Understanding "The Atami Murder Case" by Tsuka Kohei: A Kishida Prize-Winning Masterpiece

Introduction

The Atami Murder Case (熱海殺人事件), written by Tsuka Kohei (つかこうへい), won the 18th Kishida Kunio Drama Award in 1974, shared with Shimizu Kunio's Bokura ga hijo no taiga o kudaru toki (ぼくらが非情の大河をくだるとき). Tsuka was 25, and is reported to have been the youngest winner of the prize at that time. The play was first staged on November 26, 1973, at the Bungakuza Atelier in Tokyo, directed by Fujiwara Shimpei.

Tsuka Kohei (1948-2010), a second-generation Korean resident of Japan (zainichi Korean), went on to win the Naoki Prize in 1982 for his novel Kamata Koshinkyoku (蒲田行進曲, Fall Guy). The Atami Murder Case has been revived many times, in many versions.

The Plot: A Trivial Case Made Grand

The basic premise of The Atami Murder Case is deceptively simple. A new detective, Kumada Tomekichi (熊田留吉), arrives from the Toyama prefectural police to join the famous Tokyo police detective Kimura Denbei (木村伝兵衛). Together with Hanako (ハナ子), a female officer who is Kimura's mistress, they take up a case in the seaside resort town of Atami: a factory worker from the countryside, Oyama Kintaro (大山金太郎), has killed a female co-worker he grew up with.

But the case is a petty one, and this is what Kimura cannot accept. He sets out to inflate it into a major incident and, using absurd methods of interrogation, to turn Oyama into a "first-class" criminal.

The interrogation room thus becomes a place where a story is being manufactured as much as a crime is being investigated. The questions this raises are a matter of interpretation rather than of record, but they are the natural ones to bring to the play: who decides what a crime means, and what does authority do with a suspect's life when the facts are not interesting enough?

The Theatricality: Swan Lake and a Dropped Document

Two moments are known as signatures of the play. It opens with Kimura shouting into a telephone while Swan Lake plays at full volume. In another, he deliberately drops a document he is handing to the new detective and tells him to pick it up.

A 2025 article in the Japanese American newspaper Rafu Shimpo describes his writing as "poisonously aggressive" dialogue in a passionate, fast-paced style that reveals the emotions of people in weaker positions, and says his plays set off a "Tsuka boom."

Kuchidate and the Living Text

Tsuka was known for kuchidate (口立て), a way of making dialogue in rehearsal. This was not improvisation by the actors. Actors received a script and memorized it before the first rehearsal, and Tsuka then watched them and gave them new lines orally, which they learned and performed on the spot. He is quoted as saying that only 40 percent of the lines are written by the author at a desk, and that the other 60 percent are written in the rehearsal room, with the actors prompting him. The staging could differ between opening night and the final performance.

Tsuka did not direct the 1973 premiere. His first production of the play as director came in 1975 at the VAN99 Hall in Tokyo, with three casts in rotation.

The text kept changing after that. Later versions carry different subtitles and change the characters substantially:

On the Country Road (1990), in which Hanako is replaced by the character Mizuno Tomoko
The Longest Spring (1991-1993)
Monte Carlo Illusion (1993-1998), which makes Kimura a former Olympic athlete and a gay man
Baishun Sosakan (売春捜査官, Prostitute Investigator, 1996-1999)

Cultural Context: Zainichi Identity

Tsuka Kohei was born in Fukuoka Prefecture as a second-generation Korean resident of Japan and held South Korean nationality. His real name is given as Kanehara Mineo (金原峰雄), and his Korean name as Kim Bong-ung (金峰雄). A Seoul version of the play was staged in 1985 and 1987, in Seoul and then at Kinokuniya Hall in Tokyo.

The Atami Murder Case is not, as far as the sources consulted here show, explicitly about the zainichi experience. Some readers may connect its concern with imposed roles to Tsuka's background, but that is an interpretation.

Theatrical Legacy

The play has a long stage history. It first played at Kinokuniya Hall in Tokyo in 1976, and returned there for many years. After Tsuka's death in 2010, Atami Satsujin Jiken NEXT was staged there in 2011, and new productions followed in 2015, 2018, 2024, and 2025. A film version, with Nakadai Tatsuya as the detective (renamed Nikaido Denbei), was released in 1986.

The play reached English readers through Half a Century of Japanese Theater V: 1970s (Kinokuniya), which includes it under the title The Atami Murder Case. In 2025, Ensemble Tenshi announced an English-language adaptation of Prostitute Investigator in Hollywood.

Conclusion

The Atami Murder Case began as a script staged by another company's director and became, through decades of rewriting by its author, a family of plays. For readers, it is a good way into both Tsuka's fierce comedy and the Japanese theater of the 1970s.

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