A Fugitive from the Past is a modernist detective story in which the past pays an unwelcome visit as surely as it does in any film noir. In the pulse-pounding opening, set during a typhoon in 1947, a pawnbroker's family is murdered, robbed, and their house burned down. A decade later, the person responsible, now a successful businessman living under an assumed name, has a surprise call from a prostitute who encountered him on that fateful day and became obsessed with him, even retaining his nail clipping as a memento. In its use of the investigative crime genre to inspect a society, the film looks forward to many European films of the subsequent decade, but few can match Fugitive's technical virtuosity. The film's rough, grainy textures exaggerate its elemental bleakness (especially the blustery ocean) and its brooding sense of survival at any cost, and of the impossibility of salvation in postwar Japan.