On a crowded bus in teeming Tokyo, a rookie policeman has his gun lifted. Fearful of losing his job, Murakami embarks on a desperate search for the pickpocket. A cop without a job is a modern-day ronin. Murakami becomes a lone pilgrim in an underworld seething in the heat of summer, menacingly ripe in the crush of postwar shortages, and divinely hellish under Kurosawa's odd-angled lensing and stacatto editing. The policeman's anxiety is heightened as reports come in of murders attributed to the stolen pistol; one by one, the gun's seven bullets are used up, and a simple theft becomes a case of murder by Döppleganger. Kurosawa has acknowledged his debt to Simenon, whose continental op, Maigret, is a Murakami-like seeker grown grey (and still not resigned to the fact that the bad sleep well). But Stray Dog is typical of Kurosawa's uncanny ability to mold genre to his own concerns. More than a hardboiled thriller, Stray Dog is a Dostoyevskian saga of guilt, and expiation, by association.