The Most Terrible Time In My Life
Mickey Spillane gets an update in director Kaizo Hayashi’s jazzy crime story
By Kimberly Chun

It’s hard to believe a stylish caper flick titled The Most Terrible Time in My Life could be so lighthearted. But listen to the mop-topped director Kaizo Hayashi tell a story about trying to communicate with a Spanish-speaking neighbor when his own English is rudimentary at best, and you can see he prefers to keep things light. That attitude comes through in Most Terrible’s protagonist, Maiku Hama: Far from resembling Mickey Spillane’s hard-boiled protagonist, Hama is instead a flashy punk who can’t do anything right.

“I believe a real detective should be like a ninja in Japan—a detective should live in the shade,” Hayashi says with the help of a translator. (He’s a little buzzed from visiting the south of Market saloon down the street from his new U.S. distributor, Viz Films/Tidepoint Pictures of San Francisco.) “But I created the character of Maiku Hama, the detective who is in the sunlight.”

Hayashi has experience in the gumshoe trade. An avid detective novel and film noir fan, he was so fascinated by that world, he studied for and eventually received a private eye license. That came in handy. When Most Terrible came out in Japan in 1993, it was said to be such a hit that there was a rise in interest in detective work.

“Sometimes I teach detectives at the detective school,” the director says. “I have to start with the difference between movies and the real detective work.

“The spirit is the same: The spirit is to help other people. But it’s not like the movies. You can’t drive the really fancy car like the movie, or wear the really nice shiny clothes because you’re not supposed to be seen.”

Not so with Maiku Hama. Filmed in a lustrous black and white by Yuichi Nagata with jazzy lighting by Tatsuya Osada and striking, angular compositions that take advantage of the scope format, Masatoshi Nagase (Cold Fever, Mystery Train) exudes a likable cool as a reformed-delinquent-turned-private eye clad mainly in vintage threads.

Hama drives a gleaming Metropolitan from 1954 (owned in reality by Hayashi), which breaks down at very inconvenient moments, and he keeps his office in an old movie theater (clients must buy a ticket to even get through the door). In spite of his good intentions and well-dressed exterior, Hama is also something of a rube. When he jumps into a mahjong parlor brawl between a pair of xenophobic yakuza and a young Taiwanese immigrant waiter Hai Ting, he gets his pinky chopped off, a humorous reference to the Japanese mafia initiation ritual. A neighborhood dog then has to be coaxed to relinquish the digit in a scene resembling the opening of Kurasawa’s Yojimbo.

Striking up a friendship with Hai Ting, Hama ends up searching for the waiter’s brother, De Jain. The catch is the missing man is a contract killer with underworld ties to the Black Dogs, a gang of particularly brutal, naturalized Japanese who refer to themselves as the “New Japs.” Things go from bad to “the most terrible time” in Hama’s life.

The film has the pop culture savvy and post-modern self-consciousness of Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs, with little of that film’s sadism and more affection. Hayashi seems to acknowledge the private dicks that fathered his creation, and he puts his own spin on the genre. Instead of Raymond Chandler’s L.A., Hama lives in Koganecho, an area of Yokohama that still resembles the ‘50s and still has the aura of an occupied Japanese port town, a crossroads for multiple cultures under the sway of American cool. Its inhabitants are the so-called “stray dogs,” such as the Taiwanese gangsters and molls, who may not speak their ancestral language or have ever set foot on their ancestral soil.

If anything, Most Terrible pays tribute to the resilience of immigrants and underdogs and the friendships and families that these fringe-dwellers create.

“With heart and friendship, you can overcome obstacles or the ‘most terrible time,’” Hayashi says. “Even if you are experiencing the ‘most terrible time,’ then the good things that come after that, even though they are little, seem much better than before.”

Born in Kyoto in 1957, Hayashi himself experienced prejudice growing up as a naturalized Korean Japanese. “In terms of racism, I believe every country has that problem. But since I was young I always felt discrimination toward me,” he says. “But at the same time, I had the ability to look at it objectively, to see the viewpoint of those who did those acts of discrimination or hatred and also those who are receiving discrimination and abuse.”

Since that terrible time of his life, Hayashi went on to direct the acclaimed features To Sleep so as to Dream and Circus Boys, the Maiku Hama trilogy.

But he’s making a break with the past and living in Los Angeles and writing the screenplay for his first English-language film, which he plans to shoot in San Francisco next summer.

Considering he feels that Japan lacks strong producers and distributors, it makes sense that Hayashi moved to the United States. But although his love of American films and mysteries may have prepared him, he’s had to adjust. “At first, I really disliked L.A.,” Hayashi says with a chuckle. “But as you live there, little by little, then from the viewpoint of the detective, I found Los Angeles to be a really interesting place. There’s so many different people and different races and different unusual places: It’s almost like a miniature earth.”