In her new film K-20: Legend Of The Mask (aka K-20: The Fiend With Twenty Faces), director and scriptwriter Sato Shimako has delivered Spider-Man - like excitement and scale, from life-or-death duels at dizzying heights to a fantastically detailed retro-future cityscape. At the same time, she and her collaborators have adapted the superhero genre to local sensibilities, beginning with the title character.
A creation of pioneering Japanese mystery writer Edogawa Rampo (aka Hirai Taro, 1894-1965), “the fiend with twenty faces” is the Moriarty-like criminal rival to the Sherlock-Holmes-like detective Akechi Kogoro. The film, however, is based on a new story by Kitamura So, in which the setting has shifted from an early 20th Century Japan that more or less corresponds to reality to an alternative-history Japan that, as the action begins in 1949, has avoided fighting World War II (no attack on Pearl Harbor, for one thing) and has thus preserved its old class system, with a wealthy aristocracy lording it over a vast, desperately poor proletariat.
The Fiend is a masked thief who deftly filches the treasures of the rich and moves through the urban canyons like a black-cloaked cat. Effortlessly leaping fences and climbing walls, he keeps one quick step ahead his pursuers - and never reveals his identity.
The most grimly determined of those pursuers is the suave, brilliant detective Akechi Kogoro (Nakamura Toru), who is engaged to the impeccably upper-crust, charmingly unworldly Hashiba Yoko (Matsu Takako). His assistant, though, is a delicate-looking, but intensely loyal young chap (Hongo Kanata) - and their relationship has a borderline campy Batman-Robin vibe.
Be that as it may, the film's true center is Endo Heikichi (Kaneshiro Takeshi), a talented, if penniless, circus performer who is employed by a mysterious stranger (Kaga Takeshi) to snap candid photos of Akechi and Yoko. This assignment, however, leads him to being taken for the Fiend. With Akechi and the police in hot pursuit, he must find the real deal -- whom he suspects is his new employer.
The Fiend's prime target, however, is Yoko - and once he snatches her the game is truly joined, with Heikichi and Akechi finding themselves on the same side.
Mark Schilling