This is one of those films that one hears and reads a lot about, but when one sits down to watch it, one realises that one doesn’t really know exactly what to expect! Of course, this tends to be the case anyway with many of Miike’s films, but ICHI is something else again…

The film opens with a pimp beating one of his girls senseless, before raping her. He realises that someone is outside of the window watching, but by the time that he opens it to investigate, the peeping tom has disappeared, leaving only a little pool of gooey cum to indicate that anyone was actually there at all. Yes folks, this is how we are introduced to the anti-hero of the film, Ichi (played with bug-eyed abandon by Nao Omori), and this theme of rape/voyeurism runs right through the centre of ICHI THE KILLER, providing the axis on which Ichi’s character balances.

In Shinjuku Precinct, the boss of the Anjo syndicate has gone missing, along with 300 million yen. All that’s left is a room of carved up bodies. Insane yakuza Kakihara (the ubiquitous Tadanobu Asano, star of many cool indie films in the last decade including MABOROSI (1995), Shunji Iwai’s PICNIC (1996), Satoshi Isaka’s FOCUS (1997), Nagisa Oshima’s GOHATTO (1999), Sogo Ishii’s LABYRINTH OF DREAMS (1997), GOJOE (2000) and ELECTRIC DRAGON 80,000V (2000), and Katsuhito Ishii’s SHARK SKIN MAN AND PEACH HIP GIRL (1998) and PARTY 7 (2001)) investigates and vows to find the boss. The boss’ sexy girlfriend, Karen (HK actress Paulyn Sun), who speaks a bewildering mixture of Japanese, English and Cantonese(?), gets involved with Kakihara and they kidnap and torture various characters in their search for the boss. Peripheral to all this is Ichi. Kakihara learns more and more about him and wants to meet him and, quite possibly, to be killed by him.

As far as plot goes, that’s about it. This film is more concerned with set pieces of gruesome violence than with following a standard yakuza story, and Miike’s usual visual touches are everywhere. There is a mixture of manic high speed photography, super-fast editing, video footage, CCTV footage, hand-held cameras, long takes, close-ups, etc, all put together in the way that only Miike can. There are also the usual bizarre pieces of (usually jet black) humour and the general feeling of misogyny that one gets from some of Miike’s films.

The two main things that the film has going for it are the central characters of Kakihara and Ichi. Kakihara is an unhinged psycho, who enjoyed a sadomasochistic relationship with the boss (Kakihara being the masochist and the boss the sadist). His mouth has been slit on either side and so he has to wear little rings that hold it together (the way he’s first introduced to us is a very neat visual gag: we see him from behind, smoking. However, the smoke comes out of the flaps of skin on either side of his face rather than his nose or mouth!) He is searching for the boss in order to renew this relationship, but feels increasingly that Ichi might be able to provide him with the pain he requires, especially after Karen fails to fulfil his desires. Kakihara delights in torturing other people too, hanging a (innocent) rival yakuza from the ceiling by hooks through his skin, stabbing him in the cheeks with a thin knife and pouring burning oil over his back. When he has to admit that the guy wasn’t actually who he was looking for he has to apologise. The rival yakuza tell him that this isn’t a matter that cutting off “one or two fingers” will settle. Instead, Kakihara slices the (pierced) end of his tongue off (in close-up) much to the horror of the rival yakuza. He then takes a cell phone call, barely able to speak. There are various other similar scenes of torture (sticks through the skin on a guy’s face, a woman has her nipples cut off, a guy has his cheeks ripped off, etc, etc).

Ichi meanwhile is a simpering buffoon, controlled by a sinister Chinese pimp called Long and a mysterious character called Jijii (played by TETSUO director/actor Shinya Tsukamoto, also to be found in Miike’s DOA2). Ichi’s life revolves around a central trauma, a childhood incident in which a girl who tried to help him when he was being bullied was raped for her efforts in front of him. Where an ordinary person would be expected to help, Ichi was frozen to the spot. However, he didn’t actually *want* to help her: he wanted to rape her too. Tormented by this inner conflict, Ichi is an emotional wreck. He is fascinated by the beat-up prostitute we see at the beginning of the film, promising her that he will kill her pimp. This he does (slicing him in half from head to crotch with his razor shoe heel), but instead of freeing her he tells her “I killed him for you, but don’t worry; I’ll hit you instead”! The girl is understandably not impressed and tries to hit him with a baseball bat. Ichi slices her main artery, killing her.

