Miike’d Up: Shinjuku Outlaw

In Miike’d Up, I will be attempting to watch the entirety of Takashi Miike’s filmography in chronological order, or at least as much of it as is feasibly possible.

Reviewed on Letterboxd 10/29/22

Miike’d Up: An [Incomplete] Prologue

Shinjuku Outlaw (1994)

The tough thing about trying to watch Miike’s early films is that a lot of them simply aren’t available with English subtitles, so I unfortunately had to skip over quite a few to continue on with my Miike’d Up journey. 

While Shinjuku Outlaw seems like a pretty basic yakuza flick, there’s actually a surprising amount of depth to it once you look past its basic plot. Yomi, a member of the Hiroshima yakuza, is involved in a shootout early on that puts him in a coma, a coma that he’s in for 10 years. When he awakens from this coma, deadset on revenge, he finds that the world has changed, and it’s no longer the Japan he knows; not only has the yakuza changed, but so has the country at large: when he suggests cutting off his friend’s finger to atone for his wrongdoings, he’s laughed at by the opposing yakuza, who have all but moved on from their former code of honor. When he finds himself on a road trip with Tsuji, a member of the yakuza group he’s now bound to, Yomi learns that Tsuji, despite appearances, isn’t actually Japanese; he’s Peruvian (go figure) and was taken in by the yakuza when caught smuggling drugs into the country. 

The world has moved on while Yomi was “dead,” and now there’s nothing that ties him to the place — and the life — that he once knew. Any attempts to hold on to the past are depicted as folly, seen clearly in Tsuji’s death; he’s mistaken for Japanese as he’s gunned down (by a Taiwanese man, no less), showing all the good that becoming a member of yesteryear’s yakuza did for him. It’s telling that Yomi battles a foreign group in the film (the Taiwanese mafia), as this only hammers home the point that the times are a-changin’; the danger isn’t just opposing yakuza anymore, but the world at large. Ultimately, it’s little surprise that Yomi doesn’t come out the other side unscathed; a man once dead has little to live for, but this time it seems that his death might actually have been for something.

⭐️⭐️⭐️ out of 5