The Maiku Hama Trilogy

So here we are people, beside the gleaming discs of the mythical Maiku Hama Trilogy. An exaggeration? I should say not, having seen the first film: The Most Terrible Time in my Life shown on Channel 4 in the small hours of Sunday morning perhaps twenty-five years earlier and being enthralled by the Yokohama detective Maiku Hama and that sudden colour-filled ending. Yes, the Maiku Hama Trilogy has been on my list for years, always slipping through my fingers - there were US DVDs but... sold out and the few remaining copies are HOW MUCH? I also found the crowdfunding for a 4k restoration too late. Some films are the holy grail.  

What’s more I had never seen the follow-ups: The Stairway to the Distant Past and The Trap.  

Going back years, the director Kaizo Hayashi’s work has been painfully hard to get. HB Films released a pretty terrible print of Zipang. I saw this first, then the glorious To Sleep so as to Dream at the Zipang film festival, but that seemed lost for a home viewing until Arrow finally released the 4K restoration.  Ironically, a friend of mine asked them to release the film years ago and they didn't think it would sell. So are we reaching a point where more of Hayashi’s films could see the light of day? The ICA own a print and occasionally screen his second film Circus Boys, and now we have at last the 4K restoration of the Maiku Hama trilogy. 

But of course having last seen the first film close to quarter of a century earlier there is always the risk that memory clouds reality, and the sequels could be dross. Equally, my love of To Sleep so as to Dream could topple the trilogy.  

So I sat on my screeners.  

In part to watch as many as I could on the big screen and also honestly because I’d been feeling rough and these films were just too important not to be treated with the love and respect my mind had wrapped around them. Yes I know, we’re in sad cinephile territory - it may not be life and death, but it's not far off. Returning to The Most Terrible Time in my Life and being given access to The Stairway to the Distant Past at the cosy grindhouse of The Nickel cinema, followed y watching The Trap the next day at home, what awaited me? 

What indeed. Read on. 

Ex-juvenile delinquent now private eye Maiku Hama (Masatoshi Nagase) works so that his younger sister Akane (Mika Ohmine) can go to a good school and a better college. From his office overlooking the cinema screen (literally) he’ll take any job but cannot guarantee results. No matter, he has his mentor Joe Shishido (Jo Shishido) to keep watch over him. In The Most Terrible Time in my Life he almost loses a finger but gains a friend, the Taiwanese immigrant Yang (Hai-Ping Yang), who hires Hama to look for his brother who may just be at the centre of a yakuza war.

No problem, as this is nothing compared to the return of his mother, Lily (Haruko Wanibuchi) and an investigation into the waterfront where even the yakuza fear to tread due to the presence of the The White Man (Eiji Okada) in the subsequent The Stairway to the Distant Past.

That done with, Hama must face tougher challenges in The Trap such as falling in love with Yuriko (Yui Natsukawa), a series of murdered women for which he is under suspicion and worse, a doppelganger with an eye on his girlfriend. 

If you wanted to be broad about the description of the trilogy you’d have to say that the Maiku Hama films are pastiches, but pastiches that often move between genres, moods and tones within mere moments. You can then assume these should be films that cinephiles should love because of the filmic nods and winks, the signs and signifiers, but really this doesn’t matter. Missing what is being pastiched won’t cause you to fail to enjoy them because these are films that are smart, stylish, well-acted, skilfully directed, so “getting it” makes no difference whatsoever.

What will hit you as the films unfold is that they were developed as a trilogy; the first film was successful enough to make the remaining two a reality. I still remember watching the first film on TV, where it moves from black and white to a sudden colour montage. Oh my.

Of course back then I couldn't have been certain that the ending's claim of a continuance would be genuine. It's probably fair to say that this promise was more of a hope by the film-makers of the time who I have no doubt had scripts ready, but were unlikely to have been assured of funding before release. Happily it all came together in the end.

So the films. Director Kaizo Hayashi is happy to have Maiku Hama break the fourth wall and each film does this very early on, with Hama addressing the audience directly. To Sleep so as to Dream is derived from dream-like silent cinema, understandably here they are driven by hard-boiled cinema, by thrillers and even psychological horror by the time we get into the final film of the trilogy, The Trap. 

