issue 40 Volume 7 Number 4 (August 2012)3

Historical Dictionary ofJapanese Cinema by
Jasper Sharp
Scarecrow Press, 2011564 pages, £59.95
ISBN-10: 0810857952
Review by Roger Macy
Let me introduce you toa cultural curiosity: thebook. It has no links, it
can’t be updated , it’sbulky and heavy, and ispretty much all the work of one person. Scarecrow
Press have published scores of imprints in their‘Historical Dictionary’ series, many of which are on thesubject of a national cinema or other art-form. In theinternet era, with many specialist databases thriving
alongside general encyclopedias such as Wikipedia,
it shows considerable courage to invest in a singleshot print publication of a dictionary or encylopedia,
which needs to be authoritative, but which presents
itself with thousands of opportunities to get things
wrong or out of date. ‘Thousands’ is a considerable
understatement of the risk of error. Of the 520 pages
in Sharp’s volume on Japanese cinema, some 320 are
devoted to selected main entries, and the remainder
to the appendices. The appendices include over ahundred pages of listings of organizations, individuals,
films and terms– each first in English rendering withJapanese script and romaji [Japanese expressed in
the Latin alphabet] alongside. Finally, there is a 98page bibliography. My back-of-envelope calculationsuggests the opportunities for error-in-detail are of theorder of 100,000, nearly all of which have been avoided.
But for all the nobility of such a pains-taking cause,a reviewer has to ask, in the third millennium, as towhether a Historical Dictionary in print-form can everagain serve a scholar. For printed listings, they can only
serve in the way the editors choose to sort and display
them. No listing here is indexed back to the main text.
Companies and organisations are listed in alphabeticalorder of their romaji renderings (and the wall-to-wall
capitalisations do not help readability). Films arelisted alphabetically by their translated titles. If thereferenced director has a main entry, all well and goodbut otherwise it’s just an orphaned listing. Actually,
they work better as an index to another Stonebridge
publication, Alexander Jacoby’s A Critical Handbookof Japanese Directors which, as a sister old-fangled
book, has excellent filmographies for 150 directors,
but no way in, if you don’t know the film’s director.
The listings of individuals have their own peculiarity.
Whilst none are indexed to the main text, someone
has gone to the trouble of excluding those individuals
with a main entry without explaining this. It would
4also have been helpful for the pages to be headed‘Directors,’ ‘Performers’ or ‘Other figures,’ so that one
doesn’t conclude a false negative. Each of these points
can be rectified, by another piece of old-technology –writing annotations on the book. I would suggest thatan owner will need to overcome that taboo, to get fullvalue from this publication. That is particularly true
for the bibliography. Whilst it is organised into sometwenty categories, the bulk of the references relate‘Particular Films / Filmmakers,’ etc, but these entries arelisted alphabetically by author of the commentaries.
That makes eminent sense in a monograph wherenames and subjects are indexed, but leaves these pieces
virtually unfindable unless the work is already known.
That seems to me to be a lost opportunity. Indexing
commentaries by film would have filled a real gap.
Many of these quibbles clearly relate to common
organisational themes of the series and cannot
be ascribed to the author. Areas where Sharp has
clearly deployed his considerable knowledge toeffect is the listing of ‘Other figures.’ For instance
MORI Iwao (森岩雄) is ‘Toho production head,’ MORI
Masayuki (森昌行) is ‘Producer’ but MORI Katsuyuki(森且行) is ‘Former SMAP member.’ That last meant
nothing to me, but ‘SMAP’ duly gets its own entry. I
learnt which talent agency developed this aidoru
group, who the members are, and how their careers
were developed. That’s the kind of detail that
doesn’t appear in other English-language books.
It is probably in the show-business history that Sharp’s
contribution is most valuable. He has devoted entries
to some of the more famous ‘classic’ directors but theformat doesn’t allow him to say anything new, anddoesn’t point towards any key works by others. Actors
and other personnel, on the other hand are muchbetter served here than by other English language
publications, particularly for the current generation.
But, alas, it seems Japanese media companies arestill charging too much for simple still photos forreference books to be appropriately illustrated.
Another strength of Sharp’s Dictionary is censorship.
Not only is there a main entry of some length,
numerous figures who have run up against Japanesefilm censorship have entries. These figures do not
only relate to Sharp’s previous volume on ‘pink’films, Beyond the Pink Curtain, but also to various
political disputes of the twentieth century. So I wasdisappointed that Sharp could not find space toaddress the most controversial topic, the routine
portrayal of rape as entertainment in a large sector of
the Japanese film industry. That seems to me to be amuch more relevant subject than the arid business ofthe non-portrayal of pudenda. For ‘pink’ film subjects
in general, I would refer the reader to Sharp’s ‘Pink’book, where a larger budget allowed filmographies
to be better organised. Too often, in the Historical
Dictionary, an entry reads like a list in prose-form,
Issue 40 Volume 7 Number 4 (August 2012)

