Art Director/Production Designer/Cinematographer/Editor/Producer/Writer/Director: Shinya Tsukamoto
Music by Chu Ishikawa
Story by Hisashi Sato and Shinya Tsukamoto
Starring
Shinya Tsukamoto as Tsuda
Kahori Fujii as Hizuru
Koji Tsukamoto as Kojima
Koichi Wajima as Shirota (Gym Owner)
Naomasa Musaka as Hase (Ethical Trainer)
Naoto Takenaka as Ohizumi (Less Ethical Trainer)
Nobu Kanaoka as Nurse
Tomorowo Taguchi as Tattoo Artist
. . .
“He who leaves the fight unfinished is not at peace.”
-from the N.K. Sandars English language translation of The Epic of Gilgamesh (1960, revised 1964, revised 1972)
“I was on my way home, but the moon brought me back here.”
-dialogue from the film Tokyo Fist (1995)
. . .
Review by William D. Tucker.
Two men-a struggling insurance salesman named Tsuda and a struggling boxer named Kojima-fight over a woman-Hizuru, a competent data entry office worker-in Tokyo. It gets loud. It gets bloody.
Tokyo Fist is a saga of jealousy and vengeance told in a punitively kinetic style. The camera seems to jitter about with hysterical excitement. Boxers in training assault the lens full-on. The audience is positioned as a punching bag. Brilliant industrial music gets the blood boiling. Yes, the characters are miserable. But there’s tremendous energy driving them. You keep waiting for someone’s head to explode.
Tokyo Fist also features clever use of real world locations in Tokyo mixed with stylishly lit sets. Director Shinya Tsukamoto even incorporates his fascinatingly gruesome stop motion animation techniques from Tetsuo the Iron Man and Tetsuo II: Body Hammer to convey both inner emotional turmoil and bodily destruction in a more down-to-earth context of economic downturn and social dysfunction. Tokyo Fist is hyper-stylish but the visual flourishes do not smooth over the suffering of the characters. This is a satirically brutal view of Tokyo in the mid-1990s.
In the beginning, things can more or less be said to take place in mundane reality. There are two men, and there’s the woman they’re fighting to win. Everyone is basically someone who probably could exist outside of a movie. Maybe, y’know, the lighting would be less stylish, the shot compositions sloppier, more off-the-cuff, but these folks would still make sense free of the cinema frame.
Hizuru and Tsuda live in a nice enough apartment, and both work tolerable corporate jobs. We see Tsuda and Hizuru as having a happy relationship, at first, but we are soon enough given hints that all is not as it seems. Tsuda seems like a nice guy, but he’s actually jealous and controlling when not taking Hizuru for granted. Tsuda soon enough unleashes a full-on abusive side. He seems to feel entitled to nice things because he works so hard even if he’s both a tool of the system and a lousy partner. Hizuru seems like a doormat, but her passive exterior masks a simmering rage at being stepped on and trapped in a loveless relationship. Hizuru’s also resisting the expectation that she’s supposed to give up her career when Tsuda and her get married-a regressive expectation since it’s both misogynist and unrealistic. It’s misogynist in that it’s based on arbitrary gender roles. It’s unrealistic in the sense that Tsuda and Hizuru are living in the depths of the Post-Bubble Economy Malaise. A single income isn’t the smart way to go if they do stay together.
Kojima enters the scene as a shadowy figure from Tsuda’s past. Tsuda is tasked with paying out a policy to someone at a boxing gym. So Tsuda goes to the gym. It’s framed as a descent into a bizarre underground cultish scene. Bruised men weep and hang their heads at being freshly defeated in the ring-mind you these are just sparring matches. Tsuda catches a glimpse of men throwing rapid fire punches synched to exaggerated sound effects. Tsuda’s instantly captivated by what he sees. Tsuda is also obviously threatened by it. Something’s stirring within the salesman. Tsuda and Kojima walk past each other, obliviously-except Kojima did see Tsuda. Of course, Tsuda might have recognized Kojima but chose to ignore him, but Tsuda comes across as so clueless that I don’t think he did. Tsuda leaves the gym, eager to catch the train home-but that’s when a first person slasher villain camera charges up behind him-
It’s Kojima. Him and Tsuda exchange words. It’s civil enough, on the surface, but also full of tension. Kojima and Tsuda know each other from the past. It’ll be awhile before We the Audience get filled in on that past, but it is very obviously the source of tension. Tsuda fears the past, and so he denies it. Kojima’s stuck in it.
