The Foreign Duck, the Native Duck, and God in a Coin Locker / Ahiru to kamo no koinrokka (2006)

The God in the coin locker is Bob Dylan, whose “Blowin' in the Wind” is used as a repeated motif in this most unexpected film. Shiina sings it on the train to his freshman year at one of the several universities to be found in Sendai, and the story itself often seems to be blowing …

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 …

GO (2001)

The Japanese relation to and racism about Koreans has rarely been more complexly and sometimes confusingly dealt with than in GO. Based on a very autobiographical novel by Kazuki Kaneshiro, it tells the story of the last year in high school, with flashbacks, of Sugihara, a boy of half Japanese, half Korean descent. We first …

Moon Child (2003)

The moon child of the title is Kei, who is no child but is instead a vampire in the Dracula sense – he drinks blood, is eternal, and can only be destroyed by sunlight. First seen in Tokyo at the start of the millennium, he reappears throughout a sci-fi future life that concludes in the …

Shinjuku Triad Society / Shinjuku kuroshakai: Chaina mafia senso (1995)

Opening with a severed head on the sidewalk, Shinjuku Triad Society then proceeds to intercut from the head to a dance club with DJ, a young man sitting on a toilet on an open stair landing, police chases, a homosexual blowjob, a cop having his throat slit, and a detective breaking a chair over the …

Dead or Alive / Hanzaisha (1999)

So much is going on in Takashi Miike's Dead or Alive that it is hard to know where to start. As in Fudoh, we begin with a blast of violence but much longer. To the sound of ear drum bursting rock, we are thrown into the night in Shinjuku, with intercut street scenes, a woman …

Kamikaze Taxi (1995)

Kamikaze Taxi suggests either a wild, violent bloodfest or a crazy comedy, but though there will eventually be a lot of death, it doesn't quite fit either of those genres. In the way of Japanese story-telling, we do not even meet the taxi or its driver until fifty minutes into an almost three hour movie …

Most Terrible Time in My Life / Waga jinsei saiaku no toki (1993)

I first saw The Most Terrible Time in My Life about thirty years ago as part of an Asian Film Festival long before its official American release and years before I knew anything about Japanese films outside of the art house circuit and sixties chanbara. I thought at the time it was entertaining and a …

All Under the Moon / Where Is the Moon? / Tsuki wa dotchi ni dete iru (1993)

As Japan's prosperity boomed, it became a magnet for Asian immigrants. The most prominent of these were the Koreans, many of whom had come during the war years as slave labor, but who had since been joined by economic immigrants from both North and South. To these have been added in this movie Filipinos, Chinese, …