which would be far more readable, and usable, as a list.
It certainly can’t be easy to freeze content into a bookthat has to serve a range of readers, some who mightcome to it with a surface interest in film but little
knowledge of Japanese history, and others who might
be historians with little experience of film. So, how
to mention the war? A twelve-page entry certainly
doesn’t shirk the subject. Since there’s also a specific4-page bibliography on the same subject of ‘War andFilm,’ my previous quibble about lack of referencing
doesn’t apply here, although it would have been
more friendly for one to refer to the other. It’s a lot offacts at varying levels to follow one another without
subdivision or indexing, and I would recommend a
student to go to original essays on the subject, manyof which are listed. Specifically, if there were such acomplete absence of anti-Soviet battles or war films,
it would have been notable, but there are examples of
both; and ‘umiwashi’ needs to be rendered in English
as ‘Sea Eagle.’ There is also no mention of the theatricalantecedents for many war-time films mentioned. A
neglect of writers can be seen elsewhere, for example
on Atomic Bomb cinema – the ‘dramatic reconstruction’in 1995 of decision-making on the Japanese side
before Hiroshima was the work of scriptwriter IshidōToshirō. The important entry for the ‘Manei’ company
provides further war-time details but, as for thestatement, ‘much of its local output was destroyed
during the Soviet invasion, with what remains in
China’s Film Archives or at Changchun Studio, thereby
essentially lost to Japanese researchers’ – that needs
qualification in respect of the recoveries from Gosfilm,
listed in the NFC newsletter number 61 of 2005.
The policy on rendering Japanese into romaji is explained
and consistent. I soon got used to seeing all nameswith macrons, and all places without. The accuracy is
generally far beyond my level of detection, although
I believe Ishihara Yūjirō should have two macrons.
Jasper Sharp has worked assiduously in an unyielding
format and you would have to be very well-read not tomine new information from this resource.

World Film Locations:Tokyo, edited by Chris
MaGee
Intellect Ltd, October 2012
128 pages, £11.50
ISBN 1841504831
Review by Micahel Sullivan
For any fan of Japanese cinema,
and with time to spare in Tokyo,
this book is a must as it charts ajourney of eighty years of movies being filmed in theIssue 40 Volume 7 Number 4 (August 2012)

