The scene is a rather familiar mixture of police versus yakuza, but shot at street level, with a gritty lens. It essentially begins with the murder of a police informer, who's found dismembered, lying in the street. The scene is a frenzied one, with passers-by horning in on the crime scene, investigators combing the crown for someone who can translate a witness's statements, and beat cops who pose for candid photos with the severed head! The entire film spans mostly Taiwanese & Japanese locales, Triad & Yakuza territories, and a multitude of dialects surrounding the Chinese, Taiwanese and Japanese gangsters. In fact, the language barriers (or more precisely, the languages themselves) are nearly characters in and of themselves. Even the police get wrapped up by it.
After a violent and multifaceted beginning, the film becomes clearer; the Chinese-born Kiriya is a Japanese cop who becomes obsessed with saving his younger brother's future as a lawyer, while Yoshihito (the younger brother) has agreed to help in an "illegal" underground organ harvesting program the Yakuza and Triads have been conducting. The Chinese police know about it, but they consider two willing parties as a legit deal, 'Who has been wronged?', they say. Kiriya is sent to China to investigate the organ-harvesting case, but uses most of the time to investigate Wang, the head of a syndicate, who has employed Yoshihito as council/intermediary. The film definitely has a gritty, 1980's feel to it, and catches the far east gangster scene at the height of it's power and brutality. Nobody is safe, no one is untouchable.
I don't presume to "get" everything going on here, there's so many facets to a society I've never known, but Miike does a great job at parsing the dynamics/motivations of every character; even if they don't have a major role. Be it a drugged-up, strung-out whore who ultimately wants to live a normal life, or a Japanese officer who cares deeply for his Chinese parents that speak no Japanese and feel lost in the country they now live. One of those is a major character, and one is a minor one...but both lives are illuminated sufficiently. If I had to mention a negative, it would be that there's just so much jammed into the film that it was pulled in too many directions. The up-side is that it never became convoluted. Another would be, and I don't know if Miike did it for show/shock, but the movie is packed with loads of sex between the gangsters themselves or the gangsters and a couple of androgynous man-children. The police even use ass-rape as an interrogation tactic. He lost me there. Still, a great early Miike film and a must see.
