The founder of a company producing features for cable television stations, who is obsessed with film noir -- murder mysteries shot in black and white "with warped gangsters and neurotic heroes and dangerous women, shiny wet streets and big black cars with their headlights on" -- has disappeared.

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If Imamura Shohei is the film-maker "obsessed with the lower part of the body and of society, " then Nakagami was his literary counterpart.

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