| Courtney Kowalke |
Image sourced from trigon-film
Stray Dog plays in glorious 35mm at the Trylon Cinema from Sunday, May 24th, through Tuesday, May 26th. For tickets, showtimes, and other series information, visit trylon.org.
For a film reviewer, I have a big blind spot when it comes to Asian cinema. I enjoy the occasional Bollywood musical, and the Twin Cities Arab Film Festival keeps me up to date on the Middle Eastern movie scene. I am pretty ignorant of what’s going on over on the east coast, though. Outside of big crossover successes like Parasite (2019), Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000), In the Mood for Love (2000), or my personal favorite, Kung Fu Hustle (2004), I don’t know many Chinese, Japanese, or Korean movies.
I certainly know of Akira Kurosawa. A titan of Japanese cinema, Kurosawa is best known for his samurai films (or chanbara/“sword fighting” films as they’re called in Japanese). I have Rashomon (1950), Seven Samurai (1954), and Ran (1985) in my Tubi queue. I’m pretty sure I’ll enjoy them—I love a good Western and a lot of those are homages to (if not blatant copies of) classic samurai movies. Still, I have yet to bite the bullet. I have been busy this spring, and I want time to sit with these films and really absorb them. I am also admittedly daunted by exploring a new-to-me genre. Samurai films—especially Kurosawa’s films—are revered globally by critics. They have a rich history and a legion of ardent fans. What if I don’t enjoy these classics? I’m used to marching to the beat of my own drum, but I am also used to being consulted for my opinions on movies. I would feel even more ignorant than I already do if I wound up disliking these movies since they have such a large cultural importance.
I saw my opening into Kurosawa’s oeuvre with Stray Dog/Nora Inu (1949). Unlike the Kurosawa films I was familiar with, Stray Dog is a noir detective story set in then-present day Japan. Also unlike the Kurosawa films I was familiar with, Kurosawa originally wrote Stray Dog as a novel rather than a screenplay. In his 1981 autobiography, Something Like an Autobiography (Gama no Abura: Jiden no Yō na Mono), Kurosawa explained, “I am fond of the work of [Belgian novelist] Georges Simenon, so I adopted his style of writing novels about social crime.”1 While I have not read any of Simenon’s works, I did read everything I could find by Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler in college, and I love discovering new hardboiled detective movies. I love the gritty atmosphere, the stylized visuals, and the typically snappy dialogue. Tack on a reference to dogs—an animal I already have a lot of affection for—and I am ready to dive in.
Image sourced from Roxie
Last May, I wrote about A New Leaf (1971) and how disheartening it can be when a creator disowns a project of theirs that I enjoyed. Right before I began watching Stray Dog, I learned the film belongs to that elite club as well. According to American journalist and film historian Donald Richie, Kurosawa was displeased with the finished project. “I wanted to make a film in the manner of Simenon, but I failed,” Richie quoted Kurosawa as saying in his 1965 biography The Films of Akira Kurosawa. “Everyone likes the picture but I don’t. It is just too technical. All that technique and not one real thought in it.”
To an extent, I agree with Kurosawa about Stray Dog being limited by its technique. In his defense, however, the movie’s techniques are products of its time. It seems like nowadays, there are a multitude of digital or print cameras with which to film a movie and a world of options for its soundtrack. One can use popular songs or ambient and electronic music for the incidental score. In the 1940s, however, orchestral music reigned supreme. At times, the score for Stray Dog seems too whimsical and upbeat for the movie’s vibe. The film’s editing also felt unpolished to me. There were several transitions between scenes that I found jarring, and some cuts during conversations that felt abrupt. There was one long shot I enjoyed when Detective Murakami (eternal hottie Toshiro Mifune in his seventh film role ever) is waiting for a lab technician to compare one of his bullets to a bullet found at the scene of a crime. I am also excited to see Trylon show Stray Dog on 35mm because the copy I watched for this piece was a bit fuzzy. I think having the proper film and projector technique will enhance the overall experience.
