Two Guns, One Mouth: Dual Adaptations of the Same Novel from the Same Director
by Jason Suzuki
“I wanted to make myself a Napoleon,” states Raskolnikov, “and that is why I killed her.”
-Crime and Punishment
A LONER HAPPENS UPON A CRIME SCENE. Next to the corpse and amongst the gore is a handgun. It still has four bullets in it. They decide to keep it. Hijinks ensue. This is the set-up to Fuminori Nakamura’s debut novel The Gun (2002). A deeply psychological work that recalls The Stranger and the stories of Patricia Highsmith. The way the cards fall once the protagonist takes the gun cannot merely be checked off and explained by a dramatic principle. The premise is elegant enough to stand with other noir starting points that have yielded so many variations: a woman waiting in a detective’s office; a square seeing something he shouldn’t have; lovers on the run; etc., Nakamura’s work eventually received English translations starting in 2012 with The Thief. Accolades were acquired such as the David Goodis Award, placing him in the hard-boiled lineage even if some critics insist his work is above sitting on the crime shelves. And while Nakamura continued the existential streak in subsequent writings, it is film director Masaharu Take who saw the potential for multiple exercises in nihilism. Tackling the story twice, The Gun was released in 2018 and two years later we had The Gun 2020.
December 2020. A Tokyo District Court judge sentences Takahiro Shiraishi to death. The 29-year-old plead guilty to killing nine people. His victims – 8 women and 1 man – had expressed suicidal thoughts on Twitter. Using the name “Hangman,” Shiraishi would invite his victims to his home, offering to help them die. He would rape, strangle, dismember, and store body parts in his apartment. His lawyers argued for the lesser charge of “murder with consent.” He later disputed the consent.
THERE’S PRECEDENT for a filmmaker to have another go at the same material but the proximity between the two Guns is interesting. It was 30 years in between Kon Ichikawa’s film versions of The Inugami Curse (1976 to 2006), both based on the 1951 entry in the Kosuke Kindaichi mystery novel series. Both films are rather straightforward attempts at the book. The latter film comes off as a re-do with a new cast and new tech. The Gun 2020 however is not a straight adaptation. What Take has done has a closer kinship to Mingus’ “Haitian Fight Song” and “II B.S.” An evolution of an idea. Similar enough to be chained together but running in different directions, seeing how far they can go before being torqued back. “After the completion of the previous The Gun,” writes director Take via email communication, “I had a conversation with [the author] and his wife over a meal, and we were thrilled with Kyoko Hinami – who played the ‘Toast Woman’ character – who exceeded our expectations. And during that conversation we started to conceptualize what would have happened if the Toast Woman had shot the gun. And that became the basis for the next movie.”
The “Toast Woman,” is the chick that Nishikawa – the protagonist of the novel and the first film – forms a sexual relationship with after a drunken night out with friends. There are no direct tells that the keeper of the weapon in The Gun 2020 is supposed to be the same character. For one, they give her a name: Toko. Where she lives is different from the Toast Woman. It’s more run down, sharing a likeness with the dump Nishikawa lives in. Her social life consists of a tormenting mother and a stalker who is cavalier (sloppy? polite?) enough to make his presence known but that’s where his boldness stops. Relatively harmless. It’s hard to imagine her going out to karaoke with friends and meeting a college boy to fuck around with on the side of her main squeeze. Toko doesn’t even have a squeeze. While Nishikawa could fake it up with the rest of them in social interactions, it is Toko who is authentically fringe.
July 2020. A car was deliberately driven into a three-person weed-cutting crew in Aichi prefecture. One of the men died later in the hospital while the other two remain seriously injured. The driver, 27-year-old Kei Aono, proclaimed “I wanted to be God. I wanted to kill. Anyone would do.” He attempted to flee the scene in a second truck.
THERE’S A GOOD CHANCE Japan will be brought up on those instances where gun control is the fleeting debate of the day. Known for its strictness, the country’s policies have a history dating back to the Meiji era, even earlier if you count sword hunts from the Sengoku era, where enemies of newly installed regimes have their weapons confiscated. Sword hunts became outright sword bans during the Meiji restoration. Samurai, peasants, and everyone in between were forbidden from carrying blades effectively ending the country’s caste system in favor of the military and police being the only ones armed. Fast forward through further laws and revisions. Rifles and shotguns are fine as long as for hunting or sport shooting. Just try making the case for a handgun being used for either of those activities. Handguns are banned outright.
