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“Ladies and gentlemen, we are about to begin our descent into Los Angeles.” That’s the first line of The Graduate. “Descent”: Technically it’s the pilot advising his passengers, including Dustin Hoffman, that they’re about to land, but as an old film professor taught us once it’s also writer Buck Henry’s way of saying “We’re going to hell.” Anyway this is all old news.
This is director Alan Poul’s first shot of season two of Tokyo Vice.
And sure enough, we’re watching a woman get brutally murdered by a yakuza goon while a government minister watches and does nothing within a couple of minutes. Welcome to this particular slice of hell.
But it’s also a bit of heaven, isn’t it? That’s the real appeal of Tokyo Vice, creator J.T. Rogers’s stylish cop/reporter thriller based on the memoir of the same name by real-life American journalist in Japan Jake Adelstein. As anyone who’s watched a few episodes of the original Japanese Iron Chef can tell you, 1990s Tokyo was a deliciously glamorous place — a political, financial, and cultural world capital with a sumptuous nightlife and a seedy underbelly. (Granted, you didn’t see much of the seedy underbelly on Iron Chef unless you count particularly harsh judges.) The streets, the lights, the food, the storefronts and restaurants and bars and clubs and bikes and beautiful men and women and architecture…Tokyo Vice’s great strength is showing you why this place is worth killing and dying for in the first place.
This premiere episode (“Don’t Ever Fucking Miss”) picks up right where the Season 1 finale left off. Which itself is kind of a surprise, since the future of the show seemed weirdly uncertain for the bulk of its initial run. Everyone was calling it a limited series for some reason, including me, and while HBO didn’t include that verbiage in their marketing materials I don’t remember them going out of their way to swat it down either. Granted, between the onset of Covid and the still unresolved sexual misconduct allegations against star Ansel Elgort it was a weird time.
So I kind of assumed I’d never see how things worked out for Jake (Elgort) and his friends: Samantha (Rachel Keller), the ex-Mormon runaway turned budding hostess club owner in hock to the yakuza; Sato (Shô Kasamatsu), a yakuza soldier on the come-up who befriends both Americans and starts a romance with Samantha before his resentful underling Gen (Nobushige Suematsu) stabbed him, leaving his fate uncertain; Emi (Rinko Kikuchi), his editor, constantly caught between his naive ambitions and the political pressures exerted by her conservative bosses; and Detective Hiroto Katagiri (Ken Watanabe), whose zeal to take down the uncharacteristically violent yakuza gang led by the young, ambitious obayun Shinzo Tozawa (Ayumi Tanida) helped lead to the death of his secret undercover partner, Miyamoto (Hideaki Itô). I figured we’d never see the confrontation between Jake, Katagiri, and Tozawa teased in the opening minutes of director Michael Mann’s pilot.
Given last year’s Super Mario Bros. sidescroller level number of cliffhangers, the challenge faced by this episode is almost mathematical in nature. As quickly as possible, it has to get things back to close to square one, so that our heroes aren’t on the verge of taking Tozawa down, but nor is Tozawa on the verge of having them killed for getting that close. Otherwise we wouldn’t have a second season at all, would we?
So things get wrapped up in pretty short order. Last season ended with badly beaten Jake receiving a blockbuster surveillance tape from an unknown source, depicting the murder of his and Samantha’s friend Polina (Ella Rumpf) getting killed by the yakuza while her client, Vice Minister of Foreign Affairs Jotaro Shigematsu (Hajime Inoue), does nothing to stop it. Clearly the whole thing was taped to give Tozawa blackmail material on the minister, so Emi and Jake set out to find out what by asking the minister himself.
Jake, meanwhile, finds out that the boat is registered to Tozawa’s mistress Misaki (Ayumi Ito), which comes as news to her; she doesn’t even know that her boyfriend’s liver is failing, and that he traveled to the United States for an experimental treatment. Neither does anyone else outside his inner circle.
But due to their obligatory attempt to get a quote from the minister before running the story, Emi and Jake’s opsec is not so tight. Within hours every copy of the tape has been torched by an arsonist within the newspaper, no doubt at the behest of the minister and his yakuza contacts. No tape, no evidence, no story, no justice for Polina. Jake is devastated.
Katagiri fares little better. He discovers Miyamoto’s murder, only to have it covered up as a heart attack by his superiors to hide the duo’s unauthorized investigation into Tozawa-gun. Also at work, no doubt, is the coordinated effort by high-ranking members of the press, the government, and law enforcement alike to keep the murder rate low by simply not recording murders as murders. This is the structural enemy that’s the real antagonist of Tokyo Vice, just as the War on Drugs was The Wire’s real Big Bad rather than Avon, Stringer, Marlo, or the Greek.
Both men, it should be noted, have been well and truly threatened by the yakuza. Jake was beaten. Katagiri’s family was threatened with murder, leading him to send them into hiding. With no case, no support from their higher-ups, and no guarantee they’ll live another day if they keep it up, the two men basically give up — a bold strategy for a season premiere, to be sure. But the job for both, Katagiri says, is to expose other crimes and right other wrongs, even if a big one got away.
Sato has a little arc of violence, betrayal, and redemption straight out of Boardwalk Empire. We learn early on that he survived Gen’s attack, and that his aging obayun, Hitoshi Ishida (Shun Sugata), is guarding him in their private medical facility personally. With his victim still alive and likely to start talking and no way to get at him directly, Gen approaches Tozawa’s men, offering to turn traitor in exchange for protection. You’d be surprised how unappealing an offer “Hire me and I’ll fuck over the last guy who hired me” can be as a business proposal.
Gen certainly is! The Tozawa guys throw him in the trunk and drive him directly to the headquarters of Ishida’s organziation, Chihara-kai. In a fantastically nasty scene, Ishida gives the just-awoken Sato a knife and tries to “help” him slit Gen’s throat for the betrayal, with Sato fighting all the way. Eventually Ishida heeds Sato’s pleas for mercy, and puts Gen’s life in Sato’s hands from now on. Bitter enemies can make strong allies in the end; ask Don Draper and Pete Campbell if you don’t believe me.
Finally, Samantha spends the episode reeling. Not from the Chihara-kai heavies who keep trying to oversee the construction of her club — by the news of Polina’s death, which a visibly miserable Jake delivers to her. It’s profoundly painful to watch an increasingly drunk Samantha stumble around Tokyo, calling everyone she knows only to realize she basically has no one she can count on at times like this at all. Keep in mind she’s estranged from her family, Sato can’t return her calls because he’s just been stabbed, and she told Jake to fuck off when she misinterpreted his attempts to get good info on Polina to flesh her out as a full human in his story as ghoulish tabloid journalism. (He probably could have timed the request a bit better, but I’m on his side here overall.) From collapsing on a dance floor to sobbing at a shrine she and Polina once visited, Samantha’s having a long dark night of the soul, and Keller makes every moment engrossing to watch.
The weird thing about Tokyo Vice is that while Michael Mann’s visual accomplishments in that pilot were formidable, the rest of the show has been much better as a story — fewer odd anachronisms, a much warmer and thus more interesting Jake than the flat-affect Mann Man we meet at first, and so on. Director Alan Poul doesn’t skimp on shots I needed to jot down in my notes: a big pullback into the sky from a tenth-story restaurant window, the gorgeous bar where Sam tries to drown her sorrows, and enough night-in-the-city magic to leave you a little breathless. But he seems to really get what works with this show: lonely characters having adventures in what happens to be one of the most interesting places on earth. In that sense, at least, Tokyo Vice sells itself.
Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, The New York Times, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.
