Category Archives: Crime fiction and film from Japan

Mid-year reading report: The Thief, St Kilda Blues, Hanging Devils, In the Morning I’ll Be Gone

Hanging-Devils-Jacket1My reading has been dominated of late by the need to get through a lot of pulp books and material I need to be across for several upcoming literary festival appearances (all of which I’ll also be discussing here in the coming weeks). Between all this, however, I have managed to get through a few books purely for pleasures and I thought it was about time I shared my thoughts on these.

First up is He Jiahong’s Hanging Devils: Hong Jun Investigates. I lamented on this site some time ago about the seeming absence of genuine contemporary crime fiction set in China, written by someone living there. Well, Hanging Devils is just that. According to the back cover blurb, the author is one of China’s foremost authorities on criminal justice, a professor of law at People’s University of Beijing and the author of several best selling crime novels including four featuring the character of Hong Ju.

Hanging Devils (also the slang term given to overhanging tree branches that can fall without warning, potential killing anyone unfortunate to be underneath them) is set in the mid-nineties.… Read more

Pulp Friday: spy pulp part 2, Assignment Asia

To commemorate the 50th anniversary of James Bond, last week’s Pulp Friday was a selection of spy themed pulp covers.

This week’s post takes us to one of the main battlegrounds for pulp spies in the sixties and seventies – Asia.

The Cold War was in full swing and those Reds were getting up to all kinds of nefarious activity behind the bamboo curtain, everything from kidnapping, sabotaging America’s space program, developing bubonic plague, drug running, to assassination.

And secret agents like Mark Hood (The Bamboo Bomb) Butler (Chinese Roulette) Death Merchant (Chinese Conspiracy), Joe Gall (The Star Ruby Contract) and Drake (“The man with nobody’s face” in Operation Checkmate), Nick Carter (The Defector) and Sam Durell (the Assignment series, over 48 of which were written), were in the thick of it.

They usually committed a lot of violence, had a lot of sex, and travelled to exotic locations. The books below are set in China, Singapore, Hawaii, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Thailand, Japan and Sri Lanka.

And, of course, there were some great covers. My favourite is the Robert Mcginnis illustration for Scott S Stone’s The Dragon’s Eye. But I’m also rather taken with the sleazy eighties feel of the photograph on the cover of Assignment Bangkok.… Read more

Blackmail Is My Life

A couple of nights ago I finally got around to viewing a film that’s been on my must-watch pile of DVDs for ages, Kinji Fukasaku’s Blackmail Is My Life.

Regular Pulp Curry readers will know I have a bit of a thing for Fukasaku’s work, having previously reviewed two of his films on this site, Yakuza Graveyard (1976) and Street Mobster (1972).

Released in 1968, Blackmail is set in Tokyo at the beginning of the country’s economic boom. The story revolves  around four young slackers who will do anything to avoid the trappings of mainstream middle class life. They are a tight knit group comprising former Yakuza, Seki, ex-boxer Zero, Tom Boy sex bomb Otoki, and their leader, Muraki.

Muraki may look like a bit of a fool with his hounds tooth jacket and permanent grin but he’s an expert in his chosen craft – blackmail. He’s also completely unafraid of anything. As he puts it: “The bigger and tougher they are the more reason to taker them down.”

Their targets are mostly “stupid arsed salary types”, low level starlets and businessmen who the gang secretly film committing adultery in seedy love hotels. But Muraki is keen to take things up a notch. His opportunity comes when he leans of the existence of the ‘Otaguro Memorandum’, a document that could bring down a corrupt high-level Japanese politician if it ever saw the light of day.… Read more

Street Mobster

MobsterKinji Fukasaku’s Street Mobster focuses on the short, fast life of Isamu Okita (Bunta Sugawara), a chinpira or low–level street punk with no firm gang allegiance, trying to carve out a criminal living in an unknown Japanese city sometime after World War Two.

His mother was a prostitute who drowned while on a drunk, his father unknown. As Okita’s narration over a photomontage at the beginning tells us the date of his birth, August 15, 1945, the day Japan formally surrendered, is considered unlucky.

Okita doesn’t care, he makes his own luck, pimping, brawling and extorting his way through life with his gang of fellow chinpira, until their activities come to the attention of the local yakuza, the Takigawa, who want their cut of the takings. His refusal to pay homage results in a severe beating, which Okita pays back by charging into a sauna and slashing several yakuza goons with a butcher’s knife.

Upon his release from prison many years later, Okita finds the world has changed. The streets are full of “straight people” enjoying the prosperity of Japan’s economic boom in the sixties. The yakuza, meanwhile have retired to their glass and concrete office towers to manage their illegal activities.

It’s not long before Okita has formed another gang of chinpira.Read more

Yakuza Graveyard (and the start of my journey into Japanese crime cinema)

For someone who hosts a blog on crime fiction and film from Australia and Asia, I have to admit I’ve seen very few Japanese Yakuza films.

Indeed, one of my New Year resolutions for 2011 is to make some serious inroads into this fascinating genre of Asian crime film.

But where do I start the journey?

A large number of films featuring the organised crime syndicates known as the Yakuza have been made in Japan since 1945. These can roughly be categorised into several distinct phases.

The first was the so-called ninkyo eiga or ‘Chivalry films” made after World War Two. Japan was occupied, much of it had been destroyed and the economy was a mess. The public needed a hero and the Yakuza began to replace the samurai as the staple of popular Japanese cinema, sticking up for the little guy against Westernised, corrupt Japanese businessmen and politicians.

The sixties saw the emergence of new directors (the best known of which was Seijun Suzuki) who depicted the Yakuza and their elaborate rituals as no different to the trials and tribulations of the average Japanese salary man. Whether you worked for a homicidal crime boss or a large corporation, the hours were long, career advancement was hard and someone was always ready to take your place the moment you tripped up.… Read more