Three years after making Watcher In the Attic (Edogawa Rampo - Yaneura no Samposha, 1994), Jissoji Akio returned to the work of Edogawa Rampo - Japan’s answer to Edgar Allan Poe and Arthur Conan Doyle - in Murder On D Street (D Zaka no Satsujin Jiken, 1997).
His hero is once again Akechi Kogoro, the master detective with an uncanny insight in the murkier reaches of the human heart, played once again by Shimada Kyusaku, he of the lantern jaw, imposing height and laconic manner. This time, however, the story is closer to a straightforward mystery, though the question of whodunit becomes less interesting than the motives and characters of the victim, suspects - and, of course, the shadowy Akechi himself.
The year is 1927, the place, the Dangozaka section of central Tokyo, where Rampo himself lived after coming to the city in 1919 from his native Mie Prefecture. Also, the action begins in a used bookstore much like the one Rampo himself once ran with his two brothers. Instead of an aspiring writer, however, the store’s proprietor is one Tokiko (Yoshiyuki Yumi), a woman verging on middle age with a taste for kinky sex. Then she turns up dead - strangled by the sort of rope she once used for pleasure.
Suspicion falls on a store employee named Saito who took the dominant role in their S&M revels. Also implicated is Seiichiro (Sanada Hiroyuki), a cross-dressing forger Tokiko hired to copy prints of bound beauties by a famous S&M artist. Seiichiro throws himself into his work, making forgeries that are impossible to tell from the originals. He is so confident of his skill - and jealous of the master he copies - that he destroys the originals and give Tokiko a set of copies instead. Is this warped, if brilliant, man also a murderer?
Akechi is soon on the case, probing the psyches of the two suspects with his usual foppishly casual, but preternaturally clear-sighted air. He quickly decides that it is - but does it matter? The film’s most memorable scenes are the, not the unmasking of the perpetrator, but Sanada Hiroyuki’s performance as Seiichiro, with a focus, passion and touch of madness that transforms what could have been another genre exercise into a dazzling portrait of the artist who is the real thing in every way - but his art.