Every bullet must be accounted for. In order to get more, the used cartridges need to be returned. At a shooting range, the shells need to be gathered up. Cops don’t carry their guns off duty. A police officer was posthumously charged with a criminal offence when he used a gun to kill himself. He did so while on-duty.
A couple years back film director Toshiaki Toyoda was arrested on suspicions of possessing a firearm, eventually released once investigators discovered it was a WWII-era heirloom that no longer worked. The next year he directed the short Wolf’s Calling which opens with a woman finding a gun while going through family keepsakes in her attic.
What this stringency adds up to is extra taboo for the protagonists of the films. Possession of the gun plays into their highly internalized lives as they have to keep it hidden. But trying to keep it hush-hush can lead to obsession. The gun becomes a metaphor for the divide between private and public. You can aim it outward or inward.
May 2021. A decayed corpse was found in a suitcase along the shore of Lake Biwa. Age and gender are not known due to the decay. Foul play is not suspected, just abandoning a corpse.
THERE ARE OTHER ICONIC JAPANESE FILMS WHERE A GUN PLAYS A CRUCIAL ROLE. Stray Dog (1949) where a cop looks for his stolen gun. Bullet Ballet (1998) where a man spirals after the suicide of his girlfriend by a handgun. He seeks revenge after being robbed by a gang of punks. After getting scammed while trying to buy a gun, he decides to make his own. His homemade gun shoots askew. It’s an extension of his twisted psyche, possibly reflective of hesitancy to do harm.
In the film Love Exposure (2008) a character imagines that there are invisible bullets flying all over Tokyo. A variation on the string of fate, these bullets become a connective material. “For those who can see the bullets,” the character states, “death isn’t an accident.”
July 2019. Around 10:35am, emergency services received a distress call about “an explosion on the first floor” of a Kyoto based animation studio. Over thirty fire trucks battle the flames. As reports come in, the number of casualties rise. Starting from 1 dead, 9 unconscious becomes 13 feared dead then more than 20 feared dead and then simply 33 dead, 36 dead. Nearby a backpack and bag containing knives and a hammer were found. Almost a year later police were finally able to arrest the suspect, a 42-year-old who badly injured himself while starting the fire. He believed the animation studio had stolen his novels.
THE MOST OBVIOUS DIFFERENCE between the two films is that it’s a man who keeps the gun in one and a woman in the other. “When a human holds a gun,” per director Take, “which also symbolized stress, we thought that the stress that a woman or a man carries would differ based on their gender, where the gun had the role of expressing the feelings of the character that carried it.” The characters find themselves in the gun. It’s unclear who is an extension of what. Toko writes that she took the gun because it seemed unhappy.
The man/woman dichotomy is well-tread. Nishikawa’s newfound gun ownership gets mixed up against the emasculating forces in his life. Toko now has a new type of empowerment against predatory men. These are tropes we’ve seen before. The similarities between the two are more intriguing to read into.
Take also wants to look at it beyond the most basic of identity politics, “As society moves forward though, instead of tying that expression to defined male or female identities, there will be more versatility that depends highly on the individual.”
The gun takes on a sexual role for both of the protagonists. Nishikawa admits that the girl he just slept with was no match for his newfound obsession. Toko brushes the steel of the barrel against her thighs after caressing it against her bosom. The intimacy makes the crime even more illicit. Something so lethal can replace the intimacy missing in their lives.
The number of bullets still left in the chamber is unchanged between the films. Four, meaning death. An omen of intoxicating doom. Pistolet fatale.
May 2019. Kawasaki City, Kanagawa Prefecture. A 51-year-old man held a knife in each hand as he approached those lining up for the school bus. Out of the twenty people stabbed only two were not children. Out of the three dead, only one was the perpetrator. The Prime Minister – who sought to revise Article 9 of the Constitution – says he “felt a strong anger” about the attack.
IN ONE OF NAKAMURA’S OTHER BOOKS, The Kingdom, the protagonist needs to get rid of a gun. “If I just threw it away randomly, I’d feel bad. A strange person might pick it up and use it.” She’s a blackmailer who poses as a prostitute, targeting high-profile men. Toko in The Gun 2020 does a low-stakes version of this scam, leading men on to a love hotel, asking them to pay up front before they go in, and then walking off with the cash. The men are aware that if they make a scene then people will know what they were up to. The protagonist in The Kingdom eventually decides to leave the gun in a mailbox, reasoning that a postal worker would do the responsible thing once they find it. From the point of view of the postal worker though, this could be another The Gun depending on how “strange” they are. Hamlet could just as well hold a gun instead of a skull, asking the same questions.
