Onibi: the Fire Within

Mochizuki’s second collaboration with the writer Yamanouchi Yukio may be the most intensely moving Yakuza film ever made. It’s certainly one of the best achieved Japanese movies of the 1990s. Its authors give a brand new tonality to the old story of a Yakuza released from a long jail term into a society he finds changed beyond recognition.Kunihiro (Harada Yoshio, never better) seriously intends to go straight. He moves in with Sakata, a gay guy he met in jail, and would be happy taking odd labouring jobs and lazing around in the sun if it weren’t for his former junior Tanikawa (Aikawa Sho), who is effusively respectful, unfailingly generous with the envelopes of used banknotes and unstoppably determined to get Kunihiro back into gang life. Kunihiro finally starts working for Tanikawa’s new boss (another fine cameo from Okuda Eiji), first as a driver, then as a debt collector. But the incident that rekindles his ‘fire within’ is a murderous attack on his gay friend…Onibi is Mochizuki’s most complete and heartfelt statement of his hatred of Yakuza. It’s equally an amazingly elegiac account of the emotional fall-out from moral choices; the emotional pay-off is saved for the very last shot, after the end-credits. An indisputably great film. (Tony Rayns)