by Hazel Anna rogers for this Carl Kruse Blog
I just finished reading Tokyo Express (otherwise known as Points and Lines) by Seichō Matsumoto. I found the book at the lido where I go swimming. They have a bookshelf there that you can take books from, or bring books to. I like things like that. The book was water-damaged when I found it, and the pages had that crunkled dried thickness of paper that has been in the rain.
It was not a very long book, and I raced through it, finishing last night at about 11pm, when I switched off my light and lay back in the dark, thinking. Tokyo Express is a crime thriller about an apparent ‘lover’s suicide’ which two detectives suspect to be a case of foul play. Matsumoto’s narrative is shaped by the intricacies of the Japanese train timetable, and it weaves this way and that over the length of the country, from Tokyo to Hokkaido. This is perhaps why its other title is ‘Points and Lines’.
I never thought I was a crime/thriller/murder-mystery sort of person. Not that I was ever staunchly against watching or reading them, it’s just that I’ve never been one to crack out a John Grisham on the family holiday. But during Christmas last year, my family and I somehow found ourselves in a 90s political-crime-thriller-murder-mystery wormhole. ‘The Firm’, ‘The Pelican Brief’, ‘Enemy of the State’, ‘The Hunt for Red October’, ‘The Client’ – safe to say, we were knee-deep in the world of lawyers, scandal, tapped landlines, and heart-in-your-mouth chase sequences. It was a whirlwind that came to pass as a result of us all contracting Covid-19 around the same time – what else was there to do but watch a fresh-faced Tom Cruise uncover the cultish goings-on of a top lawyer’s firm? And then there’s the late and great David Lynch – what are ‘Mulholland Drive’, ‘Lost Highway’, and ‘Twin Peaks’ if not crime-thriller-murder-mysteries of sorts?
Upon returning back home to my apartment in the new year, I had a sudden realisation that I had been callous in my dismissal of the crime/mystery genre. For what is life if not a neverending series of mysteries?
Why is that woman crying?
Why have they put up police tape in front of the apartment block opposite my house?
What was that scream in the night?
What are they shouting about next door?
Who is that man in the window that I watch getting ready in the mornings?
We go about our days surrounded by mysteries, by series’ of unknowings. We just don’t think about them. Why would we? We’re just going about our day, consumed in ourselves, in our phones, in our jobs, in our lives. We know nothing of the people around us, where they live, what they do when the skies turn dark, what they eat, how many lovers they’ve had, what terrible things they might have done. This is why the detective story, the murder mystery, is such a deliciously enticing medium for art, because where previously we knew nothing, through art, we can delightfully presume.
The 90s were the heyday of the thriller/murder mystery/crime genres (I’ll say ‘thrillers’ from hereon out. It’s getting a little out of control with all these hyphens and dashes). Thrillers from in and around the 90s have a particular kind of allure infused with the promise of the turn of the century and all its rapid advances in technology. Yet they are equally imbued with a deep nostalgia for their recent past, and oftentimes reveal their grief for the death of the seeming innocence and isolation of the small town, now corrupted by the ‘new’. The allure of the old-school crime thriller is in its simplicity. Paper trails make evidence easier to acquire, but also easier to destroy. Physical public records, like newspapers, make research more accessible and less gatekept by password-only online databases, but also more painstaking; you have to trawl through reams and reams of documents to find what you’re looking for. Tokyo Express, the novel I mentioned earlier, is set in 1957. In Japan in 1957, people got around by train. Passenger flights had only recently been introduced, and passports were not required to travel on intercountry flights. A name sufficed. Much of the novel, similar to Lynch’s ‘Twin Peaks’, is spent with its protagonist(s) sitting and rifling through old paper records to try and find a glimmer of evidence that might help them solve their respective cases.
It’s difficult to pinpoint why such mind-numbing work is so compelling. I suppose it is, in part, because there is nothing separating you from the protagonist in his strife. There are no computers requiring specialist skills to hack into, no passwords required to gain information. There are just landlines wired into the walls, tape recorders kept in breast pockets, and government documents in big wooden chests in the backrooms of libraries. Such movies, or novels, make you think that you too could solve a crime. And isn’t that just so damn EXCITING!
