仁義なき戦い 広島死闘篇 (Jingi Naki Tatakai: Hiroshima Shitō-hen) [Battles Without Honor and Humanity: Deadly Fight in Hiroshima] (1973)

I was convinced I reviewed the predecessor to this film, 仁義なき戦い (aka Battles Without Honor and Humanity), but apparently it was in my rather large-sized hiatus before I got back into the swing of things. I suppose that’s all well and good, given that the five films in this series (alternately titled “Battles Without Honor and Humanity” and “The Yakuza Papers” in English-speaking countries) were filmed and released so closely together (the first three all came out the same year!) and become different stories from the same truth-based source, featuring many of the same actors. Not all, of course–this is an epic of organized crime, and there’s a lot of blood and death.

After cheating in a gambling den, Shoji Yamanaka (Kin’ya Kitaōji¹) impulsively takes revenge with a knife and is arrested and sent to prison for two years. There he meets Shozo Hirono (Bunta Sugawara, lead–as much as there was one–as the same character in the previous film), and is eventually released, only to find himself seeking an alternate way to pay for food in a restaurant and being shunned and feeling insulted, he’s taken to the street and savagely beaten. This is because the waitress with whom he attempts to bargain for payment is Yasuko Uehara (Meiko Kaji), the niece of boss Muraoka (Hiroshi Nawa), and this attracts the rage of the hot-headed son of Otomo boss Choji (Yoshi Katō), Katsutoshi Otomo (Shinichi “Sonny” Chiba). Yasuko comes to his defense, but their burgeoning romance enrages Muraoka when he finds out, as he had offered Yamanaka a place in the yakuza family–and throws Yamanaka out of Hiroshima. Yamanaka’s attempts to redeem himself and win back the chance at Yasuko (however secretive it may need to be, due to Yasuko’s war hero-widowed state) take him back into the path of the later-released Hirono, and into the perpetual sights of the ever-present and ever-ambitious Katsutoshi.

Whew. Trying to summarize these, I feel pretty pleased that screenwriter Kazuo Kasahara apparently struggled with trying to keep things straight enough–so much so that allegedly he refused to write the story of the major outbreak of violence in the 1950s in Hiroshima due to its complexity and volume of characters (he later agreed to the studio’s request and made it the basis for the next two screenplays instead). I’m at least mildly annoyed that the subtitles on this Arrow release often omit translation of words of address–I quietly gathered from my extremely limited vocabulary that familial terms were used regularly as means of address, but only a handful of these are actually shown. Worse, when some characters are addressed by name, this is left out. As someone who often struggles with keeping names straight in the more “subtle” contexts (I read and re-read a particular few pages of Matt Kindt’s Mind MGMT just last night trying to keep straight who was who), this was extra frustrating–when most name usage was in the third person, it was a lot harder to associate faces with names. I should be thankful, I suppose, that lying is kept to a minimum, as is double-talk or obfuscation (there’s not really much “I took care of <so-and-so>”, so much as “I killed <so-and-so>”). Sometimes choosing a family name over a given name² happens, too (despite the one I can hear), and makes things doubly confusing.

That whole struggle makes things very distracting here–part of my brain wondering why on earth they decided to change how someone was addressed or referenced despite the spoken dialogue, another part of my brain trying to put those things back together, and another trying to take those pieces of information and feed them back into the plot. This is often not an issue, but the nature of Fukasaku’s films and Kasahara’s screenplays makes things move very quickly. We do get on-screen call-outs for character names when they appear (sometimes) and descriptions of their roles in the organizations (though the definitions aren’t always clear–what’s an underboss? What’s a “sworn brother”? There’s some intuitive clarity, but not knowing the structure/organization of the yakuza in the 1950s really doesn’t help those make meaningful sense. Plus I swear a few of those guys got an introduction then spent the rest of the film in the background at most.). That call-out and the pacing of the film, as well as the presence of a narrator (Satoshi “Tetsu” Sakai), give the film a “dramatized documentary” sort of feel: the end-point of these narratives and scenes is to bring us to the milestones of prison sentences and deaths.

One of the interesting structural elements of Fukasaku’s films thus far, though, is that not only do we have Yamanaka as our sort-of lead here, where Hirono was the same sort-of before, we follow emotional arcs for these characters (and some others) all in service of that “newsreel” sort of intention–parallel narrative arcs running next to each other, where the public view is sewn onto the dramatized emotional arcs, chopping up and signposting the public, sensational elements pulled from reality (albeit with altered names). There’s no fight between these two films, it’s the narrator and the factual call-outs acting as a reminder of the real events we’re getting emotionally involved with. The violence is gritty for its time, blood-spattered and somewhat unsparing, though it’s filmed with a more sensationalistic-artist form: gunshots are often repeated or echoed even where they couldn’t have been to create an explosive auditory punch to the moment, with odd angles and rapid editing on the casualties of it, something like crime scene photographs, as we’re eventually left with the on-screen news bulletin about the event.

I think somewhere they’ve called this the Japanese answer to The Godfather, but the basis in reality keeps things less contained, less defined, and less structurally clear, as I think I’ve suggested above. If it’s an answer, it was taking the question quite liberally–this isn’t to say it’s a bad answer, but it’s certainly an unexpected one. The scale of it is larger–The Godfather does cover two generations (let’s not discuss the third for now…), but it does so without carrying us directly and completely from one to the other. This, on the other hand, is a tangled mess of twenty-plus years, all of it covered in one way or another, as the limitations of five movies allow. It’s more kinetic, too–as much as a recent rewatch of Coppola’s classic (with the echoing words of coworkers calling it “boring” in my head) reminded me that the length of that one does nothing to slow its pacing, this is relentless in many ways. Quiet moments are few, and filled with tension when present. We leap from event to event, the script and direction keeping this from being jarring, but leaping around like we can’t stop for anything all the same.

These are interesting movies–following Yamanaka here after Hirono before (and, I understand, after) reminds me of some series or other I can’t quite bring to mind, where a single movie deviates in structure, but only slightly (so no, not Halloween III: Season of the Witch) and follows a different character for one movie before coming back around. Here, it feels less like an idea born of boredom, or a differing creative voice inserting itself, and more like an attempt to build up another arc to fill out the totality of this story.

I’m certainly increasingly pleased that I did dig out this set (for a little more than I might’ve liked, if I’m honest!) and look forward to the rest–and its sequel trilogy.

¹This is the first time this notation has lost me. I assume that means that, under the transliteration I was taught, it’s “Kinnya Kitaooji”, as the “‘” does lead to an assumption of pausing for me, which a “nn” would equate to. Regardless, because it’s the one I’ve got available, I’ll leave it as is.

²I struggle with how to choose ordering, given that I developed an appreciation for trying to appreciate native formations some time ago, which is why I’ve been known to keep literal translations of titles handy when I’m titling these reviews myself. I should probably choose an approach and stick to it, but sometimes the case is small and the names are unfamiliar enough that I can’t be entirely certain (due to everyone else also choosing orders seemingly arbitrarily–indeed, I’ve got a character here that has their name listed the opposite way of the rest in my base source for info on my collection. That’s incredibly frustrating) which is the family name. So not knowing that, except where handily here we talk about the “Otomo family”, the “Hirono family” (though I already knew that one), and the “Muraoka family”. Cool: clear which name is family, even if it’s a different sense of family!