Graveyard of Honour

One of Fukasaku’s most important films, based on a novel about true events and characters by the Yakuza-turned-writer Fujita Goro. The film shows the struggle with life and death of several kids who grow up on the wrong side of the tracks in postwar Japan. In Tokyo just after the war lives a Yakuza who excels in his bluntness, senseless violence and provoking feuds with other Yakuza gangs. He rapes a girl, attacks his boss with a knife, murders the only gang member who shows any sympathy towards him and hence ends up in jail time and again. In the end he becomes addicted to drugs and commits suicide. Even though the theme is reminiscent of Battles Without Honour and Humanity, Fukasaku is here at his most extreme in portraying the tragedy of postwar youth, personified by the utter loneliness of the protagonist, driven on by incomprehensible motives, who throws himself into the fateful abyss of violence and decadence. The ‘dirty hero’ is a common character in Fukasaku’s films, but a hero who is so averse to any need for salvation is exceptional, even for him. The pregnant realism grips you right up to the end, maybe most strongly in the scene just before the end when we see the hero chew on the ashes of his cremated wife. By the end of the sixties Watari Tetsuya had grown to become a star of action films from the Nikkatsu Studio, in which he always played the honest hero. When Nikkatsu only made ‘roman porn’ films he started working freelance and made his début for Toei with this film. The cooperation with Fukasaku was to be pursued the year after in the film Yakuza no hakaba: kuchinashi no hana/Yakuza Graveyard.