The Faulty Stroke

"Trust the train, Mademoiselle, for it is le bon Dieu who drives it."
"The Mystery of the Blue Train"

I am a fan of mystery fiction, by which I mean I am not solely into mystery literature. While I mostly discuss books here, you'll also see me talk about video games, stage plays, audio dramas, comics and more, as long as it features a mystery plot. And while I generally don't have too much interest in other genres, my attention is quickly drawn if I learn something completely unrelated to the mystery genre, does in fact involve stories that could be interpreted as mystery fiction. That is why I had no intention of watching Oppenheimer at first, until someone told me it could be watched as a proper mystery film, and to my surprise, he was completely right.

And that is why I have longed to watch the 1985 "pink" (= basically softcore porn) film Chikan Densha: Seiko no Oshiri ("Molester Train: Seiko's Tush") for some time now. Yes, you read that title right. I first heard about this film in a mook on locked room mysteries edited by Arisugawa,, which featured an article about locked room murder mysteries in the visual format: several prominent Japanese authors were asked about their favorites, and Abiko Takemaru's recommendation was this film. Later I learned Yamaguchi Masaya also recommends it as a locked room mystery. Of course, that seems a bit strange, as Seiko no Oshiri was just an entry in an extremely long-running series of pink films about...well, molesters groping women in the train among others. There's some story to connect the scenes with sexual content, but you'd hardly expect one of these films to be hiding a locked room murder mystery classic, right? It turns out that because the series (which ran from the eighties until the 2010s) is so insanely long (there are apparently more than a hundred of them), the series covers a wide variety of different genres from comedy and suspense to political thrillers, though the scenes with nudity/sex are of course the main attraction. Though apparently, most films aren't even about molesting in the train, as they eventually move away from that setting and might only include one such scene... Anyway, the more I learned about Seiko no Oshiri, the more I became interested in it: the film is actually directed by Takita Youjirou, who directed many of these Chikan Densha films, but would become internationally renowned with his 2008 Okuribito/Departures film, which would become the very first Japanese film to win the Oscar for the Best Foreign Language film. So yes, this is a softcore porn film by an Oscar-winning director which also features a locked room mystery. The whole story about all of this sounded just unbelievable, so I had to see the film.

Chikan Densha: Seiko no Oshiri starts the year after the infamous Glico Morinaga case, in which "The Fiend With Twenty-One Faces"  (a nod to Edogawa Rampo's Fiend with Twenty Faces) extorted the confectioneries Glico and Morinaga. Now, a different industry is threatened: the rice industry.  Someone calling themselves "The Fiend with Twenty-One Faces" has announced they have poisoned the rice of the koshihikari variety sold at a rice store, and threatens to repeat this act. The culprit however is in fact a corrupt chairman of the Miyagi Agricultural Association, who wants to scare consumers into moving away from koshihikari so they'll consume the sasanishiki variety. However, he himself receives a call from "The Fiend with Twenty-One Faces", who threatens to expose the whole deal, unless he pays up a hundred million yen. The chairman hires his old acquaintance Morizou to do the drop-off: Morizou is a chindon-ya: someone who dressed in excessive loud clothes and makes music to advertise for shops, but he also spends a lot of time just molesting women in packed trains. Morizou's orders are to follow the blackmailer's instructions, which is to carry the money onto a certain train. On the way, he's instructed to throw the container out of the window of the train: the container falls off the bridge the train was on at the time, landing besides the river where a figure was standing ready to pick the money up. A chance video recording allows Morizou and the chairman to figure out who this man was, and they report his identity to the police.

Acting on this information, the police detective visit the suspect at his apartment, but as there's no answer at the door, they ask the building's caretaker to open the door for them with his spare key. Inside, however, they stumble upon the suspect lying dead on his bed. As the door was locked from the inside and the key was found inside a closed drawer of the desk, the police conclude it must have been suicide: even supposing the man was killed, how could the murderer have escaped with the door locked from the inside? While one window was only slightly open, the apartment is located many floors up, with no high buildings directly besides it, meaning a hypothetical murderer couldn't have gone anywhere from the window. However, while the case seems to end with the blackmailer having committed suicide, the money is nowhere to be found, and Morizou himself becomes the suspect, so he tries to figure out who has the money now.

Oh, and that's the story when you cut out all the softcore porn segments, and that would probably halven the length of this film easily. These scenes are always awkwardly long and really add nothing to the story (oh, we need to wait until we arrive at the drop-off point with the train? Let's casually sexually assault a woman then to pass the time!), but I guess for the long-time viewers of a series called Molester Train, these scenes are actually the main part and the mystery plot is the unnecessary filler. The overall tone of the film is very lighthearted, with acts like groping treated as something minor and something to laugh about and the non-sexual jokes are also... of a certain quality, so it might be a challenging view for some.

But to get to the locked room murder mystery (for yes, the suspect indeed didn't commit suicide, but was murdered and left in a locked room): this truly has no right to be in a softcore porn film. I wouldn't call it a classic by any means, but it is honestly way more complex than some pure locked room murder mystery novels are, and it is actually one that becomes more convincing on the screen, compared to if you had just read the trick behind this locked room. The visual qualities of the medium really do make the trick seem more convincing, even if it's a bit ridiculous. Of course, this film isn't really structured as a proper mystery story, so there are barely hints and you're not really intended to solve this yourself (the person solving the locked room murder basically *just* figures it out),, but the actual mechanics behind how the murderer managed to leave the suspect in a locked apartment, with the only key (besides the caretaker's master key) being found inside a closed desk drawer, is pretty impressive. I can't even imagine how it was written down in the screenplay, and what everyone on the staff on this softcore film would have been thinking as they were shooting this, because it honestly should have been done in a pure mystery film, and not used as... binding material to connect the sexy scenes. The core, underlying idea of how this locked room murder was committed isn't anything special per se, but the execution is... insanely complex and not even a lot of actual mystery films/television shows will ever show anything as mind-boggling as this, and that indeed makes Seiko no Oshiri a strangely memorable mystery film.

But Chikan Densha: Seiko no Oshiri can't be called a good film by any means, so it's really up to you whether you should watch this film. The locked room mystery part is interesting because it really has no business being in a film like this, but the rest of the film is incredibly tedious to get through if you're only interested in the mystery part.

Original Japanese title(s): 『痴漢電車　聖子のお尻』