The film recreates small, raw atmospheres of violence caused not only by the heartless and cruel family environment that the three siblings experienced as children with their abusive father, but also by the dilemma that has brought them together 30 years later: the inheritance of the Shimohashi land. Fortunately, I saw this film in the cinema with subtitles, otherwise I would have thought that the ellipses in the script, deliberately made by Irie, were due to subtitling problems, but that’s not the case. Why does the eldest, Ichiro, inherit the land and where did he go when he disappeared, leaving behind more visible memories than the other two? The plot is intense, but either the script or the direction is lacking, to avoid saying disordered. When the first fistfight between Ichiro and Saburo takes place at the lake or river, 50 minutes have already passed, and the scattered narrative thread still doesn’t allow me to connect with either the naivety of the councillor brother or the older brother’s resentment towards his younger brother. It’s true that there are clues, because before he starts beating Saburo, he reproaches him for leaving the village decades ago with a knife in his hand, but Ichiro questions who stabbed their father in the neck. In fact, after Saburo is stabbed in the hand in retaliation for not resolving the land issue for the boss’s son, it is Jiro who tells him that it was Saburo who stabbed their father in the neck. Instead, time has been spent on the friction and eventual confrontation between migrants from the neighbourhood of the land of discord between Chinese and Japanese, over the ambition for the land acquired where the Shimo-Hashimoto commercial outlet will be built.

The councillor, Jiro’s brother, is finally part of the consortium that takes over the land, while both brothers, older and younger, are beaten up by the yakuza who covet the property. Despite holding Ichiro hostage, who came to act as a ‘guard’ for the transaction, they also control Saburo in the same house. When Ichiro stabs the yakuza leader in the neck, who is the same man who stabbed Saburo in the hand for not arranging the sale of the land, the plot accelerates into a self-destructive league of violence and death with Saburo being shot at point-blank range in his car.

The only one who seems to survive, brother Jiro, does not seem to enjoy his triumph due to the terrible manipulation that his own wife exercises even in front of their son. It is a work that I regret not recommending, regardless of the bitter taste left by the ending, but above all because there are countless unclear night scenes that do not help this noir, which I suppose is autobiographical, as the director is also the writer.