Fractured landscapes: detection, location and history in Uchida Tomu's Kiga kaikyo/A Fugitive from the Past

Abstract

The narrative of Uchida Tomu's hugely successful, but critically neglected, detective film, Kiga kaikyo/A Fugitive From the Past (1964), traverses time (from the late 1940s to the late 1950s) and space (from rural Northern Japan to the urban streetscapes and communities of Tokyo and the coastal port of Maizuru on the Japan Sea). Ostensibly a work of crime fiction, the film can also be read as both a consideration of the cost of postwar social transformation and the hidden legacies of the trauma of World War II. This essay examines how the film's various topographies specifically help locate a sense of the social changes undergone by Japan in that distinctive phase between its demilitarization and renewed corporate growth. In particular, it redefines Martin Lefebvre's influential work on the ambiguities of the relationship between landscape and film by turning to a more historicized conception of the treatment of space, time and the moving image in one specific instance of Japanese genre cinema from the mid 1960s.