October 2018. Hyogo prefecture. At the scene of a traffic accident between a car and his bicycle, 29-year-old Kosuke Umegaki kicked the officer questioning him and snatched his service pistol. Once apprehended, Umegaki admitted to allegations of robbery and interfering with the duties of a public servant. The gun was meant for committing suicide, said the police on his behalf.
THE GUN CULMINATES WITH NISHIKAWA TURNING IT ON ANOTHER PERSON[1]. Previously he had used the gun to blast an injured cat out of its misery but eventually succumbs to the temptation of murder while on a bus-ride to finally get rid of the thing in a remote location. In the novel, “the world had changed” is how this scene is written about. Director Take states, “we believed this to be the key or the turning point, and so we contemplated how to express this.” To the filmmaker, it is when Nishikawa finally experiences “the real world.” Almost immediately once Nishikawa enters this world he begins to fumble for another bullet, one that can get him out of there.
Take admits “using monochrome was thought to best represent the gun itself.” This evokes the world of film noir but most things look better in black and white anyway. Still, the stylistic choice forces a dichotomy between the before and after of killing someone. More importantly it gives us more insight into Nishikawa through formal choices, much like a film noir. The Gun 2020 doesn’t do the monochrome/color thing. It’s still visually striking in full color. It also opts out of character voice over. It’s more ambiguous because of it. But to appreciate the changes we have to take into account the previous film. They are in conversation which makes 2020 all the more engaging.
April 2017. A 60-year-old woman was arrested and eventually prosecuted for the murder of her 73-year-old neighbor almost a decade prior. Shoko Kikuchi was implicated in the crime after the results of a DNA analysis underneath the victim’s fingernails. Kimiko Tejima was found in her apartment with stab wounds to the neck and abdomen. ”I just wanted to kill someone,” said Kikuchi, admitting to the allegations upon her arrest. She even denied being acquaintances with her neighbor.
WHEN ASKED what the variation of a third The Gun would be, Take leaves it open, “Because it would be in a world after Covid, it is clear it will be a different movie from the previous two shot before Covid.” Seems an obvious enough thing to assume but it might be harder to differentiate this third version than one would think. Quarantines and stay-at-home orders are the perfect plot points to incorporate the isolation and the alienation of person-to-person interactions that are already seeping from the prior Guns’ internalized worlds. The second film being called The Gun 2020 should add to the confusion as the year was immediately memed into whatever the opposite of a goat is. The forbidden nature of possessing the gun provides the protagonists with an all-consuming rush that gets increasingly difficult to keep close to the vest. And with a pandemic setting, venturing outside too can have a taboo quality. Inside or out there is no escape from the otherworldly. A true people person would make for a third test subject that stands out from the fakery of Nishikawa and the fringe vibes of Toko from The Gun 2020. You can have a character whose new circle of friends is in the form of a revolving cylinder, more willing to accept a “new normal” than they would like to admit. Enjoying the pandemic for all the moral grandstanding it allows. The thought of shooting someone to have some trace of human interaction could be uneasy enough waters to splash around in.
February 2021. A police officer found his 29-year-old colleague bleeding from the head in the police station toilet. His service revolver was with him in the bathroom and a letter found in his locker. The officer worked in an automobile division at the station.
REFERENCES TO THE WAR in Afghanistan in the novel are updated to US-backed regime change skirmishes in Syria for the film. American empire becomes a backdrop/counterpoint to the highly internalized world of our man with the gun. He turns on the TV, sees the news. Global then local. International warfare then a body found in a nearby town. Death on different scales. There’s the question of whether it’s the gun itself that begets the violence. Would Nishikawa or Toko have committed their crimes without it? Is violence inevitable? Was finding the gun inevitable? Those who want to hurt others will find a way to do so. Call it human ingenuity. In a recent presidential memoir, the author speaks of killings abroad. The kind that he signed off on and carried out with cutting-edge war tech. Despite wanting to save these “warped and stunted” men who were caught in the crosshairs, the author cites the machinery that he commanded as a reason for why they had to die. Don’t you hate it when that happens? The passage would be chilling for anyone with a standard for humanity that hasn’t already hit the floor.
May 1938. Nearly half of a small village near Tsuyama was massacred in one night by 21-year-old Matsuo Toi. After severing the electricity line to the village, Toi visited various homes with nothing but a katana, axe, and a Browning. He wore two flashlights on his head. Previously, his attempts at yobai were unsuccessful leaving him sexless. Two years earlier his sister was married off. He lived alone with his grandmother whom he beheaded. His body count reached thirty. Toi didn’t wait for the authorities and at dawn aimed his shotgun at his chest. He believed it was his Tuberculosis that made him a pariah.
