Takashi Miike is a rogue whose legend has long been cemented in cinema lore. He has directed 127 features and TV shows at the time of writing, six of which came from his legendary 2001 run. He makes a mockery of auteur theory because every other film feels like the work of a different director; the style and mannerisms of half a dozen filmmakers seem to reside within that mammoth filmography. Which brings me to Radiance Films’ new box set, Underworld Chronicles, a collection that captures a slither of his Yakuza output. The three films included — Fudoh: The New Generation (1996), Agitator (2001), and Deadly Outlaw: Rekka (2002) — are so disparate in style that they feel curated as a genre retrospective rather than a collection of one man’s work. But that’s the nub of Miike: after 127 directorial outings, he essentially is a genre unto himself.
Let’s start chronologically with the earliest film in the set: 1996’s Fudoh: The New Generation, a continuation‑turned‑quasi‑adaptation of Hitoshi Tanimura’s then recently cancelled manga. Miike’s film went on to have two sequels, both directed by Yoshiho Fukuoka, and the original Fudoh played a major role in getting Miike recognised internationally, becoming his first film to screen at an international festival. Returning to the idea of multiple directors residing within Miike, this is an early outing for his gonzo manga/anime‑adaptation mode, a uniquely maximalist string to his bow. In essence, it’s a story about a father–son rivalry sparked by the brutal decapitation of Fudoh Jr’s (Shosuke Tanihara) elder brother, with the younger generation killing the older generation of Yakuza one by one in a game of revenge, retaliation and power plays.
That surface description, however, misses the wild style on display. We have a pair of pre‑teen hitmen — technically hitboys — and two high‑school girls, one firing guns like a combat veteran and the other performing a strip‑show finale where her pièce de résistance is shooting darts out of her vagina. Later, the gang is completed by one of Fudoh’s teachers and a literal giant (Kenji Takano). There’s also a Korean/Japanese cyborg and a very young Riki Takeuchi colluding in this great familial war. This is classic Japanese exploitation: complete with near‑full‑frontal nudity and over‑the‑top gore.
Another argument Miike presents against auteur theory is just how varied in quality his work can be, spanning the divide between a generational talent and something a lot less transcendent. Fudoh delivers a fun 100 minutes of constant escalation and hyper‑eccentricity, whilst also being hamstrung by its origins as a follow‑up to a deceased comic book that has long passed out of relevance. The Fudoh manga was a recent thing when this was made, meaning that understanding the bigger picture of this Yakuza landscape was far more manageable then — now, thirty years have passed. The script presumes knowledge of the source text, makes little effort to introduce you to this world, nor does it give you anything tangible to understand why anything is happening. Here we have a very raw version of the filmmaker Miike was to become — something that affects everything from his ability to get the best from actors, pacing and even tone. Credit where it’s due, though: he gets a lot out of his minor budget.
It was a success though, internationally too, and there’s a very tangible reason for that: the maximalist excess. The first kill sees an older Yakuza offered a free drink while being transported by the police, and the resulting mix of poison and high blood pressure causes his blood to cascade and explode from him as if he were the opening elevator doors in The Shining. That’s the ground level — from there it just ups the ante, occupying the space that saw the likes of The Story of Riki becoming cult icons.
Onto his career‑defining 2001 with Agitator, his three‑hour Yakuza epic and the work of an altogether better, more mature filmmaker. There are two versions of the film on the disc: a two‑hour‑thirty international cut, and the full three‑hour version split into two parts and tucked away in the extras. The full version doesn’t receive centre billing because a proper remaster wasn’t possible, the bridging material between the international cut and the complete version survives only in poor quality. This is Miike offering a Yakuza film in the mode of the classic 1970s era that saw the ascendency of sagas like Kinji Fukasaku’s Battles Without Honor and Humanity. It begins with a Yakuza general stepping into another gang’s territory — played, in a rare acting appearance, by Miike himself as a thoroughly horrible little shit — which escalates into his “agitator” being killed after he pulls a gun.
After 127 directorial outings, (Miike is) essentially is a genre unto himself.
