Asian Drama

Inspector Sugishita Ukyo, head of the Special Missions Division, returns from London and goes home in the sports car of Assistant Inspector Kanbe Takeru, who has come to meet him at Narita Airport even though Ukyo did not ask him to. However, on the way home, Ukyo notices police officers from the Metropolitan Police Department conducting a crackdown outside the agency’s jurisdiction in Chiba Prefecture and gets suspicious. The police officers that Ukyo had seen were riding motorcycles. He lies in wait in a street with a dead end, but the motorcycle police have vanished into thin air. Ukyo is mystified and begins a thorough investigation. The Head of the National Police Agency’s Secretariat, Onoda Koken, appears before Ukyo, who has a bad feeling about what is going on. He tells Ukyo that Honda Atsuto, a revolutionist and senior leader of the leftist radicals “Red Canary”, has secretly returned to Japan.

Usami Kei is a salaryman who has risen in status due to his engagement with Mei, the wealthy daughter of his company's president. Shortly after she breaks off the engagement, a power failure leaves him stuck in the elevator of his apartment building. Trapped with him are three others living on the same floor - Airu, a trilingual interpreter, Ojiro, a model photographer, and Masato, a psychiatrist. While waiting, their conversation hits upon their love lives and the question of whether there is truly only one fated partner for everyone. As a result, they decide to try "shuffling" their relationships with each other.

Almost defying description, Miike's film opens with found documentary footage about sperm-production in young males and then turns to a graphically violent recreation of the execution in 1865 of the 28-year-old Okada Izo, a low-born samurai who killed in the service of the anti-shogun rebel Hanpeita Takechi. Fast-forward through 15 decades of Japanese history: suddenly Izo's spirit possesses the body of a street-sleeper in an alley of Tokyo's financial district.

The reincarnated assassin goes on a killing rampage through time and space, from the Warring States period to the day after tomorrow, slaughtering everyone from a Buddhist elder to the prime minister ("Beat" Takeshi in one of dozens of star cameos), not forgetting his own mother. Nothing can stop him, because Izo is negation itself: the contradiction spewed up by the "perfect system" that is Japan. Nothing is immune to his attack, except perhaps the godlike emperor (Matsuda Ryuhei) and the maternal goddess of mercy (Momoi Kaori). Standing to one side, watching and commenting in song, is Tomokawa Kazuki, a radical folkie from the 1960s.