Yoshitarô Nomura’s Zero no shôten (US: Zero Focus) chronicles one woman’s investigation of her husband’s disappearance accompanied at various points by her sister-in-law, her husband’s co-worker, and police inspectors. Through brief interior monologues, flashbacks, and contradictory witness stories a la Kurosawa’s Rashomon, Teiko Uhara (Yoshiko Kuga) discovers that her brand new husband Kenichi (Kôji Nanbara), a successful advertising executive whom she’d met through a matchmaking service, had not only lied about leaving for a business trip, but he’d lied about most of his past. When the corpse of her husband’s brother Sotaro (Kô Nishimura), a well-adjusted family man, is discovered in the same northern city, having followed Kenichi on his covert journey, the puzzle becomes far more complicated. Hizuro Takachiho is brilliant as the unknowable Sachiko Murota, a former prostitute now married to a wealthy friend of Kenichi, who turns out to be integral to the disappearance of both men. Perhaps too talky and procedural for some, Zero Focus is an intricately crafted mystery, layer after layer peeled back until the truth is revealed on Noto Cliff overlooking the crashing waves below.