great capital city of Japan. The editor Chris MaGee, whois the editor of the Toronto J-Film Pow-Wow Japanesefilm blog in Canada, includes contributions from 17
other writers in his book. The work covers 45 scenes
from different movies that have featured Tokyo alongwith photos, maps and a short description. There arealso seven articles which focus on different aspects ofJapanese cinema.
The first section covers the period 1929-1960, in thedescription of each example scene we are also taken
on a journey through cinema history, for example
there is a description of how much footage is lost frombefore 1945 due to the highly flammable nitrate used
for film stock, the damage Tokyo suffered in World War
II and the film prints that were burned in the post war
period by American censors. One surviving fragmentof a movie from 1929 shows scenes of a Tokyo thathas long since disappeared. It is only in the 1950s that
more films exist which show buildings of the city thatcan still be seen today, one amusing example is theclock of the Wako Department Store in Ginza whichfeatures in the 1954 movie Gozilla (Gorija) and which
doesn’t escape destruction.
From 1961 to 1978 we are given vivid reminders ofmajor events in Tokyo’s history starting with the 1964
Tokyo Olympics and the route taken by the marathon
runners which can be seen in Tokyo Olympiad. In
conjunction with the Olympics the New Otani hotel in
Chiyoda was built and opened in 1964, at this time thiswas the tallest building in Tokyo and three years later it
would feature in the James Bond movie You Only Live
Twice as the headquarters of an evil organisation. Frompersonal experience from the restaurants at the top of
this building there is still a lovely view of Tokyo as wellas the nearby Akasaka Palace. Another moment from
history is shown in the 1971 movie Throw Away Your
Books and Rally In The Streets, in the 1960s protests
by the nation’s youths were common and this movie
shows the chaos in the streets.
The third section starts to bring this overview of Tokyo
movie scenes up to date as the period 1979-1999
includes scenes from Tokyo Tower in the 1985 film
Tokyo-Ga and also the animated movie Pom Poko.
This Studio Ghibli movie was based on a real life areaof Tokyo called Tama Hills which was redeveloped forhuman habitation and tells the fiction tale of the fightthe raccoons (tanuki) fought to protect the shrinking
forest. There is also another scene from Takeshi Kitano’s
Kikujiro, as a young man he lived in the area of Asakusa
and at the beginning of this film we are taken on aquick tour of this same place seen through the eyesof a boy.
As can be expected the final journey of Tokyo’s
cinematic history brings us to the most recent, as well
as iconic, movies such as Lost In Translation, Kill Bill, and
The Taste of Fish (Tsukiji Uogashi Sandaime). Scenes
5from Pachinko parlours, bridges, bookshops and fish
markets are shown, and of course all can be still seen
today. For anyone interested in Japanese cinema andwith an opportunity to visit Tokyo this book is a mustbuy. Not only does cinema bring a city to life, but it is apleasure to see the same places with your own eyes.

My Life as Li Xianglan 「李
(
香蘭」
を生きて)
by Yamaguchi Yoshiko
Nihon Keizai Shimbun, 2004
241 pages, ￥1600
Review by Fumiko Halloran
Yamaguchi Yoshiko was aprominent movie star and singer
from the late 1930’s to 1958
when she married a Japanese diplomat and retired
from a successful but controversial career. She waspopular not only in Japan but in China, Hong Kong,and Hollywood.
The dramatic life she describes in this memoir illustrates
the fate of a beautiful and talented girl who grew up
in Manchuria when Japan established a puppet state
there in 1932. Fluent in Mandarin and trained by a
Russian opera singer, Yamaguchi lived a complicatedlife with several identities. This memoir illustrates thedifficulties of living in a cross cultural environmentthat is exacerbated by civil turmoil and international
conflict.
Born in 1920 to Japanese parents who lived in
Fushun, Manchuria, her name was Yamaguchi Yoshikoaccording to her family’s registry in Saga Prefecture,
Japan. Then, in accord with a Chinese tradition, she
had two Chinese adoptive fathers, both of whom wereclose friends of her father, Yamaguchi Fumio. Fromthem, she was given two Chinese names, Li Xianglan
as the adopted daughter of General Li Jichun, and Pan
Shuhua as politician Pan Yugui’s adopted daughter.
When she appeared in movies, she played the rolesof Chinese girls or women and spoke only Mandarin.
Millions of Chinese fans believed her to be Chinese
until after World War II. She was put on trial by Chinese
military authorities who accused her of betraying China
to spy for Japan. She was found not guilty, however,after she proved that she was in fact Japanese. She
escaped execution and was expelled from China.
Returning to Japan in 1946, she resumed her film careerand married an internationally known artist Noguchi
Isamu. Five years later they were divorced. She went
to New York in 1956 to star in the Broadway musicalShangri La under the stage name of Shirley Yamaguchi.
6

