I watched the movie adaptation of 本陣殺人事件, which I read recently and talked about here.
Happy to report that I did indeed picture the situation correctly! So I guess I can read some Japanese after all…
What I thought of the 1970s Honjin Murders movie
I always had mixed feelings with how English Lit classes would use watching the adaptation as a go-to chill day after finishing discussion on a book, but I gotta admit - it’s got a hell of a lot of charm with the language factor added in. It was super interesting to see both how everything happened exactly how I imagined it, since the description was so meticulous and vivid, and more visually infused with detail than of course I could ever have managed. Stuff like “what does a Japanese bride wear” or “what does a koto sound like” are things I’m not going to be able to picture as well as a full film production can for me, no matter how good the description is, after all.
And it’s a very faithful adaptation too. The Japanese wikipedia page actually enumerates every small difference and I felt pretty smug for having noticed most of them. The biggest change is that it’s not treated as a period piece, so Kindaichi, for example, is wearing extremely 1970s clothes. It also, in an effort to eke more substantial characters out of the story, lingers a lot more on a particular important side character.
In general I’d kind of describe it like – the original novel has a kind-of silly mystery at its core, and Yokomizo grounds it extensively in a specific time and place, rooting it firmly and making it come across more plausible and meaningful than it would be otherwise.
And this movie version takes the same kind-of silly mystery and builds a visually compelling movie around it. Without that same time and pace the novel has, I think it masks the core silliness of the mystery a lot less well, and in general feels a lot less substantial as something meaningful, but it does a good job replicating the same beats in a different way in a completely different medium, and it looks really cool in places.
Very fun with the novel so fresh in my mind, but wouldn’t ever recommend it in the novel’s place!
The copy I have lacks any subtitles at all, but I remember almost everything that happens in the novel still, so it turned out to not really be a problem at all. Remembering all the important unusual nouns that people might talk about helped a TON, and if I missed nuance of what people said… well, I didn’t notice because I’d just unconsciously remember the novel instead.
One embarrassing misunderstanding the movie did shed light on:
Early on, a character is described as wearing an 大きなマスク and I remember not being sure what to picture and being very confused that this big mask covering half his face somehow wasn’t more of a big deal to the people around him.
The movie showed me the obvious mistake - it’s the “mask up” kind of mask, not a 仮面, and I’m a fool.
One detail I’m still a bit confused by is a hollow bamboo shoot - I wasn’t 100% sure how to picture it in the book, and in the movie it was like, tied aloft in a tree as possibly a landscaping / bonsai-adjacent style of thing… but I’m not sure.
In any case again, the central contrivance I pictured exactly correctly and I’m still stoked about that.
Anyway, the only other comment that comes to mind is a complaint that Kindaichi himself came across as kind of boring here! It seems like he does quite a bit less actual detective work, and I didn’t catch his stuttering and cheekiness about it either.
P.S. to add also – the flow of description and order events are shown is completely changed - necessarily since it’s a different medium, but still for the worse. And it makes some sections a lot less vivid, like the scene where the bodies are discovered is long and tense and exciting in the book, but here loses a lot. The snow extremely fake, for one. And it’s hard for the visuals of something like that scene to live up to your imagination running wild.
Other than that, recently my tokusatsu tide has ebbed and my wrestling moon has waxed, so @fallynleaf can probably expect to get tagged in stuff here and in the other extensive thread soonish.
I wanted to watch a wrestling show (with a 耳 済ます’d for the commentary), so I picked the big Cyber Fight Festival show from a month or so ago since it’s on vod now… before realizing that it’s coincidentally a pretty big wrestling weekend for NJPW right now - so I ended up watching Summer Struggle in Nagoya today, and plan to watch Wrestle Gland Slam tomorrow and then Cyber Fight Festival after/during the week (since the latter is less time sensitive since I think I already know who wins the big matches from magazine covers).
Summer Struggle in Nagoya thoughts
While it’s not the most remarkable show (still lead-up to the Grand Slam, we’ll see how that goes), it was good to just sit and watch an Ishii match (and a Tanahashi match) again. I love both of those wrestlers, and among the bevy of reasons to be a bit ambivalent about NJPW these days, I think a major one for me is just that stalwart card highlights like Ishii and Suzuki are naturally shifting slowly more into the background as time moves on.
It was good to hear Milano Connection A.T.'s voice again, too! It’s interesting to hear Japanese commentary slowly start to like… do what commentary is meant to do for me as I pick out more. Now they really do help me key into what moves to expect. Their unison E- whenever EVIL almost hits his finishing move (that is also called EVIL) is wonderful, for example. And I can even pick out some details I didn’t know, like this being Ishii’s first singles match with Bullet Club EVIL. Or I heard them say 地元 talking about Okada, and sure enough - He’s from Aichi.
Along similar lines, but visual (still 100% related to my studies and SRS and stuff though), I saw Takagi’s entrance:
and thought (while suppressing the lingering suspicion he’d look even cooler with the old belt) “wait why is he wearing the Takeda clan’s mon?”
Turns out, Takagi’s from Yamanashi, and the domain that’s now Yamanashi Prefecture is 甲斐国 (Kai), which is where the Takeda clan was based, including the famous Sengoku general (and subject of the Kurosawa movie Kagemusha) Takeda Shingen, who’s the reason I put that mon in my anki deck.
So as a dude who clearly is into the place he’s from, it makes sense as a symbol to use, and in fact - here’s a tweet of him visiting a shrine dedicated to Takeda Shingen.
(Come to think of it, 鷹木信悟 and 武田信玄 are awfully similar names with a shared kanji as well)
Anyway, pretty cool unexpected connection for me to come across!
A last tidbit is I caught a phrase from commentary that must come in handy a lot during Bullet Club matches (blurred since it does kind of spoil the ending of a match):
最悪なタイミングでレフェリーが復活
I’ve also taken to listening to a couple episodes of the NJPW podcast on my weekly grocery/shupro run.
A bit more thoughts about the wrestling podcast
It’s got 1 guest per month, with an interview split up over the weekly episodes, and the guests so far have been Tanahashi, Nagata, and Makabe, which unfortunately for me, means the guests have each been hoarser than the last, with worse audio quality to boot. So my listening comprehension during the interview sections is very much questionable!
I assume at this rate the next month will be Tomoaki Honma calling in from a ガラケー on speakerphone.
My favorite running bit is that, to further apologize for the completely impossible quiz from a few episodes ago, they replayed audio of the person’s confused commentary, and also read out a professional commentary version to try to show exactly how it ended up so incredibly misleading.
The recommended match to watch for one of these episodes was this 2013 one between Shinsuke Nakamura and Kota Ibushi (I really really wish there was a free link I could share), which I’m pretty sure was my first full wrestling match ever!! So obviously I second the recommendation! (Plus it won Best Bout, so there’s that)
There was a time in ~2015, when I was aware that wrestling was deeper and weirder than I thought, and I was intrigued by it, but all I knew to do or was willing to commit to at the time was search for Shinsuke Nakamura on dailymotion or whatever and watch matches that way, with no other context. So I’ve got a vague memory of my first one being Nakamura vs. some goober (lol), and the other possibilities (mainly the big Wrestlemania match with the crown), while certainly ones I saw at the time too, never quite gelled 100% with my memory… and this does! So I’m 90% sure this was my first full match.
I’ve had it playing on the side why they type this… man… remember when Nakamura was the coolest person in the world? Remember what wrestling crowds sound like??
Anyway – no joke, those scattered pirated matches got me through some tough nights, Nakamura signing with WWE made me try out the network, and the rest is history. So anyway, it was a really cool and strange feeling to hear about this match on the podcast!