Ley Lines / Nihon kuroshakai (1999)

Takashi Miike’s Ley Lines is the third in a loose trilogy about the Chinese in Japan, following the fate of two brothers and their friend as they first try to escape from the prejudice shown to them in their small town as “half-breeds” and eventually to escape from Japan itself.

After wrecking the local council office when denied a passport because he is already on probation, Ryuichi decides to go to Tokyo with his local gang. All but Chan back out, until at the last second Ryuichi’s more studious little brother Shun joins them. In Tokyo they scrounge a living, eventually selling toluene for the hustler Ikeda. They soon cross paths with Anita, a prostitute from Shanghai, who moves in with the trio after she is badly beaten by a client and then by her pimp, becoming part their lover and part their mother. Unable to get passports, convinced that things will be no better in China where they will still be both half-breeds and even greater outsiders, they decide to be smuggled onto a ship to Brazil. To get the money, they rob the Chinese moneylender and gangster Wong. No one will be surprised to learn that this too goes bad.

Unlike the Young Thugs trilogy, Miike’s “Chinese” movies (Shinjuku Triad Society, Rainy Dog, and Ley Lines) do not seem to be based on a single writer’s experiences. Nevertheless, they also are all set in an underworld where violence is the most common language. The Japanese title is actually Japanese Underworld, but this is not the world of warring yakuza or triad gangs. This is the underworld below that layer, of scroungers and chancers and the constant search for money.

Miike’s penchant for blood and bullets is repressed until a surprisingly poetic ending. Thus, the violence itself becomes much more realistic and difficult to watch, particularly the violence inflicted on Anita by her pimp and her clients. Even her first visit with a client is a rape, with him awaiting her with erection ready and charging into her without any chance for her to prepare herself. The violence the young men deal with is far more realistic than usual for Miike’s films, fists and pipes and boots that have much greater effect on the audience’s sympathy than his usual gallons of blood splattered over walls and bodies by guns and knives.

This is not to suggest that Miike fails to provide some bravura set pieces. Anita’s introduction with a long steadi-cam walk through streets and alleys and into a genuine hole-in-the-wall Chinese restaurant is spectacularly successful in setting not only her character but the world in which she and the three boys will eventually come together. And the long final shot starting from a close-up in a rowboat and pulling away to an aerial view is unforgettable, not because of its technical skill but for its ability to combine a poetic presentation of hope, death, love, and the afterlife. Sometimes, Miike seems to be channeling Suzuki’s color films with odd color filters or with a desire to find a different way to tell a typical story that can ruin an occasional scene, like the view of Anita’s sadistic client seen from inside her vagina spread open with a speculum.

At other times, he is in the world of Oshima’s Shinjuku movies, with scenes shot guerilla style among street crowds or with sudden jump cuts. Yet at others, he can be quiet and still, with the silent scene of Anita and Ryuichi alone on the train as poignant as any in Japanese film history.

The boys are not immigrants but rather children of families with one Chinese and one Japanese parent, so the movie is not directly about the immigrant experience in the way that Yentown was, for example. Their life mirrors that of many of the Koreans or part-Koreans seen in other films, raised as Japanese but not accepted as Japanese. On the other hand, Wong is an immigrant who has “made it;” as he says, he now has money, cars, and women. But in private he is still missing something. He brings Chinese prostitutes to his bedroom not for sex but to tell him children’s fairy tales from his native Shanghai. Though this may make him eccentric, it does not make him sympathetic. In our first sight of him while eating in the small Chinese restaurant, he shoots a cat for meowing is too loud. It’s hard to remember a clearer introduction saying “This is a Bad Guy,” certainly not since Henry Fonda shot the little boy in Once Upon a Time in the West or possibly even since Richard Widmark pushed the old lady in her wheelchair down the stairs in Kiss of Death.

Brazil has long been a dream destination for Japanese emigrants in movies, though a trip by ship would be much longer than to other possible destinations where they might blend in (such as Hawaii or Peru). While the boys dream of day-long sambas, the occasional music provided by Miike regular Koji Endo is for accordion or perhaps bandoneon, far more suggestive of Argentina, though the accordion was long a favorite of Japanese film composers of the post-war era.

As with Yentown and many of the “Korean” movies, the cast is Japanese-born, except for Anita played by Dan Li. As Ryuichi, Kazuki Kitamura is a smoldering presence, not unlike the early Yoshio Harada.

The goofier Chan is Tomoro (often credited as Tomorowo) Taguchi, a character actor who sometimes seems to be in everything, though almost never in a role as large or as visible and significant as this one. As Wong, Naoto Takenaka continues to show himself one Japan’s most versatile actors. Amid the violence, Miike manages to suggest a considerable amount of sympathy for his characters, not something usually associated with Miike’s name.