Ah. Now I’m all dewy-eyed and nostalgic. I remember sitting on the floor of my best friend’s bedroom, dialing ‘141’ into the receiver to make the call anonymous. Then the wait. Phones used to make a sort of ‘beep beep beep beep’, dialing out the number you’d typed in before calling it.
He answered pretty quickly:
“Hello?”
Stifled giggles, then:
“Hello. Is Sandra there? She’s left her cupcakes in the oven and we were wondering when she wanted to collect them?”
A pause.
“This isn’t Sandra – I think you have the wrong – ”
“Yes, no problem, just – if you can tell her she can come and collect them now, that’d be great.”
“Who is this? I don’t know a Sandra – ”
“Well that’s fine, just tell her that the cupcakes are ready, and it’d be great if she could come and get them.”
“I DON’T KNOW WHO SANDRA IS!”
And a long ‘beeeeeeeep’ as our classmate ended the call. We collapsed into giggles on my best friend’s carpeted floor, then began leafing through the huge tome of The Yellow Pages, trying to decide which company to prank call.
For our classmate, the one who received the ‘Sandra Cupcake’ call, this may remain his life’s greatest mystery. For all I know, he may have penned down a book based on the strange call he received, aged 10, from a woman demanding some cupcakes be collected. This was how we made our entertainment, when I was little. Listening into private calls, turning the pages of phone directories, turning down the lights and telling terrible stories to the tune of the darkness.
Time has passed, and I sit here on my laptop with my emails open and my mobile phone beside me in my bag. My laptop is connected to my phone’s 4G, allowing me to browse the internet. My internet searches are recorded by my browser. The cookies stored by the browser are used by third parties to try and sell me things. My father just sent me a message on WhatsApp, and it arrived almost instantaneously to my phone after he clicked ‘send’. I just bought a hot drink at a cafe, the cafe where I am working. I paid with my debit card, which is connected to my bank, so my bank knows where I have been spending my money.
It feels like the mystery is all but dead. If I were to commit a devastating crime, right this instant, I would be discovered within moments. That isn’t to say there aren’t great mystery/thriller shows being made today – I just started ‘Severance’, and it’s a beautifully intricate story that weaves its mystery into your brain as you drift off to sleep.
But it’s different, for sure. There is less space for naivety, for innocence, like that of the teenagers in the original ‘Twin Peaks’. Lynch acknowledges this in the last season of the series. ‘Twin Peaks: The Return’ has a distinctly rotten feel about it; The Roadhouse bar, previously a relatively warm old joint, becomes the locale for various disjointed and loathsome interactions between minor characters, which are never developed further. Twin Peaks itself has become plagued by traffic, drugs, violence, and hopelessness. Norma’s infamous ‘Double R Diner’ has become a franchise, with several branches dotted around the state. The beauty of the little town of Twin Peaks is depicted in utter dilapidation brought on by the rapid modernisation we all encountered during the mid-to-late 2000s. Suddenly, we all had smartphones. Suddenly, we all had laptops and tablets and smart-watches. Suddenly, VHS and DVDs turned into Netflix. Suddenly, we all paid for our coffee using contactless payment. Suddenly, paper money turned plastic.
It all happened so fast, didn’t it? And it’s beautiful, incredible, to see how quickly it all changes. It really is. Day to day, we don’t see it, and then it’s there, and the world looks all different and maybe we weren’t quite ready for it, but it’s brilliant and sad and strange and alien all at once.
But even with all of this, with all this information streaming out of the ends of my fingers as I type endless searches into Google, as I scroll through the headlines on the news outlets, as I read infographics posted by people on Instagram – still, here we are, still kept awake thinking on the curious mystery of living.
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This Carl Kruse blog homepage is at https://carlkruse.at
Contact: carl AT carlkruse DOT com
Other articles by Hazel include Is Horror Having a Renaissance, Has Rave culture Died, and Art for Arts Sake.
A;so find Carl Kruseon Dwell.
