Graveyard of Honor

Kinji Fukusaku
1975

This barn-burner Jitsuroku (true account) flick is a manic four-minute-mile through the grimy bombed-out alleys of postwar Tokyo, and the sleazy smash-and-grab experience of a yakuza's tattooed life. At the center, real life gangster Rikio Ishikawa is played against type by Tetsuya Watari in an aviator-clad downward trajectory towards ignominy and the unyielding surface of the jailyard blacktop.

After a series of costly and violent faux-pas' against other families Rikio is tossed from Tokyo's yakuza network. Serving only one of his ten year banishment he returns from exile freshly hooked on smack. From here, its a jerky and prolonged ending for him and his prostitute-turned-geisha gal, Chieko. Not even an assassination attempt from the spurned bosses, or a few lengthy stints in prison can get rid of cockroach like Rikio who, is finally (mercifully) killed by his own hand after scrawling a farewell on his cell wall: "30 years of madness, what a laugh."

To say it is difficult to identify with the film's protagonist is modest in the extreme. Our hero is a man who rapes his future wife on the first date, and turns an angry blade to any hand offering aid. This extreme behavior leads to some excellent setpieces, particularly Rikio proving he's a "crazy motherfucker" by munching on the bones of his freshly cremated spouse. A tramp junkie with a hand-cannon provides some great moments as well, adding even more chaos to the shit-shit storm surrounding public enemy number one.

Fukusaku's visual sense is as unrelenting as his subject. Shaky cameras mix it up in both haphazard brawls (there's a lot of them), and topless, sake soaked, parties alike. There's a dizzy, canted-angle sense of frustration in the wake of the great war, that only the yakuza seem to profit from. Societal infrastructure only comes across in the forms of the Japanese police and occupying forces, who are painted just as corrupt as the yakuza, yet devoid of a sense of honor and propriety.

Rikio is the embodiment of Japan's postwar rage, masochistically lashing out against a fulfilled fate. While the gang bosses appear to be wise and benevolent bastions of power, they turn to flabbergasted children with Rikio's audacious defiance. This utter disregard and complete disrespect for any kind of authority (even the outsider/underworld variety) is the only way to come to grips with this knockabout gangster in a heroic light. This ultimate uncompromising individual, simultaneously worthy of our pity and disgust, gets his in the end. For all its downbeat subject matter "Graveyard of Honor" never really feels depressing, Fukusaku shoots like a candle alight at both ends, and the penultimate suicidal leap feels strangely like a triumph. What a laugh.

Review by Brett A. Scieszka