But let’s look at some of our recurring cast: 

Maiku Hama, the ex-juvenile delinquent turned PI. Incompetent? Maybe a little but he more than makes up for it in effort. Even when on a bicycle looking for someone's lost dog. Even if he is always broke. Well, mainly always. 

But we all need friends and taxi-driver ex-juvie, Hoshino (Kiyotaka Nanbara) is a good friend to have in a pinch. Pick a lock, drive a cab, punch a guy. We all need friends. 

And if we need friends we need parents. Well, less said about Maiku’s parentage the better; a father who is sometimes a mentor and who beette Joe Shishido? I mean. It’s Joe Fucking Shishido, what more do you want? OK, Joe Shishido twirling a cane and drinking into the wee hours of the morning perhaps.

But if we have friends like Hoshino we have police detectives like Nakayama (Akaji Maro), corrupt and more likely to punch you than say hello. Putting you in juvenile detention is nothing to him, he’ll also force you to buy him coffee. 

And what more do you need to keep you on straight and narrow but a younger sister like Akane, whose future could be so much more than yours ever was or will be. 

Yet, there’s yakuza turned politicians like Kanno (Shiro Sano) who are on the make and happy to let their goons like Yamaguchi (Shinya Tsukamoto) go full crazy on you. Yeah, that’s never good, especially when they are mixed up with your friends. 

If you haven’t already got the Maiku Hama reference read up on your hard-boiled fiction. Mike Hammer was Mickey Spillane’s signature PI, but Philip Marlowe he is not. Hell, he's not even Sam Spade (who Hama has a picture of in his office alomg with Bogart from The Maltese Falcon). Spillane’s Hammer was about as vile a character as you can imagine; vain, misogynistic, nigh psychopathic to the point where director Robert Aldrich and his screenwriter A I Bezzerides when adapting Kiss Me Deadly actually undermined the character because they so despised him. Ironic then that Spillane sold enough novels in the US to have been said to have single-handedly created the paperback industry. There’s no accounting for taste...

In a way Hayashi does the same here. Maiku Hama might be his real name (something that the character keeps reminding us of) but he is a far cry from Mike Hammer and if anything as the films progress, we see Hama adapt and grow, something Spillane’s character would be unable to do. Yang, the Taiwanese with a past and who pulls Hama into a gang war web in the first film becomes a firm friend and shows a side of Hama that is different to how he is with those that he grew up with, or to Hoshino or his sister. Yang is someone that Maiku Hama wants to help, to save him from himself and his situation. In the second film he wants to protect his sister from... well, their stripper mother. In the final film, having fallen for Yuriko there’s the risk of her falling into the clutches of the dangerous Mizuki (Tomoko Yamaguchi) and Mikki (Nagase, again). 

Yet the confidence in the filmmaking is there right from the start as it is in one crucial other place; Masatoshi Nagase’s performance. It is so very, very easy to miss in his Maiku Hama how easily he moves between the aspects of his character, sliding without us noticing from melodrama to stone-cold seriousness via a comedic loss of a finger by way of stylised action. There’s something about how Nagase captures each element of his private detective that is deeply yet quietly impressive. As the films so slide between genres and tones it would have been so easy for aspects of his performance to falter in one particular part, to excel at the comedic dismay at once again being waylaid by the detective Nakayama but failing to be deeply serious in his desire to protect Yang from what he sees as his worst characteristics. Light and breezy, troubled, playful, thoughtful, the lover, the light-footed criminal, it’s fair to say Nagase flows through all the parts he needs to play with an ease that’s easy to neglect so neglect it I shall not. Neither should you. 

But let’s dig into each film a little more deeply. Ok, I know I am taking an odd approach here but that seems very much in the spirit of the films. 

