Illustrated by Max Currie
Ozman resurfaced much the way Kent had played his own revenge scene in a made-for-television drama that never made it to the television. He starred as the twin brother of a New York English teacher working in Japan who goes missing after a run-in with high-level yakuza. Kent played both twins, the dead one in flashbacks. The protagonist has come from the United States to get to the bottom of his twin’s mysterious disappearance. Upon discovering the yakuza connection, Kent’s character tracks down the people responsible for what he discovers is his brother’s death and exacts his revenge with violent ferocity. But not before his character meets and subsequently falls in love with his dead twin’s Japanese girlfriend. Kent recalled staring down into the camera (or the face of the yakuza baddie), his own face filling the frame, just as Ozman’s mug filled the frame as he peered down at Kent in a POV shot: maniacal sneer, rain dripping from his face, eyes wide with zeal, head shaved to a wet sheen. Except for the shaved head, Kent too had sneered and dripped and gone Jack Nicholson in The Shining all over the scene. A film critic for Tokyo Journal who had been invited to a preproduction rehearsal wrote: “Mr. Richman plays the vengeful brother like community theater on steroids.” Soon after the article ran, the movie lost its greenlight status.
Kent suspected he was dreaming again, lost in some series of cause-and-effect fantasy, his paranoia and ill state producing hallucinations bred by his worst fears. He’d thought of little else since he learned of Ozman’s escape. Until he noticed the black-handled chisa katana in a lacquered scabbard around Ozman’s waist, Kent believed he was safe in his reverie, if still on the ground outside Cedars and in a stupor.
christopher bundy 