The entire joyful and, in terms of vulgarity and ridiculousness, amusing scene at the beginning takes place in Abashiri prison, as dictated by the rules of this series, which eloquently illustrates the redemption of a yakuza and other insignificant scoundrels in their various plots. In the midst of this narrative steeped in sweet stupidity, we witness the pantomimes of the prisoners, the theatricality of attending to a fellow prisoner pretending to be dead – and perhaps dying in the lie – of eating the anal remains of the corpse without ignoring – like Sorimachi – the stomach cramps and signs of vomiting, and finally the stratagem of the burial, repeating the prayers of Namu Amida;

but all these twists and turns, which are neither brief nor gratuitous, prepare them to reveal that they have gained a frivolous and unhealthy experience that will be useful to them in the series of events that follow, no less pantagruelian, as Rabelais said. for example, Shin’ichi Tachibana will receive a horse as a trophy for shooting the centre of a coin, defeating a stranger (called Shimamoto, as we will find out at the end in his revenge), thus defeating his opponent on the road, only to be informed a couple of leagues later, as he is leaving, by another scoundrel (a worker at the Hamaguri ranch, as we will later learn) who jumps out at them on a path and claims that he helped Tachibana win and wants half of the spoils that a minute ago were the reward. Upon arriving at the deplorable Futagori hotel, a young man enters and calls himself Sayare Yoshio. He puts a price on the horse’s pedigree and asks to borrow it to show it to his father.

A taste of the film https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6hjBTausL4k

The thieves agree, but as time passes, they realise that the kid has tricked them, so they head to the Gonda ranch to demand that they be paid, as is their due, 300,000 yen for the animal. Unfortunately, when they arrive, they refuse to pay, so they decide to teach them a lesson with their fists until the ranch owner, the landowner Gonda, comes out and immediately orders them to pay the former yakuza.

Tachibana had barely begun to fan himself with the money when he left the Gonda ranch and witnessed the poor treatment of his horse, which he had already named ‘Hanako’. He immediately returned and almost threw the money in the face of Gonda and his henchmen, then walked away firmly, took Hanako and left for his destination, to continue wandering. I don’t usually give SPOILER warnings because I assume that the reader has already seen the film when I write the review, but my Spoiler Warning is about Hanako and the horses at the end that are poisoned by the cowardly and despicable Gonda, so if you don’t want to see the beautiful animals fall, now is a good time to stop reading. In short, Tachibana sides with the Haraguchi ranch because he realises that the ranch owner buys the horses legally at auction and raises the animals legally and lovingly, unlike his rival Gonda, who sends his thugs to buy horses at markets and squares to threaten bidders at auctions and increase his monopoly. Tachibana and his two brothers from Abashiri receive offers from Gonda to sabotage, set fire to and otherwise attack the rival ranch, but they refuse. As Tachibana hugs Hanako and promises to train him to beat the thoroughbreds, he is shot from a distance and the horse dies in front of him in a heart-wrenching scene.

He runs to the hill and catches up with Shimamoto, whom he hasn’t seen since the Futaguri hotel, and is astonished to see him again. He thinks that Shimamoto shot him, even though Shimamoto claims otherwise, and he doesn’t calm down until Shimamoto lends him the rifle and Tachibana smells it and feels its coldness, dismissing Shimamoto. They say goodbye stiffly, and then we see that Shimamoto is working in collusion with another young ex-yakuza, Satake, a young man hired by Gonda to kill the horse. Satake is given a new mission: to poison the 50 horses on the Haraguchi ranch, but Shimamoto appears and advises him not to do it because there are friends of Abashiri there whom he does not want to harm. Instead of taking the powder and poison to scatter it in the field, Satake runs to tell Tachibana and the others about Gonda and admits that he killed Hanako but did not know she belonged to Tachibana. They rush to try to save the innocent horses but are unable to save a single one. We already know how it ends. Tachivana and the rancher Haraguchi himself, along with the others, burst in on Gonda and his men and decide to kill him, but first Shimamoto demands to be the one to shoot Gonda because he still remembers the death of his parents at Gonda’s hands. However, Gonda’s daughter Akiko gets in the way. Shimamoto was also willing to kill her, but Tachibana intervened, arguing that she had nothing to do with his revenge. Shimamoto warns him, not without reason, that he will shoot him if he does not move. He does not move, and Tachibana is shot, leading to the ellipsis at the end. We only understand that Tachibana did not die because in the last shot he walks towards Hanako’s grave, but what about Gonda?