The plot goes something like this: the film features solely on warring yakuza gangs in the notorious Shinjuku gangland and vice district of Tokyo. The boss of the Anjo gang is "entertaining" his prostitute girlfriend when he mysteriously vanishes, along with 1,000,000 yen. His top hitman, Kakihara (played brilliantly and extravagantly by Tadanobu Asano, probably best known in the West for his role in Electric Dragon 80,000v. and who is a top J-pop star and respected musician to boot), is desperate to find him, partly due to the stolen money and partly due to the fact that Kakihara is an extreme masochist and Boss Anjo was his favourite sadistic partner. He suspects another hitman, Suzuki, knows who killed him and may have also been involved, so he tortures Suzuki for information, which leads to his official dismissal from the gang (but only after cutting off the end of his tongue and giving it to his temporary boss, played by Tetsu Sawaki (who also played Aoyama in Audition), as a kind of bizarre self-punishment/peace offering). |