Edogawa Rampo (Hirai Taro, 1894-1965) was a disciple of namesake Edgar Allen Poe and Arthur Conan Doyle who popularized the mystery story in Japan with a local version of Sherlock Homes, Akechi Kogoro. Rampo created his own mix of the erotic and grotesque - called eroguro in Japanese. His work has inspired dozens of films and TV shows over the decades, including Jissoji Akio’s 1994 film A Watcher in the Attic (Edogawa Rampo Gekijo - Yaneura no Samposha).
Jissoji’s version is soaked in an atmosphere of period eroticism and decadence, underlain with wry humor and canny insight into the baser human passions. As a mystery, it is undoubtedly old-fashioned (it turns, shades of Sherlock Holmes, on the brilliant deductions of an amateur detective), but Jissoji maintains the tension until the inevitable twist ending.
The story begins with residents of the Toeikan, a cheap Tokyo rooming house, drinking sake and discussing the impact sound will have on the movies. One, a languid young man named Goda (Mikami Hiroshi), sits apart from the others, blowing smoke rings and thinking how stupendously boring these people are - they don’t have an original thought between them! Better to die and be done with it!
Rather than end it all, however Goda finds a new interest. One day while he is playing dress up with a woman’s wig and lipstick, he accidentally loosens a ceiling board in his closet. Climbing up, he discovers a dimly lit passage way under the roof leading to the Toeikan’s other rooms. Soon he is scampering about like a ninja, making knotholes and moving ceiling boards for a better view. What he sees are the intimate acts - sadistic, criminal or vaguely mad - that reveal infinitely more about his fellow roomers than the various fronts they present to the world.
As the days pass, the keen delight Goda first felt from his explorations begins to fade. He needs a new stimulus. He remembers Endo the dentist (Mutaka Naomasa). a loathsome toad of a man who once boasted to all and sundry of attempting shinju (love suicide) with the young wife of a colleague. Flashing a bottle of morphine, he told Goda and the others that “with this you can die easily and painlessly” Goda decides to steal the morphine and give Dr. Endo a taste of his own medicine.
He plots his crime with an ingenuity worthy of an Arthur Conan Doyle villain, but has to contend with a lantern-jawed “researcher of human psychology” named Akechi Kogoro (Shimada Kyusaku), who takes a disturbingly keen interest in his fellow roomers.
With its lovingly detailed period atmospherics and stance of ironic detachment from the debauched and deluded goings-on, A Watcher in the Attic verges on arty comedy, but Jissoji refuses to go for easy, superior laughs - preferring instead to make the audience see the film’s tiny world from Goda’s twisted point of view. In other words, the best, most secretly thrilling seat in the house to watch the human comedy - at least until one of the watched looks back through the knothole.