Suspect X

Watched with: Sunshine
On: Saturday 7 March 2009
At: Golden Village building next to Northpoint

Reviews only talk about this movie's main plot - how a woman (Yasuko Hanaoka)and her daughter (Misato Hanaoka) kill her ex-husband, and their mathematics genius neighbour (Tetsuya Ishigami) helps them cover it up. A brilliant physicist (Yukawa), who is a friend of Detective Utsumi assigned to the case, happens to be Ishigami's ex-classmate in college. After reading the review in Life! last week, it left me with the impression of another L-Light battle as seen in Deathnote.

The movie, however, was nothing like that. Subtle actions left much inferring work to be done, which contributed to the beauty of the movie. Also, interwoven in the main plot is an underlying theme of love. At the very beginning, Utsumi rebuts Yukawa when he says that everything on earth can be explained with science and logic. He retorts her playfully with unsolvable mathematical equations for her rebuttal answer - love.

Misato and Yasuko kill her ex-husband out of defence and security because his leeching presence is a menace to a peaceful future. As Japanese houses have thin walls, their neighbour, Ishigami, heard the entire commotion. He walked over, told them he heard everything and his conjectures, and proceeds to help them cover up the crime...

The next scene is of the police discovering the naked body of Togashi, who is the ex-husband of Yasuko Hanaoka. His body was found in a baseball field, with a new bicycle lying nearby, his clothes burnt, his hands and feet burnt and his face disfigured. He was found to be dead on 2nd December, and the police traced everything to Yasuko and her daughter.

After some questioning and investigation, the police were still unable to break Yasuko and Misato's strong alibis of being at the cinema and singing karaoke after that on 2nd December. Despite their strong alibis, the police still believed Yasuko had something to do with the crime because they found evidence that Togashi had tried to locate his ex-wife and would surely have wanted to meet her. Detective Utsumi finally enlists the help of Yukawa once again (apparently it wasn't the first time) and his initial disinterest towards the case melted away when he learnt that the suspect's (Yasuko) neighbour was his ex-classmate, whom he personally regards as a genius.

Yukawa thus went to look for Ishigami, and this is when the clues start to be given out to both the viewers and Yukawa. We find out from Yukawa that Ishigami's only love is Maths, and he never really cared for anything other than that. Also, they got along precisely because of their common love of disproving theories.

After their meetup, Ishigami asks Yukawa a question that Yukawa himself considered uncharacteristic of Ishigami - he had asked (or should I say, commented on) how Yukawa managed to remain young and handsome over the years. Let's call this clue A.

On the way to the high school that Ishigami teaches at, Yukawa remarks that he walks through an interesting path to school where he has to pass by many homeless people by the river. Ishigami agrees, while saying they are like clockwork, doing the same thing repeatedly every day. And this is clue B, even though it seems like a casual remark.

When Yukawa asks to meet up with Ishigami again, Ishigami suggests mountain-climbing - something he likes and is good at. While warming up at one of the stops on the way up, Ishigami says that he asked Yukawa for this activity because it could be his last time climbing a mountain. This is clue C.

I wonder why Ishigami gave Yukawa so many clues. Perhaps it was because he knew Yukawa is smart enough to figure out the truth, but would be unable to gather the required evidence.

Anyway, Yukawa mentions that he treats Ishigami as a friend and would never fully expose his suspicions of him while they were still warming up. Ishigami remarks that solving everythng to discover the truth might make everyone unhappy in the end so it was pointless and Yukawa shouldn't pursue it further. Later, tension builds up when they are on their way out and Yukawa almost dies while he continues his ascent in the raging snow - and Ishigami abandons him even though he hears his cries for help. It seemed like Ishigami had deliberately wanted to kill Yukawa - but at the last moment, he returns to help. This scene is important for a complete understanding of the movie.

Before this scene, actually Yukawa had mentioned casually his suspicions to Detective Utsumi about the case; that Yasuko was the murderer, and Ishigami probably helped her to cover up. He felt that Ishigami could not have been involved in the murder because he would never see murder as a logical solution to anything. Following on that, the police started to check up on Ishigami too, but he had alreayd preempted everything.

