From the liner notes to the Mystery Train soundtrack cd:
"Mystery Train is a temporal comedy that takes place within one twenty-four hour period in Memphis, Tennessee. The film is a kind of triptych including three seperate but connecting stories, like those Japanese films made up of several ghost stories, or the Italian ones consisting of romantic comedies. But in Memphis, it's the Italian who is visited by a ghost, and the Japanese who are romantically inclined. And there's an Englishman there too, who causes everything to get pretty fucked up by the end. Although the characters never really meet, in Mystery Train the episodic form is finally just a disguise, and the three stories just separate cars pulled by the same train -- a minimalist's version of The Canterbury Tales.
JIM JARMUSCH
NYC 4/89"