“ The Crawler in the Attic ” is based upon the novelette ‘ The Stalker in the Attic ’ by Edogawa Rampo. Rampo ( sometimes written as Ranpo ) is one of Japan ’ s most celebrated authors and the father of japanese detective fabrication american samoa well as one of the key writers of ero-guro ( erotic antic ). There have been a number of adaptations of ‘ The Stalker in the Attic ’, most of which concentrate on sexual perversion rather than the deduction strand of the original report : the most note of which is Nobou Tanaka ’ s “ The Watcher in the Attic ” ( 1976 ), which is contribution of Nikkatsu ’ s original roman pornography cycle. The original story tells the exploits of an nameless protagonist – the narrator – who is so consumed by boredom that he wanders the streets in disguise hop to stumble on something to relieve his boredom. The narrator then moves into a boarding firm where, to his joy, he discovers that he can spy on the other tenants through a opening in the floorboards of the attic board.
“ The Crawler in the Attic ”, as in all the versions I have seen, dispenses with the back-story and rather concentrates on events in the board sign of the zodiac and focalise the narrative around the antics of the ‘ stalker ’. In this translation, a private detective, Akechi Kogoro ( Kusano Kouta ) is commissioned by a young woman, Naoko ( Yuki Mamiya ), to discover whether her fiancé, Endo ( Fuchikami Yasushi ), is having an affair with Teruko ( Kijima Noriko ), a beautiful youthful college scholar. The ‘ watchman ’ in the attic is Goda Saburo ( Kawai Ryunosuke ), who lives in the same boarding house as Teruko, and from his advantage point in the attic spies on Teruko ’ s illegitimate liaisons with Endo. One day, Endo is found dead and it is up to the brilliant Akechi and his wife to discover whether Endo was murdered and if so, who by ?
“ The Crawler in the Attic ”, like Rampo ’ s original report, is about male voyeurism and desire. On the cinema shield, however, this voyeurism has considerable more frisson than on the page. As spectators, we are all voyeurs, watching events unfold on the blind from a [ safe ] distance. here, as much is the encase in japanese eroductions, the spectator is figured as male and the gaze as sadistic, which mirrors the sometimes baffling scenes of sadomasochistic play between Endo and Teruko : a case in point is when Endo hits Teruko so hard across the boldness that she bleeds. The publish of consent is always a crafty one in japanese cinema, specially given that there are a significant numeral of eroductions and repugnance films with rape in the championship or which use rape as a key narrative device.
The habit of darkness and faint combined with an about absence of color, with the exception of the sex scenes, which imbues the narrative with an asian noir sensibility. however, unlike most asian noir films, “ The Crawler in the Attic ” moves from a noir narrative into a classical deduction narrative preferably than the other means around. The minimalist soundtrack with its emphasis on ambient make noise and the use of traditional japanese instrumentality conveys a smell of motionlessness and ambiguity alike to that used by japanese artwork cinema of the 1960s. While Yuki Mamiya plays the function of the young ingénue well and Kusano Kouta is suited to the role as the brilliant detective Akechi, it is Fuchikami Yasushi as the increasingly tormented lothario who stands out.
even though “ The Crawler in the Attic ” had no subtitles and I only understand fundamental japanese, I in truth enjoyed the film. Shoji Kubota manages to bring raw life to what is one of the quintessential japanese eroductions. The filming, music, editing and acting bring to animation Rampo ’ randomness narrative of aberrant behavior and homicidal purpose in what is never lubricious, although not elementary in places, twenty-first century roman pornography.
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