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From there we get a full‑blown gang war, politicking, and a surprising level of emotional maturity and honesty buried beneath the duty, honour and brotherhood. There’s also a density of character interaction and ensemble work that needs every one of its 150 minutes to breathe; there’s so much going on here, so many spinning plates and narrative considerations, that the level of growth in the five years since Fudoh is simply phenomenal. Miike is a whole new director here. At the core of all these twists, turns, betrayals and bloody shoot‑outs is the lead character, Kinohiko (Masaya Kato), whose love and respect for his family patriarch, Higuchi (Naoto Takenaka), grounds everything. Although the cast is too vast to run through all his players, the emotion felt in the bones of those two actors is the antithesis of the stoic manliness that stereotypes the gangster genre. To see a character cry once the pomp, ceremony and men he is responsible for are reduced to dots in the rear‑view window places Agitator within the upper echelon of gangster cinema for my money, as it punctures the machismo to show them as relatable — albeit volatile — people.
Shigenori Takechi’s script is heightened by Kiyoshi Itô’s raw, handheld cinematography, a creative instinct that imbues the film with real spontaneity and a sense of the everyday danger, all aided by the digital noise that remains on this Radiance print. Miike’s Agitator, like so many 70s Yakuza films before it, plays like a demystifying of the Yakuza — something that predates real‑world developments whereby they had to go legitimate or be crushed under the governmental drive the Japanese Diet undertook to eradicate organised crime through the Anti‑Boryokudan Act and the Yakuza Exclusion Ordinances of 2011. While difficult, dense and perhaps a little overlong, Miike channelled the generational talent within to create one of his best — a film overlooked simply because his straighter, more grounded work is overshadowed by the gonzo and horror that made his name.
Last in the set is 2002’s Deadly Outlaw: Rekka, a film that channels the sort of Yakuza titles made in the 1960s with their playboys and violence, albeit framed through the stylings that would later be made famous in Miike’s Dead or Alive trilogy. The name itself echoes the Tetsuya Watari‑fronted Outlaw Gangster series. There’s also a brushing up against reality here: the racism Koreans experience in Japan isn’t openly discussed, and while it featured more heavily in Isao Yukisada’s GO (2001), it’s present here with a rather harsh bit of cultural specificity. The script suggests that Koreans are somehow more predisposed to violent outbursts, which serves the film well for Riki Takeuchi’s (Kunisada) scorched‑earth vengeance after his father is killed in the opening scene, whilst also being a problematic generalisation — far from the mature touch of Agitator.
Rekka is also a tale of Yakuza and revenge, but it tackles it as much more of an action film, from the opening scene where a pair of hired hitmen gun down a family patriarch (and his underlings), who also happens to be Takeuchi’s adoptive father. Cut to prison, where an entire wing of officers has to hold down the rampaging Kunisada; upon leaving jail he’s approached by old Yakuza connections terrified of how he’s going to react to the murder of his surrogate father. To describe Rekka in any way, it would be the midpoint between Agitator and Fudoh. It has the characters and emotional foundation of Agitator, with an opening act that asks more of Takeuchi than his typical roles do, combined with the maximalist excesses of Fudoh in the third act — only without the questionable nudity and thin grasp of contextual storytelling.
2002 was also a prodigiously prolific year for Miike, the same year he completed his Dead or Alive trilogy, and Rekka feels akin to the second of that series, 2000’s Birds (II). Both films begin with a degree of humility before escalating further and further, until we have a furiously angry lead offing foes with a homemade bazooka. Twice. Rekka sees the hero and his accomplice walk the path to hell in the same way Ittō Ogami does in Lone Wolf and Cub, and it’s fun in a more consistent and sustained way than Fudoh, simply because Miike takes the time to invest in his main characters, which allows every step his characters make feel earned. By this point, Miike found a charisma in his direction whereby he could drop surreal developments without jumping the shark, and that final scene is one of the stranger things he has done within one of his “straight” films. While Miike has undisputed classics like Audition and Agitator, there is a particular image within the movie community of what a “Miike film” is — and for my money, Deadly Outlaw: Rekka is it: equally grounded and excessive, filled with familiar faces that recur throughout his career, and never forgetting to have copious amounts of bloody, gory fun.
Underworld Chronicles is a must for any self‑respecting Miike fan. This limited edition box set comes with 4K restorations of each movie for their Blu‑ray debuts, but don’t expect pristine restorations — the soul, a.k.a. film grain, is alive and well in these prints. There are also audio commentaries with Tom Mes, Shosuke Tanihara (Fudoh) and Miike himself, plus the 2009 documentary Electric Yakuza, Go to Hell!. Contained within the box is also an 80‑page bound book featuring new writing by Tom Mes and Colin Geddes, and archival writing from Tony Rayns.
UNDERWORLD CHRONICLES: TAKASHI MIIKE IS OUT NOW ON RADIANCE FILMS BLU-RAY
