{Inter} Cultural Japan

One of the first Japanese novels that I read in the original language (painstakingly slow!) was Zero no Shoten (Zero Focus) by popular mystery author Matsumoto Seicho - it is more than twenty years ago when I found a copy in a secondhand bookstore in Kyoto. I especially enjoyed the atmosphere of the story: after the husband of a young newlywed disappears on what was supposed to be a brief business trip, the young woman travels from the comforts of Tokyo to snowy Kanazawa to search for him. Gradually she unravels the threads of the double life he led…

About ten years after reading the novel, I saw the film version Zero Focus by Nomura Yoshitaro on Japanese TV and taped it. It is a film noir as ever there was one, with strong hints of Hitchcock, and here, too, the atmosphere is great. During a second trip to Kanazawa, Teiko visits the Noto Peninsula, which in the film appears as a snowbound landscape full of dangers. Sheer cliffs tower over raging seas, dilapidated houses cling to rocky slopes, and the snow keeps falling relentlessly. If anything, the last scene where Teiko confronts the murderer on this cliff has been drawn out too long, there are too many flashbacks while she challenges the woman behind the mystery to a confession. But I can easily imagine Nomura Yoshitaro liked this landscape so much he just went on filming here…

[Yase no Dangai Cliff, Noto]

And now, again about ten years later I visit Noto and finally stand on the same cliff as Teiko in that dramatic last scene, 50 meters above the sea: Yase no Dangai. It is a beautiful day in late summer, and the sea is a calm field of green-blue. No raging waves, no violent storm, no snow. The only things that remind me of the danger of the place are the many signs warning against suicide. The bodies of people who jump here are taken far away by the tide. Think about the faces of your parents. The cliff hangs so far over, it can easily break off and I carefully keep to the path.

Matsumoto Seicho also came here, of course, and he left the following poem that has been carved on a stone near Ganmon, a little bit to the south on the same rocky coast:

sagging clouds
alone facing
the raging waves
I feel sadness
first trip to Noto

kumo tarete | hitori takereru | aranami wo | kanashi to omoeri | noto no hatsutabi

Read more about places to visit in Noto in What to see on the Noto Peninsula.