With this movie Suzuki became one of Japan's most distinctive directors, displaying a mastery of cinema not yet fully equalled by his younger contemporaries. The plot is triggered by a discovery of two corpses: a dead cop in the arms of an equally dead woman in a sordid hotel. A yakuza (Jo Shishido) discovers, after numerous adventures and violent encounters, that the cop's own wife arranged the killing because her husband was about to learn that she was the local narcotics boss. Suzuki's irreverent attitude towards the yakuza is already fully in evidence. However much they may pay lip service to the code of honor, the ninkyodo, his gangsters become comic (no matter how violent) as the conventions of the genre are pushed to the point where they reveal their hollow artificiality. Sarcastically but with a straight face, he shows that a yakuza in films is only a romanticized version of an already idealized image of the samurai, the only difference being that the aristocrat who employed the samurai to steal and kill on his behalf has been replaced by an urban gang boss of uncertain social status in spite of his aristocratic pretensions. Edinburgh Film Festival '88