There she met Otaka Hiroshi, a young diplomat eight
years younger, while she was performing in thatmusical. After they married two years later, Yamaguchi
chose the name Otaka Yoshiko and retired from films
and stage. Her husband later served as ambassador
to Sri Lanka and Myanmar. She used her Otaka namewhen she ran for and was elected to the House ofCouncilors in 1974. She served in the parliament foreighteen years as a member of the Liberal Democratic
Party.
Over the years in China, Japan, and America, she
had five names with different identities. She sufferedfrom emotional conflicts, according to this memoir,
particularly as Li Xianglan, the Chinese star, which
hid her true identity as a Japanese. As she rose
toward stardom, Yamaguchi seemed unaware of thecomplicated political situation around her. She was
keenly aware, however, of the Japanese military’s
attitude toward the Chinese and was hurt by both
Japanese mistreatment of Chinese and the hostilityof the Chinese toward Japanese. When she went toJapan for the first time when she was eighteen years
old, she was shocked by Japanese contempt andcondescension toward Chinese even though hersinging of Chinese songs was popular.
During the year Yamaguchi was born, Mao Zedong
was a young man organizing a socialist youth group,
the League of Nations was established, and California
passed legislation that was seen as an ‘anti-Japan law’
intended to limit Japanese immigration. In Europe,Mussolini grabbed political power in Italy and Hitler
launched the first uprising in Munich, which failed.
As she grew to be a teenager in Manchuria and later
Beijing, the Chinese fight against the Japanese wascomplicated by the civil war between the Kuomintang
and the Chinese Communist Party. The Yamaguchi
family’s Chinese friends were pro-Japan leaders who
cooperated with the Japanese government andmilitary while fighting the Chinese communists. Yet her
best friend, a Russian girl with whom she maintained
a lifelong friendship, turned out to have a father who
was a Soviet Communist Party member working for
Pravda and Tass, the Soviet publications.
Yamaguchi as Li Xianlang was named Japan’s Manchurian
Goodwill Ambassador as she was propelled to stardom
with movies including Leaving a Good Name for Posterity
about the Opium War. It was produced in Shanghai
by a joint venture between Japanese and Chinese as
Japanese propaganda. The head of the production
company, Kawakita Nagamasa, was a veteran in the film
industry and chose themes that passed Japanese militarycensorship but appealed to Chinese audiences. In thismovie, the Chinese understood that British colonial
ambitions in China had been parallel to modern Japaneseambitions. General Lin Zexu who fought against British
was a national hero. Li Xianglan appeared as a girl selling
Issue 40 Volume 7 Number 4 (August 2012)

candy in the opium dens.
Yamaguchi recalls a painful press conference inBeijing shortly after the movie was released. A Chinese
journalist accused her of appearing in movies likeSong of the White Orchid, China Nights and Vow in theDesert in which Chinese women were mistreated by
Japanese men but then they fell in love with them. A
journalist asked: ‘Where is your pride as a Chinese?’
Yamaguchi writes that she almost confessed that she
was Japanese. But the pressure on her not to disclose
her true identity had been applied by different interest
groups who had used her for political purposes. She
apologized to the journalists and pledged not to be
involved in such movies again.
She writes movingly about her visits to war zones in1942. At that time she was working on an epic movie,
The Yellow River, which took place near the frontline
in Henan Province. Financed by the Manchurian Film
Association, it was almost all a Chinese production.
During the filming, the cast was in danger of beingcaught in the cross fire between the Japanese army
and the Kuomintang or Communist Chinese forces.
The theme was village life near the river in a placeabout to become a battlefield. When the production
completed its work and left, Yamaguchi recalls that
two extra train cars connected to theirs were filledwith wounded Japanese soldiers covered with blood.
Yamaguchi and another actress helped the medics
attend to the wounded throughout the night. Whenthe train stopped, even the dying soldiers wanted
her to sing, so she jumped off the train and stoodin a wheat field under the moonlight and sang old
Japanese songs for the soldiers.
Having gone through pain of conflict between the
Chinese and Japanese, and carrying a sense of guilt that
her work as actress and singer had supported Japan’s
behavior toward China, Yamaguchi watched from
Tokyo the signing ceremony in Beijing establishing
diplomatic relations between Japan and the Peoples
Republic of China in the fall of 1972-and cried. Today
she calls China her fatherland and Japan as motherland
and has a simple message: ‘Stop war.’