Technical aspects aside, though, Stray Dog impacted the world of film due to its beating heart. It may not look and sound like a movie from 2026, but its ideas and its emotions remain relevant. Story-wise, Stray Dog is one of the first movies to feature the plot device of an older, more experienced detective and a younger “rookie” detective working a case together. The film is kickstarted by young homicide detective Murakami losing his gun on a crowded streetcar. When bullet casings are found at the scene of a robbery matching a casing Murakami recovers from the practice firing range, he is assigned to work the case with Detective Satō (Takashi Shimura). It’s hard for me to imagine a time where this wasn’t a common trope in crime fiction.
In a similar vein, Stray Dog is cited as the first “buddy cop” movie.2 This confused me at first because my first thought was of buddy cop comedies, where the two detectives’ differences are played for laughs. However, a buddy cop film can be any movie where two contrasting investigators are paired together, regardless of genre. As outlined by Wikipedia, “the central difference [between the two cops in this genre] is normally that one is ‘wilder’ than the other: a hot-tempered iconoclast is paired with a more even-tempered partner. Often the ‘wilder’ partner is the younger of the two, with the even-tempered partner having more patience and experience.” That’s Murakami and Satō’s dynamic to a T. Murakami is the younger, less-experienced detective, and he is driven to a fault. At one point, Satō chastises Murakami for wanting to confront a suspect at a baseball game attended by 50,000 people. “Don’t you see anyone but Honda?” Satō asks his partner. “We’ll put the crowd at risk.”
Conversely, Satō runs on a more even keel. As demonstrated at the baseball game, he looks at the big picture and forces Murakami to think beyond himself and his personal quest for justice. Although Satō takes his work seriously, he also has a life outside of the precinct, as shown when he takes Murakami home for dinner with his wife and children. Although he isn’t above threatening someone for information, Satō’s first scene shows him playing cards and sharing a cigarette with a suspect, plying information from her under the guise of having a friendly chat. Throughout the film, Satō urges Murakami to stop beating himself up over losing his gun. While Satō praises Murakami for his drive and for how deeply he feels for the case’s victims, Satō doesn’t want the rookie burning himself out while Satō still needs his help. Satō’s wisdom and experience balance out Murakami’s passion and creative thinking when it comes to finding leads and tracking their suspects.
Image sourced from Criterion on Reddit
Stray Dog was also at the forefront of Japan’s post-war film noir reinvention. Film noir existed prior to 1949, of course, although the term wasn’t coined until 1946.3 After World War II, however, the mood of the world shifted. Japan was hit especially hard. Their goal to become a high-ranking world power was thwarted; their economy was hurt by the U.S. freezing all of their assets and cutting off most of their oil supply in early 1941. In 1945, Hiroshima and Nagasaki were the first (and so far only) sites of nuclear weapon detonations during an armed conflict. 2,600,000 to 3,100,00 Japanese people died during the war, military members and civilians alike. Japan was a completely different land after WWII. They couldn’t return to the way things were, but the way forward wasn’t easy to define. Nothing was off-limits, and nothing was guaranteed.
This post-war uncertainty bleeds into Stray Dog’s characters and plot. All of the characters are exhausted. While a heat wave accounts for some of the tension in the air, many characters are angry and scared and frustrated by problems they cannot control. Compared to pre-war film noir, Stray Dog is gritty and more grounded in reality. None of the women in the film are ingenues or femme fatales. When Murakami and Satō visit their suspect’s childhood friend who works as a showgirl, the entire chorus line is shown collapsing to the floor and panting for breath as soon as they leave the stage. When bombarded by the detectives’ questions, Harumi Namiki (Keiko Awaji) breaks down crying from the stress. She isn’t defiant or sure of herself. She’s just a girl who doesn’t understand what is going on and why she’s being interrogated.
