Stranger

Kiriko was a bank teller until she went to jail for fraud. Now, having served her time, she is one of Tokyo’s few women taxi drivers. She lives alone, minds her own business, and does her best to be `one of the boys’. Her troubles begin one night when a passenger hands her a big note (¥10,000: about 70 euros) and leaves without waiting for his change. Next time this man gets into her cab, he tries to kill her. And that is the beginning of a sustained assult on her life, at work and at home. Rather like the huge, anonymous truck in Spielberg’s Duel, the stranger just keeps on coming, and Kiriko has no choice but to gear herself up to fight back. Made on a shoestring budget for video release, Stranger offers an achingly suspenseful vision of fear and loathing on the night streets of Tokyo. It’s one of the best examples of Nagasaki’s ability to knock his favourite themes and motifs into genre shape to meet the expectations of financiers and, like The Enchantment, it anchors its escalating panic and violence in a very believable picture of the characters’ day-to-day lives. Sans make-up, Natori Yuko makes for a truly ballsy heroine. (TR)