WHAT DO WE SCAPEGOAT when blood is shed? Atrocity is clay to mold a narrative (i.e. this piece) disguised as explanation. As if making sense of the absurd can prevent the same shit happening again. In the hope of simplicity let’s look solely at Nakamura’s novel. In regards to Nishikawa, there’s the question of nature versus nurture. Going further, there’s the possibility that the individual is not even important in the equation. It’s the machinery that drives. The Gun 2020 asks similar questions. But if the individual who picks up the gun doesn’t matter then we have to ask is it the gun’s fault or is violence inevitable? Director Take extrapolates this question beyond the films:
“Humans are easily dominated by their tools. A gun is a tool created for killing. In these 10 years, it is creepy to see a flock of people unable to let go of their smart phones, and it makes me shiver picturing that these phones were guns instead. Fortunately, Japan does not have a gun-culture, but imagining how tense it may be in a society with a gun-culture like the U.S. makes me shiver. I sometimes think how one may not be able to live out a life of “not killing people, not being killed by people.” Which then I think, how about driving a car? and so I have not yet acquired a driver’s license.”
He continues:
“Upon reflections on an unfortunate past, Japan has kept the position of not being in a war for 75 years. It may be that the nation, society, households, individuals, must continuously make an effort to keep a standard of containing violence. It is an eternal topic.”
All this discourse on the individual helps to distract from large scale bloodshed. It might be easy enough to say you wouldn’t keep a gun if you found one but governments pull millions of triggers in the name of destabilization and profit without too many critical eyes looking. There’s a minor asterisk that needs to be added to Japan abstaining from war for 75 years. What defines war needs to be broadened as it’s more than just troops on the ground (although Japanese troops went to Iraq in 2003). Japan followed the US’ lead when it came to placing sanctions on Syria in 2011, citing violence perpetrated by Assad. But this veil of humanitarianism was nowhere to be found when Abe ramped up business with Israel to over $6 billion by 2019. This was growth that was stimulated by an official visit in 2015, one year after the massacre in Gaza. Just follow the money and this type of violence becomes disturbingly more black and white and easier to understand.
July 2020. Tokyo. Nazuna Hashimoto started suffering serious bouts of depression once Japan increased their preventative measures early into the pandemic. The gym where she worked as a personal trainer put a pause on business and her friends were steadfast in compliance with stay-at-home recommendations. She had a new boyfriend of a few months who would come visit at her request. He would be the one to find her laid out on one of his visits and call the ambulance, saving her life and sabotaging her suicide attempt. Now she speaks openly about her depression, striving to challenge the stigma against open discussion of mental health issues. The two of them have developed an app meant to pair therapists with those looking.
While working on this piece I decided to check out other books from Nakamura. The Thief, with all its awards, seemed like a good place to go. My copy was used but clean. A few pages in, a single word had been highlighted: intrinsically. Further on there was a second highlighted word: yen. The Thief is a quick read. All in all, this person highlighted a total of eleven words. I wondered if stringing them together would create a message meant for me. Intrinsically yen inexorable inundate ambidextrous presentiment syndicate brigands mongrel megalomaniacs arbitrarily. The thought that these were words the reader needed to look up crossed my mind but that felt pretentious. And if that were true I could have seen “furtive” getting the highlight treatment. The book’s previous owner used two different colored highlighters. It was laughable to assign meaning to this but I carried on nonetheless. Maybe the highlighters were for different places that they read in. Yellow for when out and about and orange for when reading in bed. This would mean the closer to the end they got, the more they read before sleep. I think Kurosawa once said something about reading while lying down. I use a black pen to underline or scratch scribbles in the margins to indicate passages I like. The chance of me going back to revisit these marked sections were low but I still did it anyway, like the person who highlighted those words and ended up selling the book anyway. Regardless this felt like a type of human contact that was safe. It would be impossible for my correspondence to reach the previous owner. The only path was for the book to go forward to a new owner. The highlighted words and underlined lines being anonymous transmissions to the next person, which I guess is good enough.
[originally written May 25, 2021]
[1] It shouldn’t be a spoiler to reveal that a gun is fired in the book/movie called The Gun. Regardless, spoilers shouldn’t prevent someone from engaging with a work. If it does, I’d hate to imagine what such a person would do if they find out that they die in the end.