Past Misdeeds: Devil’s Flute (1979)

Original title: Akuma ga kitarite fue o fuku

Through the transformation of the glorious WTF-Films into the even more glorious Exploder Button and the ensuing server changes, some of my old columns for the site have gone the way of all things internet. I’m going to repost them here in irregular intervals in addition to my usual ramblings.

Please keep in mind these are the old posts presented with only  basic re-writes and improvements. Furthermore, many of these pieces were written years ago, so if you feel offended or need to violently disagree with me in the comments, you can be pretty sure I won’t know why I wrote what I wrote anymore anyhow.

The early years of post-war Japan. Private detective Kosuke Kindaichi (Toshiyuki Nishida) is asked to take a look at the curious affairs of the Tsubaki/Tamamushi family, whose upper class life is taking a turn for the worse. Eisuke Tsubaki (Noboru Nakaya) was the main suspect in a nasty poison murder and robbery affair, but after his name had already been cleared his body was found dead of suicide.

Curiously, nobody seems to have told Tsubaki he's dead, and various members of his family see him appearing at the theatre, and in the windows of the family mansion. It's gotten so disturbing, the family - not exactly a hotbed of sanity in at the best of times - decide to hold a séance. Despite Kindaichi sitting in, there are even more curious things happening during the séance. Some of these, at least, look very much like products of human agency - ghosts, after all, are generally not wont to play records of their very favourite flute pieces when they could do some ghostly fluting of their own.

While Kindaichi seems rather at a loss to explain what and why is going on, someone (or is it something?) kills the doddering family gramps (Eitaro Ozawa), locked room style. With that, a series of unfortunate events gets rolling. Kindaichi starts on an investigation digging up family secrets and hidden sins, all the while trying to protect young, innocent, and pretty Miyako Tsubaki (Tomoko Saito) from the worst fall-out of the confounding affair.

Mystery writer Seishi Yokomizo's character Kosuke Kindaichi has proven so popular in his native Japan that there's a rather impressive number of movie and TV adaptations of the tales, with the detective so ingrained in parts of the popular imagination there's even a rather popular anime, manga etc. cycle about the adventures of his grandson (the latter, it seems, pleasantly unauthorized by the author's heirs).

Yokomizo is often (at least in the few parts of the English language internet talking about him at all) called "the Japanese John Dickson Carr", and going by the Yokomizo adaptations I've seen - the translation situation of the writer's novels into English or German being as bad as typical of nearly all Japanese writers of popular fiction before the advent of the light (that is to say, generally not very interesting) novel - this is one time when that sort of description actually fits. It's not just that Yokomizo is as inordinately fond of locked room mysteries and impossible crimes as Carr, there's a real kinship in the type of impossible crime the writers prefer, with many a well-researched accoutrement of the gothic, the occult, the supernatural and the macabre used in a way that situates these mysteries well inside of the realm of the Weird, resulting in mysteries that need awe-inspiringly (and very often inspired) contrived solutions to be explained as natural instead of supernatural. Personally, I'm not much of an admirer of the "murder as a puzzle" approach of so-called "Golden Age” mysteries, but when that approach is enhanced by copious amounts of séances, ghosts, vampirism, witchcraft and everything else that makes life worth living, I actually turn into something of a fan of the form, particularly when created by the kind of wit and imagination Carr and (again, going by the movie adaptations) Yokomizo brought to the table. Uncommon for the style, the "rational" explanations for the surely supernatural are generally not disappointing with these writers, for their use of sheer, overwrought yet often perfectly well thought out contrivances often reaches a point where their "rationality" seems even stranger than the supernatural would be.

Devil's Flute's director Kosei Saito (that is at least his name when you follow the IMDB - the rather dubious subtitles call him Mitsumasa Saito, and I'm not fluent in Japan apart from knowing how to shout "Help! Ghost!", so take your pick) does some rather extraordinary work with these nearly supernatural aspects of the plot, turning the parts of the movie concerning them into a Japanese approach to the Gothic, reaching intensity through artificiality, theatricality and dark and stormy nights. That aspect of the movie is - not exactly typical for the parts of this kind of film where the "rational" is supposed to assert itself - even strengthened once the identity and motivation of the killer become clear, for their reasons are completely founded on themes and ideas you'd look for in a Gothic novel. This impression is further enhanced by Saito's decision to let his actors - apart from Nishida's Kindaichi, who stands like a rock of basic human decency, understanding, compassion and rationality among the waves of melodramatic insanity surrounding him, undeniably close to Chandler's idea of the private detective as a modern knight - go all out on their melodramatics, with emotional lives that seemingly start at being turned to eleven (and really, what less melodramatic human being would kill for this kind of bullshit, and in that way?), and no stops to be pulled out even in sight.


One could argue that Saito lays this sort of thing on a little too thick from time to time, but I'm not sure Devil's Flute's plot would work at all if the director treated his characters' emotional lives with a more naturalistic approach. It's also quite obvious that Saito is able to enact a little less breathless melodramatic intensity when he wants to, for the film's main emotional set pieces are broken up by scenes that create a very believable post-war Japan, a land of broken people standing right between utterly different approaches to looking at life and reality, and of utterly non-artificial landscape shots, embedding the Gothic melodrama of the film's main plot in a much more conventionally bitter reality.