Ichi is a killing machine, dressed in a bizarre black armoured suit with a big number one emblazoned on the back (the film is based on a manga by Hideo Yamamoto (a different Hideo Yamamoto to Miike's frequent DP and this film’s cinematographer) called ‘Koroshiya 1’ or ‘Killer 1’). In order to get him to wipe out whole groups of rival yakuza, his controllers make him angry by reminding him of his tormentors and explaining that the people they want killing are bullies too. He is a very complex character and it turns out that the stories that affect him so much may in fact have been made up and fed to him under hypnosis in order to allow him to be controlled. In one scene he sees a group of kids bullying another kid. He tries to stay out of it, but eventually explodes, booting one of the bullies across the street. The bullied kid’s father, Kaneko (played by actor/director Sabu/Hiroyuki Tanaka), turns out to be working for Kakihara and is another equally unhinged character – sacked from the police for losing his pistol (a vague reference to Kurosawa’s STRAY DOG (1949) perhaps?) he turned to the gang, who he now works for as a gunman. Unable to control his temper, in one scene he beats a tortured woman to death. The film is full of these unpleasant characters, and becomes very confusing in places due to characters being introduced, dropped and mixed up seemingly at random.

The pivotal scene in Ichi’s life occurs when the gang hatch a plot to trap him. Karen will meet him by accident (she knocks him over in her VW Beetle) and convince him that she is the girl from his childhood trauma. She does this and plays on his rape fantasies, but with not quite the effects that the gang were hoping for. Whilst she is giving him oral sex, Ichi has flashbacks to the incident and starts to lose his mind. “Now I understand,” Ichi tells her, “you didn’t want me to rape you because you wanted me to rape you. You don’t want me to hurt you because you want me to hurt you”. Panicked, she tries to escape but Ichi chops off her leg below the knee before slashing her artery.

Various other bizarre plot strands cross and re-cross. Two ‘detective’ brothers work for Kakihara, both completely nuts. They capture a girl used by Long in order to find Long and hence Ichi. After torturing the girl (who may or may not have been hypnotised too), they are unable to get the information they want from her. At this point, one of the brothers says “let me have a go”. He dons a pair of fluffy rabbit ears and sniffs at the woman’s crotch, before rushing out of the room. They then find Long without any problem and take him back to the room where the woman was being held. After torturing him for a while, Ichi turns up. The brother without the rabbit ears is left to guard Long. This brother feels that he is the underdog and that the others don’t respect him. To prove himself he decides to pull one of Long’s arms off with his bare hands, in order to imitate Ichi.

In another scene, Kakihara is attacked by a rival yakuza. He removes the rings holding his mouth in place and when the guy punches him in the face, his entire fist goes into Kakihara’s mouth.

And so on. If anything, the film wasn’t actually as violent as I was expecting. Having said that, it’s certainly pretty strong stuff and features some very unpleasant abuse of women, who are little more than punch bags in Ichi’s world. The rape fantasy theme is fairly common in many Japanese films, but Miike takes it and turns it on its head, so that we’re not really sure exactly what it is that gets Ichi off. Many things are suggested, but nothing is really explained and it is perhaps all the more disturbing for this.

I’ve read several comments from people on the net objecting to one particularly sadistic scene in DOA where a girl is drowned in her own excrement and water, for no real narrative purpose. Those people should certainly not attempt to watch ICHI. One other note on this subject: I’d read that the violence in ICHI was humorously over-the-top, as in Sam Raimi’s EVIL DEAD films for example. This certainly wasn’t my feeling, and it's hard to laugh at these kind of scenes when the effects are so realistic (where do the Japanese find these FX people? See Hisayasu Sato’s NAKED BLOOD (1995) for another good example!)

Does Miike have any real moral theme or legitimate message to communicate through this film? Hard to say, but if so then he doesn’t exactly make it easy to read, obscured as everything is through the use of fragmentary dialogue, scenes and editing. There’s certainly some elements of a homosexual, sadomasochistic love story between Kakihara and the missing boss, and also between Kakihara and Ichi, though this is only on Kakihara’s part. There’s also the notion that bullied kids will eventually retaliate explosively and that childhood bullying causes severe trauma in adult life (certainly this idea is becoming more and more popular in the West). Then there’s the suggestion that women are worthless and should be treated however the man likes! It’s certainly a hard one to call, and I wouldn’t like to defend the film too strongly!

Perhaps overlong at over two hours, and very confusing in places, Miike still manages to produce a very satisfying and unexpected ending (to my mind anyway). Also, it’s kind of reassuring to know that, in this age of decreasing censorship of film (here in the UK at least), Miike can still make something like ICHI, which absolutely and positively will never see the light of day over here, in its uncut form at least…

Cast
Ichi – Nao Omori
Kakihara – Tadanobu Asano
Shinya Tsukamoto – Jijii
Paulyn Sun – Karen
Suzuki Matsuo – Jirô
Hiroyuki Tanaka (Sabu) – Kaneko
Susumu Terajima
Toru Tezuka
Jun Kunimura

Crew
Director: Takashi Miike
Screenplay: Sakichi Satô
Based on the manga ‘Koroshiya 1’ by: Hideo Yamamoto
Music: Karera Musication
Cinematography: Hideo Yamamoto
Editing: Yasushi Shimamura
Production Design: Takashi Sasaki
FX: NHK Enterprise/Yuichi Matsui/Misako Saka