The Most Terrible Time in my Life is most certainly not that. Filmed in delicious black and white (almost), it sets up the series: Hama’s office within the movie house (where you still have to buy a ticket even if you don’t want to watch the movie but see the PI), how he drives his car, his childhood friends, his intros to the camera, his relationship with the detective and with Joe Shishido, his father figure. Updating your yakuza thriller would be an easy description but hardly does the film justice. At its heart and for all its style is the idea of friendship, shown through Yang and Hama; this a film about relationships: Yang and his brother; Yang’s brother with their shared past and splintered future; Maiku Hama and his sister; Hoshina and Hama; it's a film that revolves around who you choose to stick to. Yang’s brother gives up his past, betrays it even, for the New Japs (a yakuza gang led by Kanno). Tangled skeins of relationships abound but it’s the stylish packing of it that works, the sequences such as when Hama and Hoshino go burgling. It’s a scene that works in its often bizarre, brilliant way, utterly stylised, almost surreal at times but filmed and performed with such panache. This is where the pastiche comes in, and it goes away; yes there are some genre conventions but it plays with them and creates of them something remarkable. Such is the fluidity of the film that sequences like this with our actors stylised performances and physical actions matched to the cinematography never overwhelm the film or leave other parts of it seeming less interesting. The film is just as interested in when our cane waggling Joe Shishido enters; it has just as much fun with him, how he performs, moves and engages with Hama, and it’s a sheer pleasure to see Shishido have such fun. At the centre of it all is Nagase as Maiku Hama, morphing his character between modes as effortlessly as you like. 

If screenwriting is like a circus tent then the trilogy is likewise. What do I mean? You leave the most exciting elements for the middle, and I was surprised to find that I enjoyed The Stairway to the Distant Past, which has two stairways to the past: one to his mother, another to the White Man. Luxuriating suddenly in glorious technicolour, the second film feels the most focussed, the most confident in its overall tone and damn, it’s narratively tight. In bringing together story and character it glides into a singular whole that seems not to put a foot wrong. As the story of the waterfront with its White Man that brooks no entry from police or yakuza or corporation, it introduces an elegant mythology that merges with the personal for Maiku Hama. It’s an elegant film, if not always literally; middle-aged stripper and absent parent returned to Yokohama Lily Hama is not someone little Maiku Hama wants to see and doesn’t want his sister to know is still alive. The film takes the emotional attachments of the first film and ratchets them up, adds a dash of melodrama and humour and it works. Oh boy does it work, because it always sets these relationships for all their humour and absurdity in purely human terms. It never treats feelings or emotions as mere simple things and it is the small, unspoken understandings that come to the fore, not any grandiose emotions. 

New Jap yakuza turned politician Kanno – his attack dog Yamaguchi – and detective Nakayama all want a piece of the waterfront. But it’s Hama that gets dragged in to both their machinations and his own past. It’s a neat narrative but unafraid to play it for fun - there’s even a jet ski chase, something that could be an awful cinematic sore thumb but merges into the plot seamlessly and, in some ways, feels important because the playfulness of it balances the awful ramifications of his actions. As this is 1990's Japan, memories of the aftermath of the war still linger and they suffuse the waterfront, the White Man, and those that do his bidding. Even with the numb arse of a slightly underpadded cinema seat while watching the second film, The Stairway to the Distant Past is thrilling filmmaking. It’s also deeply satisfying emotionally. How the mother, Lily, enters and exits the story feels appropriate to her character and to the world has a sense of internal verisimilitude to it; here is someone that could leave her children, return and leave again while still retaining an emotional connection to them, even if it's not an overwhelming one.  

Also, the mythologising of the White Man and how it connects to the post-war era makes it easy to imagine how the waterfront was transformed into what it has become. This is why the film feels so utterly controlled and confident, all the elements mesh and feel entirely real in the context of the film. It’s nearly as good as To Sleep so as to Dream and that's a downright masterpiece.  

Just as Nagase must shift his character between scenes, so too does The Trap move into new territory; the psychological-thriller-horror. Suddenly in love, Maiku Hama, though not unused to being on the backfoot, finds himself not just that but  also wanted by the law via detective Nakayama, who is always willing to think the worst of the man he arrested and had thrown into juvenile detention.  

Honestly, I am a bit more on the fence when it comes to The Trap and suspect I may need to revisit it again as its tonal shift for me did not entirely work. Yet in my mind I am not sure if this is true or not, because as the film progresses I can't decide if it's this shift or something more essential that affected me, Masatoshi Nagase. Or rather his absence. Or to be more precise his absence as Maiku Hama.  