Bonsái directed byCristian Jimenez
2011, (Spanish with English
subtitles), 95minutes
Review by Susan Meehan
Bonsái is a youthful andwhimsical film inspired byliterature – Proust looms large.
The film flits back and forth
spanning a period of eight years;
the earlier time centres on theIssue 40 Volume 7 Number 4 (August 2012)

university romance between Julio and Emilia. They live
in Valdivia, a city in southern Chile. She is a bright rockchick while he is mild and tender. The film is weighty
with melancholic ennui and searching. It won the Films
in Progress 19 Award in Toulouse in 2011 and was partof the Official Selection, 2011 Cannes Film Festival.
Though not a Japanese film, the title, of course, is. The
director himself, on a tour of Japan, remarked on his
film’s ‘Japanese sensibility.’ I went to see it curious
about the Japanese dimension. It is not as dark as
Norwegian Wood, though from the start we know that,‘Emilia dies and Julio does not die, the rest is fiction,’but shares this Japanese film’s grace and freshness.
Bonsái would suit anyone hoping to see
something different and fresh and to witness the
emergence of young Chilean talent in the formof the director, Cristian Jimenez, and the fourmain telegenic protagonists. Diego Noguera as
Julio and Natalia Galgani as Emilia are fabulous.
For all its profundity, there are delightful moments ofhumour, especially when the students socialise. Someof the choice phrases at a home-party include, ‘I learn
Latin better with beer in my corpus.’ A girl, perhaps
Emilia, laments that for all the beer she’s downed she’s
still stone sober, only to discover that it’s non-alcoholic.
Another scene has Julio reading Swann’s Way on
the beach. He falls asleep with the book open on his
chest, which results in an odd book-stencilled sun-tan.
Eight years on, in the film’s present, Emilia has all
but disappeared and Julio is a struggling writer.
He accepts a job typing up a novel by the wellknown author Gazmuri. He’s not yet started before
he’s replaced by a cheaper secretary and is too
embarrassed to admit this turn of events to hisneighbour, Blanca. Blanca is a translator, whom hebeds with far less passion than he had for Emilia.
Julio begins to write a novel in long-hand, adding
the occasional coffee stain for authenticity, as hepasses it off as Gazmuri’s. Through the book which
Blanca helps transcribe, it would seem that the‘author’ is still heart-broken. The viewer realises
it is an outpouring of memories of Emilia, manyof which revolve around bed and books such as
Madame Bovary and A Remembrance of Things Past.
Blanca, meanwhile, perhaps inspired to find her true
love and realising that she’s not Julio’s, decides tomove on and does – to Spain.
Having now managed to lose his life’s secondmost meaningful relationship, Julio turns to looking
after a bonsai almost as therapy, and compares thispainstaking activity to writing a novel. The bonsai itself
also seems to mirror his love life in its slow and unevengrowth. If only he’d applied the same care to making
his relationships succeed or maybe he had and stunted
the one he had with Emilia. Does this experience7

account for his indifference towards Blanca? Will his
bonsai survive?
Jimenez has said that the film pays tribute tolies, fiction and the artificial and that it is full ofjokes and music. Did Blanca realise Julio waslying about working for Gazmuri at any point anddid Emilia lie when she said she’d read Proust?
Jimenez hadn’t always counted on being a novelist,
having toyed with the ambition of being a comedian. He
certainly sounds as though he’d be convivial company.

