SHOOTING GENJI

Shooting Genji is a noir riff on the Japanese classic, The Tale of Genji, set in the U.S. during Prohibition and the Great Crash. The story s narrator, Jean-Yves LeFouet, is a book-lover who is almost blinded at age 16, when he falls from a ladder dusting books. He is changed and his eyes never recover. With daylight too bright and nighttime never too dark, he becomes perfectly suited for a multitude of shady careers. No one sees back roads at midnight as well, and a few years later he takes up driving at night for whiskey smugglers. The leader of the gang, Big Department, is reputed to be a gargantuan British thug. When Big Department decides to go legit and make money the easy way (i.e., on Wall Street), his henchman, a laconic assassin named Poochie, recommends Jean-Yves to the broker helping him invest his profits. Jean-Yves begins driving evenings for Aldo Pennebeck, a bon vivant who specializes in front running his own clients orders. In 1928, the Wall Street broker life seems awfully sweet. Money is flowing, and thanks to Aldo s taste for entertaining, Jean-Yves meets a beautiful Swedish dancer named Eva-Marie Fachsi. Love seems grand as they tentatively nibble at the Big Apple. But Fachsi decides to leave New York anyway, aspiring to bigger things in Hollywood. Then October 1929 arrives and the stock market does a swan dive off a cliff. The gang isn t happy. They drop in, grab Aldo, and throw him out his 18th-story office window. The papers call it suicide. Luckily for Jean-Yves, the thugs don t get their hands on him and he flees with his cat in Aldo s Duesenberg. This will not be the last we see of these gangsters. More a romantic than a crook, Jean-Yves motors West in hopes of finding Fachsi. When he arrives in L.A., he sees Eva-Marie Fachsi listed in the phone book, but his call doesn t go through. The number is disconnected. He stays in L.A. anyway and finds work chauffeuring at night for a producer named Charles Granyer. Granyer is filming an e