The Trap is arguably a bit too clever and the denouement makes sense of the title and a line from the film about how those that fight against the trap will be destroyed by it. Ostensibly a story of Maiku Hama’s doppelganger Mikki and his sister Mizuki, along with their sinister, physically scarred uncle and the murder of women around Yokohama. It turns into something closer to Hama’s home as Mikki becomes attached to the woman that Maiku Hama is seeing, Yuriko, and becomes their target. Fingered for the killings, Hama must do a runner but he’s protected by a rookie cop (Tetta Sugimoto) and the Yokohama PI's as rallied by Joe Shishido.  

The film looks to balance the dark psychological thriller that veers towards horror and the supernatural, while replicating the quirky absurdity of the earlier films, most often seen in how the PI's of the city troop out with the tricks of their trade to help Hama.

The dark tone and the absurdist lightness don’t always fit together as well as they do in the first two films. Still, Nagase plays all his parts well, including Mikki, where at times you can barely tell it's him (I did a double take or two, asking myself at first if it was someone that looked like him before realising no, it really is). There’s also maybe an issue with Yuriko, who is almost a bit too angelic (she’s also unable to speak), something that comes to the fore at the end and is important to understanding the film’s title and the power of Hama’s nemesis, but it does mean that Nagase has to play the lover with a character that doesn’t have too much screen presence. That and because Hama is often on the run, means that others take over the story at times and it really focusses the mind on how important Nagase as Maiku Hama is to these films. The feature has some stylish sequences, especially those with the shogi board and its manipulation by [spoiler redacted]. But it never quite finds a balance to its elements. Nakayama may still be a detective who is against Hama and his rookie partner may the opposite, but there’s a bit of spark missing. 

Some of that is Nagase's absence from portions of the film or where he's relegated to a passive viewer. That said the previous films set such a high bar, as does some of Hayashi’s other work, and The Trap can't quite live up to it. That said I suspect many people may enjoy this the most, those who enjoy Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s work will, I suspect, lap it up. Everything is relative. And honestly, I just really do need to watch it again. 

The Most Terrible Time in my Life, Careful, Detour, The Narrow Margin, To Sleep With Anger are films that sat with me so I was always looking out for them. Some I managed to get copies of within a mere ten or so years: The Narrow Margin, Detour, Careful (even if no UK release, I mean WTF!?). Others took longer. Meanwhile I saw Hayashi’s first film at the Zipang film festival in the Cinema Museum and that too took on its own iconic image in my mind. Films that matter grow in the mind and how they eventually take form after decades is troubling as the film changes because I change, because memory is a slippery bastard. This is not like watching a set of films like The Big Sleep (probably the film I’ve seen the most times of any) or even, say, Seijun Suzuki’s Taisho Trilogy which I’ve seen several times in a much shorter period of time, where it’s either been with me for a long time but always accessible or newer but equally available and time has allowed me to watch and rewatch them so that I can digest them properly. Two of the films here were new to me, the first is one with memories but those built off that initial viewing (or was it two?), yet some of it was emblazoned: the end to The Most Terrible Time in my Life, with its sudden technicolour shift still lights up in my memory even after having seen the films again. 

So in a way ignore my scoring for this boxset, just ignore the wrap up because I cannot disassociate with all that is great and all that is (again relatively speaking) a bit of a disappointment because I’m just too close to it. I need to watch it all again. And watch it again. I need to allow Kaizo Hayashi’s boxset of Maiku Hama films time to bed in, to separate out from the past, or even the present, such as the joy of seeing The Stairway to the Distant Past on that arse numbing seat (yeah, I think my seat had a padding issue and by film #2 I felt it). 

But if you should do something you should buy and enjoy this boxset. I don’t know much about Kaizo Hayashi’s career after these films, or rather, how he’s not directed more films, why he didn’t have a career like the director that acted in the first two films of the trilogy, Shinya Tsukamoto, but Hayashi at his best is sublime and that is enough to support and be thankful for this release from Third Window.