The Devotion of
Suspect X
by Keigo Higashino(translated byAlexander O. Smithwith Elye J. Alexander)
Abacus, 2011
440 pages, £7.99
ISBN: 0349123748
Review by Michael Sullivan
Keigo Higashino [東野 圭吾] was born in Osaka in
1958. In 2006 he won the 134th Naoki Prize and the
6th Honkaku Mystery Grand Prize for his novel, The
Devotion of Suspect X, which had been published theprevious year. He has been writing since 1985 and has
had numerous books, essays and children’s stories
published, many of which have been adapted for TV
dramas and movies. In 2008 the movie of The Devotionof Suspect X was released, it was directed by Hiroshi
Nishitani [西谷弘] and starred Shinichi Tsutsumi [堤真一] and Yasuko Matsuyuki [松雪 泰子]. This was
the third highest grossing film of 2008 and featured
the continuation of the same characters (and actors)
from the 2007 TV drama Galileo [ガリレオ], which
was also based on another book by Keigo Higashino.
Tetsuya Ishigami is a teacher, regarded as amathematical genius in his school years he now
teaches unmotivated school kids while living a very
simple life. He has an unrequited infatuation with hisneighbour, but as no one seems to notice, and he isn’t
willing to pursue it, it remains relatively innocent. His
neighbour Yasuko Hanaoka is a single mother livingwith her teenage daughter Misato, after having moved
several times to escape from an abusive ex-husband.
Having previously worked as a hostess, she now works
at a local bento shop. However, her ex husband, Shinji
Togashi, isn’t finished with her and he manages totrack her down, demanding money he forces his way
8

into her flat and, fearing for her daughter, Yasuko does
the unthinkable. In the aftermath she and her daughter
are left staring down at the dead body of Shinji whensuddenly someone knocks on the door. Her neighbour,
Tetsuya, has guessed what has happened and ignoring
Yasuko’s denials he proposes an audacious plan tocover up the murder. Little does she know that in hishead he can calculate the most likely odds of how thedetectives will investigate and the probable outcome.
Shunpei Kusanagi is assigned to a new case, amutilated dead body has been found by the river, theman’s clothes have been partially burnt and a bicycle
abandoned nearby. Enough clues are found to allow
them to find the man’s hotel room and figure outthat they have discovered the body of Shinji Togashi.
They soon learn that Shinji was looking for his wifeand consequently check into her alibi, it turns out thaton the evening when Shinji died Yasuko and Misato
had been to the cinema and to karaoke, furthermore
they state that they haven’t seen Shinji for a long time.
The alibis seem rock solid, they are even backed up
by solid evidence at the cinema and karaoke shop,
but something bothers Shunpei and he soon winds
up speaking to his friend Manabu Yukawa, a physics
professor, about this latest case. The story is given
a further twist when it turns out that Manabu andTetsuya were at university together, driven by his own
curiosity and a wish for a reunion they meet for the firsttime in years. However, Manabu is prompted by his
own suspicions to investigate further the connection
between Tetsuya and Yasuko.
Meanwhile, Yasuko meets up with an old friend who is
now a widower, and with whom a romantic spark flares
up. Ever watchful Tetsuya notices this and his actions
become decidedly sinister. At this point the tempo of
the story quickens as Shunpei’s and Manabu’s separate
investigations exert pressure on Yasuko and Tetsuya.
However, it starts to become unclear whether they
are following the clues that they find or that they are
purposely being fed them. The second half of the storyis very thought provoking and the reader is forced
to become engrossed in the story. The author has apersuasive voice making the audience feel they knowwhat has happened and who is lying while throughthe actions of Shunpei and Manabu making the reader
slowly doubt they know how the crime was covered
up, and more importantly know which crime wasactually committed. Although the author could havefocused a little more on the dilemma faced by womenwith abusive ex-partners, he still portrays Yasuko andher daughter compassionately while a clever twist
in the story reveals that they aren’t lying about theiralibi.

Issue 40 Volume 7 Number 4 (August 2012)