Hizuru is interested in tattoos and body piercings. To an audience in 2024 this all seems pretty tame, but Tsuda freaks out, absurdly attempting to force her to accept a laser removal and then a skin graft from his ass cheeks. Maybe Japanese society in 1995 was just super uptight about tattoos and piercings. I should also note here that Tokyo Fist has a kind of bleakly funny hysteria woven through it. Tsuda’s moral panic at Hizuru’s ink and piercings is a manifestation of this.
Kojima visits Tsuda and Hizuru’s apartment. There’s a spark between Hizuru and Kojima. Tsuda picks up on that. Tsuda becomes even more abusive towards Hizuru. She ditches the salesman for Kojima . . . who also turns out to be an asshole. Hizuru is drawn to the boxer’s impressive body, but there’s little for her beyond lust. Kojima has the same regressive outlook on women. Hizuru finds herself trapped in another infuriating relationship with another dead end jerkoff she can do without.
Tsuda seeks revenge against Kojima by joining his boxing gym. This seems like a joke, since by this time Kojima has already pummeled Tsuda’s face to a pulp during a jealous confrontation. But Tsuda pretty much has nothing but rage and shame to drive him by this point. Hizuru’s ditched him. He no longer takes his salesman job seriously. Tsuda’s all in on a duel to the death.
Even the larger population of Tokyo is hungry for a death match. We see Kojima earn a technical victory against an opponent in the ring only to get booed by the disgruntled spectators. They didn’t come to see a clean fight. They came to see a man die. Even when Kojima wins he still loses.
The fighting is, at times, direct and quite nasty, quickly becoming an end unto itself as Tsuda and Kojima seem to mutate into grisly, macho beasts more suited to battling the Hulk as opposed to going on dates in sitdown restaurants. Tsuda and Kojima bring their battle into a boxing gym, which is an all male scene, although Hizuru makes some attempts to get in the game. Literal boxing occurs, but then the literal process of boxing-the training, the drilling, the mindset, the fight itself-becomes a metaphor for the lives of our central trio. In Tokyo in the 1990s jobs, relationships, romance, desire, lust, love-these are all staged upon a battlefield that may be largely notional, and yet the city itself seems to exert some terrible power over hearts and minds. I was never wholly certain if these characters were taking action for themselves or if that terrible city power was riding herd on their asses all the way down the line.
Not surprisingly, Hizuru eventually removes herself from the whole situation . . . but Tsuda and Kojima keep on fighting. The actual Hizuru is replaced by a fantasy image of Hizuru in Tsuda and Kojima’s minds . . . which is probably what was going on even when she was still around. Sucks, but that is so often the case, isn’t it? Neither of these dudes ever saw Hizuru as her own person. Tsuda saw her as a trophy, perhaps as an eventual baby factory to secure his legacy. Kojima just got off on the sex and cuckolding Tsuda. Hizuru’s ultimate fate is ambiguous-which may frustrate some viewers-but there’s no doubt she’s better off far away from this pair of dickheads.
Tokyo Fist builds to a climax that weaves together real world imagery with gory hallucinations. Or maybe they’re not hallucinations. Maybe the central trio-Tsuda, Hizuru, Kojima-are vessels for the collective frustration, pettiness, vindictiveness, and disillusionment of post-Bubble Tokyo. Years of plenty, years of excess, riding a bullet train powered by a corporate fantasy of unlimited economic growth-
-now here comes the brick wall.
Brace for impact.
For all the good it’ll do you.