Just when we think Ishigami is desperately in love with Yasuko and is turning into a horrifying stalker when he snaps sneaky photos of her having tea with her ex-boss (she now opens a bento shop and had worked as a bar hostess previously) and sending threatening letters to him, he sends two letters to Yasuko and contacts her, as always, via a public telephone near their house, telling her to keep the white envelope and destroy the brown one after reading it. After that, he says that this would be the last time he is contacting her, which takes her aback because she was starting to fear that he would be another Togashi.

Next, we learn that Ishigami has turned himself in as Togashi's murderer. His story is that he saw Togashi hanging around outside Yasuko's house, and knew immediately that he was Yasuko's ex-husband. He told him that Yasuko wasn't home, and arranged to meet him at the baseball field on 2nd December, then killed him there. All the tools he had used were indeed at his house, as found by the police.

Yukawa is devastated as he knows that the truth is far from this, and he doesn't want to see his friend being punished for something he didn't do. He tells Utsumi that he would take over from here and attempt to solve the case. A previous remark from Utsumi about Ishigami's way of setting Mathematics test questions (from an interview with him at his school about his doubtful absence from school on 1st and 2nd December) makes him see things from another perspective. Ishigami had said that he likes to set simple trick questions, for instance disguising functions as geometry. They are simple as long as one can change one's perspective of the question. This is clue D.

Next, we see Yukawa speaking to Yasuko...

And then, the plot is unravelled...

Yakawa requests a special audience with Ishigami alone, and tells him his hypothesis about what he has done. Here it is:

The murder of Togashi had actually taken place on 1st December. Ishigami knew that the mother and daughter would not be able to tell lies properly to the police and would surely give themselves away eventually, so he arranged for them to tell only the truth. He asked them to watch a movie and sing karaoke on 2nd December, in the process gaining themselves strong alibis. To create a murder on 2nd December, Ishigami had to kill someone else - preferably a person whose death would go unnoticed. He paid one of the homeless people he sees on his way to work every day to stay a night at Togashi's boarding house (some temporary home) so as to leave his prints all over the house, then arranged to meet him in Togashi's clothes on the night of 2nd December at the baseball field. He also stole a new bicycle from some bike rental shop for the homeless guy to cycle. A new bike, because its theft would surely be noticed and reported. At the baseball field, he strangled the guy to death...

Later, he burnt the guy's clothes, hands and feet to get rid of prints. He also pulverised his face beyond recognition so that the police wouldn't know he was not Togashi. Later, he would pretend to be Yasuko's stalker and claim that he had killed Togashi because he was in love with Yasuko...

Another reason why he killed someone else was because he wanted to prevent the possibility of him cracking under harsh police questioning and saying the truth. If the truth was that he had murdered, he wouldn't be able to betray Yasuko...

What an excellent plan, misleading the police right from the start. I wouldn't have thought of it.

Ishigami shrugs off Yukawa's hypothesis, and says that he would need solid proof to prove that.

On his way out to the detention centre while led by the police, Yasuko comes in tears to Ishigami and says she cannot live in happiness with her daughter while knowing all that Ishigami has done for them...Yukawa had already told them what took place.

Let me put the clues together. Clue B was to show that the homeless man had been a gear in Ishigami's clock of the plot. Clue A had, according to Yukawa, shown that Ishigami was in love. Clue C was said by Ishigami because he knew he was going to turn himself in. Clue D was the ultimate clue that let Yukawa see everything differently and finally solve the mystery of how Ishigami managed to garner solid alibis for Yasuko and Misato.

The reason why Ishigami had done so much for Yasuko was because she and Misato had unwittingly saved him from suicide when they were friendly and called on him the day they moved in. Why he had wanted to commit suicide was not mentioned, but we can safely assume that it could be because he had found life meaningless. When he finally experienced human interpersonal love and warmth from Yasuko and Misato, he managed to find more meaning in life and live on. This also explains why he returned to help Yukawa that day - perhaps it was because he was loved that he learnt how to love others.

Ishigami had wanted to die because of love, lived on because of love and gave up his freedom because of love. The movie ends aptly with Utsumi saying, "She was the reason why he kept alive," in response to Yukawa's bemusement of why such a smart person would commit such a mistake and if he had not known love, he would not have committed this mistake.

If not for the love shown to him, Ishigami wouldn't even have been alive.