Once Upon a Time in Tokyo: Stray Dog (Dir Akira Kurosawa, 2h2m, 1949)

Few cities capture the cinematic imagination like Tokyo. London? Of course. Rome? We did that two years ago. New York? Inevitably. One does not need to stoop to the old tourist stereotype of the ultramodern, the futuristic meeting the ancient and deeply traditional, to understand why Japan's capital fascinates the Western imagination, as much as fuels the Japanese one. Tokyo is infinite: a battleground, a playground, a deeply divided city and a united one, a city destroyed countless times by its most beloved cinematic creation, Godzilla, and rejuvenated by the next time he, and his foes come rampaging to town. Over the next four weeks, we will visit four views of Tokyo on film; two Japanese, by arguably its greatest directors, and two international, exploring the foreign fascination with the city from afar.

We begin with Akira Kurosawa and the story of a gun, in Stray Dog. This would be Kurosawa's second noir, following the superb, and socially-driven Drunken Angel. Stray Dog sees its star, Toshiro Mifune-for whom little introduction should be necessary-as a junior homicide detective, Murakami, whose gun is stolen from him, and disappears into the capital's criminal underground. With the help of senior detective, Sato, (Takashi Shimura, who had already co-starred against Mifune in Kurosawa's other 1949 film, The Quiet Duel), so Murakami goes in search of the gun, and descends into a world of yakuza gangsters, showgirls, and crooks in search of the firearm and the criminals using it.

Sato (Takashi Shimura) and Murakami (Toshiro Mifune) go on the hunt for their suspect.

In doing so, Kurosawa arguably creates the police procedural: whilst the director would later grumble, in his typical search for perfectionism among his films that the picture was "too technical...all that thought, and not one real thought in it", it is a perfect blueprint for this subgenre of crime cinema. Throughout, Murakami is relentless in his search for the gun; we see him pursue, in footage shot by Ishiro Honda, later to direct Godzilla (1954) a suspect through the backstreets of the capital, where we see the lives of the lower class denizens of the city, before she takes pity on him and gives him a lead to find a dealer which will bring him closer to his lost gun. We see him beg forensics to compare a bullet found at a crime scene to one he shot into a stump whilst training. In another actor, this fervency, this rookie sensibility, feels hollow, but Mifune's intense performance makes it work.

Against him, in the Tokyo summer heat, Kurosawa places the shadow; much of Stray Dog is Murakami chasing this, and indeed his own shadow across the capital. The first of these shadows is Sato; Shimura, over a decade older than Mifune, adds a world-weariness to his performance; it is this mismatch that almost single-handedly kickstarts the buddy cop genre. It is through their teamwork that Murakami begins to crack the case, first tailing the gun-dealer thanks to the tip-off mentioned earlier, Without Sato, his first attempts fail, the chase coming to a standstill at an arcade shooting gallery, Murakami forced to deal with the stall-owner even as he tries to arrest her. Alone, Murakami is simply another rookie attempting to gain experience.

With Sato in tow, things are much easier: we see the older detective quickly gain a rapport with a suspect, giving her his last cigarette, and in return recieving valuable information. The duo locate the gun dealer, known only as Honda (Reizaburô Yamamoto) at a baseball match, and, little by little, zero in on him, the hubbub of the game hiding their intentions, even as they attempt to flush him out into the open, leading to a taut cat and mouse sequence that plays out for several minutes as the baseball game in the background also reaches its climax. Most of all, though, as Sato invites the younger detective to his home, so there is a sense of the divide in generations; Sato is married and his house is dotted with police citations, whilst the Murakami is a beginner, emblematic of the post-war generation.

Murakami's coming of age plays out against an opressively hot, and decidedly noirish Tokyo

Against Murakami, Kurosawa places his shadow, the criminal, Yusa (Isao Kimura); like Murakami, he is a war veteran, and, much like Drunken Angel, Kurosawa is quick to make a political point here, this sense that, were it not for chance, Murakami would be on the same path as Yusa, something the extended sequence in which Murakami is disguised as a demobbed soldier clearly shows. Yet, in Yusa's footsteps, we are taken into a very different Tokyo; we see the crimes that weight heavily on Murakami barely affect Yusa, with one of the final scenes further placing them apart with Sato noting that the young detective's sympathy for criminals will fade. Murakami is, ultimately, a good man, diligent and finally catching up with the elusive Yusa via deduction and good detective work, albeit only after the latter has mugged one woman, and killed another.

Yet, it is in the descent into the Tokyo inhabited by Yusa, and other unfortunate figures like him, like his sweetheart, Namiki, a showgirl, (Keiko Awaji), that shows the divide between the two Tokyos; the club that she works at (incidently run by a character played by Minoru Chiaki, in his first of eleven appearances for Kurosawa) is down at heel, the home to which she returns, with her mother, comprises of a single room; it is here that this climatic search for the gun that Yusa has used twice to tragic results bridges the gap between these two versions of the city, between these two men, and where Murakami's skill as a detective comes into its own.

What Stray Dog is, in essence, is a coming of age film, not only for Mifune's character, but Kurosawa as film-maker-alongside Drunken Angel, this is undoubtedly Kurosawa's first truly great film, with his first true masterpiece, Rashomon, released in 1950. This combined sense of filmmaker and narrative "coming of age" is not only seen in the nuance of the resolution of Murakami (and thus, Mifune's performance), to find his gun and bring its thief to justice, but also in Kurosawa's increasing skill and artistry as a film-maker

Rating: Highly Recommended.

Stray Dog is available on DVD and Bluray from the BFI. It is available for streaming via the BFI Player.

Next week, we stay in Tokyo, for the tale of a family divided by generations in one of Japan's greatest cinematic statements, in Yasujirō Ozu's Tokyo Story