A Detective's Job Should End at Some Point

What better way to see Japan than as part of en extensive murder investigation? That's the main appeal of 1974's Castle of Sand (砂の器), a police procedural based on a book by Seicho Matsumoto. The first two thirds of the film are wonderful. Matsumoto expertly weaves extensive real world knowledge with the kind of intricate but credible plot mechanics that distinguish the best detective fiction. If only it'd ended there. Unfortunately, the final forty minutes of this two hour, twenty-two minute film are an overbaked, sentimental slog. This movie needed to quit while it was ahead.

A man is discovered murdered near a Tokyo train station. Two police detectives head the investigation--a young detective named Yoshimura (Kensaku Morita) and his elder, Detective Imanishi (Tetsuro Tamba). They don't have much to go on. A waitress had seen the victim, an older man, talking to a young man about "Kameda", a relatively common name in Japan. The only other clue is that the victim had a distinct Tohoku accent, a region in the north of the main island of Japan.

After questioning a number of local Kamedas with no luck, Imanishi hits on the idea that maybe Kameda isn't a person but a place. Checking a map, he finds that, as a matter of fact, there's a town called Kameda in Tohoku. So he heads there with Yoshimura and we get some of the film's gorgeous location shots.

This is the first step in an investigation that eventually also takes Imanishi to Osaka, Ise shrine in Mie, and Okayama. This aspect of the movie may be more interesting if, like me, you live in Japan. I enjoyed seeing the railway stations in different parts of the country and was excited when Imanishi started to get close to where I live. It doesn't look like Japan has changed much since the '70s.

The clues Imanishi follows are all satisfyingly clever, too. Unfortunately, it all leads to a climax where the detective lays out the whole history of the murderer. His boss asks what they're going to charge the culprit with and Imanishi says he'd like to explain by continuing to tell the story. And so a long, long secondary narrative unfolds about an old leper and his little boy. This part of the movie is scored with the sappiest possible violin music and features shots intended to be tear-jerkers of the kid running up to hug the leper for one last time and a gang of neighbourhood children throwing rocks at the leper. The whole time, I kept thinking, "Okay, okay, so arrest the guy already."

At the end, we're clearly meant to feel loads of sympathy for the murderer but director Yoshitaro Nomura was just smashing it too hard. It's not that I mind the idea of having sympathy for a killer but this movie piles it on so thick I just wanted it to be over. Ironically, Chishu Ryu, best known for his work with Ozu, has a small role in the film. He could've told the filmmakers a thing or two about the power of understatement.

Castle of Sand is available on The Criterion Channel.