Similar, Stray Dog’s detectives are nothing like the hardboiled heroes of the 1930s. They aren’t sardonic like Sam Spade, stoic but with a dark sense of humor. Satō has a sense of humor, but it’s light. He’s a professional—he doesn’t take work home with him, something he also chastises Murakami for. Satō warns Murakami not to start relating to their suspect as Murakami learns more and more about Shinjirô Yusa (Isao Kimura), the man who has his gun.
For his part, Murakami has Sam Spade’s drive for personal justice, but he does not have the classic noir detective’s cool. Murakami is not detached, especially not from this case. He lets his emotions show. He runs into danger without thinking. He spends a full day pursuing a local gun trader’s mistress (Noriko Sengoku) without stopping for food or rest. Murakami doesn’t care what he looks like to other people; he is only focused on doing what he thinks is right.
Murakami eventually relates to Yusa because both men were directly shaped by WWII. Both served in the Imperial Japanese Army. Both were robbed on their way home after the war. Each man took something different from their experiences, though. After being mugged, Murakami’s strong sense of justice made him want to prevent something similar from happening to anyone else. Deciding to use his military training, Murakami joined the Tokyo police.
On the other hand, Yusa ending his time in the service left him feeling purposeless. His mugging left him even more cynical, and deciding there was nothing worth defending in Tokyo, Yusa became involved with the Yakuza (an organized crime syndicate in Japan). While Stray Dog is hardly the first story to use this plot device, I loved the parallel between the cop and the criminal. It provided a lot of great narrative tension and made me consider how the story would have been affected if Murakami didn’t feel as strongly as he does about protecting people and how two people facing the same circumstances can make drastically different choices.
Image sourced from The Criterion Collection
The anecdote from earlier about Kurosawa being disappointed in Stray Dog has a happy ending. In my research, I discovered that Kurosawa viewed the movie more positively in his autobiography. Specifically, Kurosawa spent several pages rhapsodizing about his cast and crew. Most of them lived in a dormitory on the grounds of the Oizumi studio during filming. 4 The film’s assistant art director, Yoshirô Muraki, and production design assistant, Shinobu, met on the set of Stray Dog and married soon after its release. Kurosawa felt that the camaraderie behind the scenes made the finished product sing. According to Kurosawa:
At any rate, the filming of Stray Dog went remarkably well, and we finished ahead of
schedule. The excellent pace of the shooting and the good feeling of the crew working together can be sensed in the completed film. I remember how it was on Saturday nights when we boarded a bus to go home for a day off after a full week’s hard work. Everyone was happy. At the time I was living in Komae, far out of the city near the Tamagawa River, so toward the end of the ride I was always left alone. The solitary last rider on the cavernous empty bus, I always felt more loneliness at being separated from my crew than I did joy at being reunited with my family. Now the pleasure in the work we experienced on Stray Dog seems like a distant dream. The films an audience really enjoys are the ones that were enjoyable in the making. Yet pleasure in the work can’t be achieved unless you know you have put all of your strength into it and have done your best to make it come alive. A film made in this spirit reveals the hearts of the crew. 5
It heartened me to read that Kurosawa surrounded himself with people he enjoyed spending so much time with while making Stray Dog. The company you keep impacts so many aspects of your life, and you don’t often get control over the people you work with. I’m glad things worked out well for Kurosawa and his crew on this film, and by extension for the fictional Murakami and Satō. Being comfortable with the people around you and that sense of security can lead to revolutionary ideas, be they new leads in an investigation or new plot devices in a classic film genre
Sources
1 Kurosawa Akira. Something Like an Autobiography (蝦蟇の油 自伝のようなもの). Translated by Audie E. Bock. Iwanami Shoten, 1981, 128.
2 “Stray Dog (Nora Inu),” Film International, Volume 4, Issues 1-6, 2006, 62.
3 Nino Frank. “A New Kind of Police Drama: the Criminal Adventure.” L’Écran français, August 1946.
4 Kurosawa, 129.
5 Kurosawa, 131.
Edited by Olga Tchepikova-Treon