314
PARTISAN REVIEW
be sure , but then
Rallsol/l
is a cowboy movie set in Kyoto, a sushi
Western where some characters wear boots :lI1d spurs and hang out at a
cafe called "Buffalo Rome." Miles R.yder, J Kyoto cowboy who owns a
Western outfitter's shop called Hormone Derange, has fled to Japan after
taking a two-by-four to the head of a drug dealer in Tcxas .
True to ' a genre which traditionally codes its characters' moral stand–
ing by the color of their hats,
Rallsol/l's
black hat is worn by one Frank
DeVito, ex-Marine and Bruce Lee devotee, who has been dishonorably
discharged for assaulting an Okinawa schoolgirl and has washed up in
Kyoto "to study at the
d(~jo
of a maverick sensei of dubious standing in the
karate world who made movies starring hilllself and who demonstrated
his skills by killing oxen barehanded. " There arc reasons beyond cleansing
and moral austerity that might draw one to Kyoto to practice ki cks
to
the
belly. It doesn't take a seminar in psychoanalysis to tell us that DeVito has
been set up as Chris Ransom's dark alter ego, the brute side of the human
equation that has no patience with being "morally taut and resolute,"
preferring the martial side of the "martial arts" to the art. It isn't difficult
to see
Rallsolll
as a psychodrallla, something between J Hollywood
Western and a Kurosawa sJmurai epic -
l-Il~'.Zh
Nooll
along the Kama
River. Chris Ransom is destined to be killed, or rather to permit himself
to be killed, by DeVito: after all , if there is blood on your conscience and
you are in Japan to do penance , penance will have to be done.
Along the way , Ransom is visited by hi s father, who turns out
to
have been keeping tabs on him through a woman named Marilyn. It is a
painful visit, during which the father , a failed playwright who has gone
into television and become wildly successful, instructs Chris: "You think
I'm in the entertainment business, but what I'm really in - what we 're all
in - is the power business. Someone is going to have to have power and
if it isn't you, then you're helpless , at the llIercy of anybody who has
it." It is a lesson Chris has already learned in Pakistan, and to which he
will finally submit as he agrees
to
a showdown with DeVito , with swords.
Never mind what all this means. I don't think it llIeans anything very
profound, though I find myself amused by McInerney's short takes, espe–
cially his running commentary on Japanese pop culture. It is hard not to
be charmed by the brief vignettes of the way Japan absorbs Western mu–
sic: the band leader at the Buff:110 Rome Cafe announces , "Let's get
down and dirty," and counts down the beat, "!chi, ni, san, shi," leading
into "Got My Mojo Workin'." This sort of scene is cleverly drawn and
brutally accurate, and McInerney has more fun than the other writers
with the cultural face-off that produces, alllong Japanese and Americans
alike, the comic vanities of hybrid behavior. Americans looking for their
ki
through
karate
or Zen or
kClldo
arc no less ripc for satiricial sendups
