Cut to title card:
Behind the wheel, the weary detective in his trenchcoat races to the scene, police beacon signaling like a defective halo. Inconstant light barely touching his eyes.
The further the D.T. influence spreads, the less identifiable Tracy becomes, the more diluted. Gould's influence circuclates like the very air. Coolly alive, in the flow & pulse of water. In the spark & flicker of fire, as secret and plainly exposed as the very devil. The influence, mutable, immutable, evanescent yet beyond transmutation, inveigling everything like a plague or conspiracy of ghosts.
He arrives. The villain from nowhere.
"All the things that used to be inside me, now they're outside. So I can see all the things inside you.... But the inside of me is empty."
The curious, plodding, sleepy-looking young man with wiry hair walks seemingly in place, growing ever-larger in the mind & eyes of his captive audience. He emerges as if from the horizon itself, a swelling born from the collision of earth, sea and sky. A point against all geometric reason encompassing, absorbing, linearity. The enigmatic villain seems to only speak in questions, his somnolent, placid voice ever on the verge of collapse into ellipsis.
"The detective, or the husband? Which is the real you? Neither one is the real you. There is no 'real you'. Your wife knows that, too."
His only identifying trait, the name sewn into the lining of his coat. Mamiya.
The detective knows who the Killer is: but the detective finds it impossible to Know the man. The killer is a missionary from an occulted past. His methods are inferential, at best; insidious. Involuted. The killer may not be pursued beyond the boundaries of his crimes. Secure in the hollow he's carved inside himself, the killer looks out on the detective with contempt bordering on transcendence.
The killer within looking down on the killer without.
Triggered by the word fate, the detective fires three times.
"Remember now?"
Kiyoshi Kurosawa pivots, abrupt as the final day torn from a calender, from gangster flicks to weird serial murder tinged with hypnotic menace. It's 1998, and the filmmaker is bored by the philosophical quandaries of V-cinema with its inbuilt limitations of commerce and pop genre fiction.
"People like to think crime has meaning. But most of them don't."
Nemesis frees the detective to free the killer. The killer, freed, returns to his origins; origins he can only recognize through inference. The killer does not know who he is, only where he is: in the world, walking up and down, to and fro. Waiting to be found in the hearts of the men whose lives he touched with fingers stainless as unwritten law. Waiting for deliverance.
The gun fires five final exclamation marks. One for each finger on his healing hand.
Eight bullets, total, to kill a man beyond life. Snuffed by an abundance of fortunate death, the dying arc of the murderer's bloody finger paints a ceremony in the expectant air. Evokes something where there is nothing. Falls, use extinguished.
The detective looks around the space of the shrine, mute, his curiosity at its end.
Inner peace restored, the detective takes his dinner. Opting against his trademark trenchcoat, for a change. Retired to the dry cleaners, to exorcise Mamiya's splatter. Leaning away from his table the detective looks spiritually sated. Coffee the perfect companion to a postprandial smoke, he orders from a nearby marionette. The waitress stiff and formal as her uniform. She does not walk so much as obey an invisible mechanism, faultless, guiding her toward the cutlery.
Plate clean, appetite restored, the detective extracts a cigarette and lights it, drawing the smoke into his lungs. Ember tip flaring like a caution signal over the industrial heart of Tokyo.
Wipe to credits.
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