Fun
Frisky
Nostalgic
Intense
Adventurous
Choked Up
Curious
Romantic
Weird
Boy, this was a nice-looking episode of Tokyo Vice. Granted, this is Tokyo Vice, and looking nice is kind of its thing. But even by the show’s own neo-noirish standards, this week’s episode (“Old Law, New Twist”) had me wolf-whistling at the screen again and again. Director Josef Kubota Wladyka and cinematographer Daniel Satinoff understand that making Tokyo look like a nocturnal dreamworld is job one if this story is to succeed; whether indoors or outside, up close or from a bird’s eye view, they make the city and its people feel luminous.
Honestly, the thing I’m most excited to do in this review is just share more images from the episode with you, but you’re owed an explanation of where things stand along the way. We’ll start with Jake Adelstein, now the toast of the town after his articles about motorcycle gangs caused a sensation. Jake’s happy enough just to soak in the moment with Misaki, the yakuza moll he’s seeing on the sly while Boss Tozawa is MIA.
The fact that this is almost suicidally stupid of both of them is a bit hard to swallow, to be honest. Jake is naive in some ways — for example, he didn’t anticipate that his articles would bring the wrath of the police down on the bikers, leading to his pal Tats’ arrest — and he enjoys the company of a beautiful woman as much as any red-blooded American. But surely he’s not as dumb as inviting her to be his date to a party at the American embassy with all his coworkers requires him to be!
I buy that they’re besotted with one another, since Jake’s charm has been well established. In this episode alone we see that he’s now fully back in the good graces of both of his formerly estranged friends Sam and Sato, and he’s a more beloved figure among his colleagues at the Meichi now than ever. But the spark, the connection, between Jake and Misaki? I’ve seen this kind of against-all-odds romance done very well recently on shows as wide-ranging as Monarch: Legacy of Monsters and Sexy Beast, and elsewhere on the show there’s real heat between Sato and his new hostess crush Erika. I’m not feeling it here, certainly not when this vampire is the person they’re running the risk of pissing off.
That’s right: Tozawa (Ayumi Tanida, a man with one of the most magnetic faces on television) is back, a return that will have wide-reaching implications for many more people than just Misaki and Jake and the actual Mrs. Tozawa (Makiko Watanabe). His organization is rife with dissent over the decision to allow Chihara-kai to reclaim some of its Tozawa-controlled territory without a fight. If he decides to press their claims, that could spell big trouble not for Sato, Boss Ishida, and the rest of their outfit — which now may include his kid brother Kaito, in whom the sleazy second-in-command Hayama has taken an interest.
I could also impact Ishida’s big bargain with Sam. In exchange for digging up intel on her big-spending architect client Masa’s next project so they can snap up surrounding real estate, they’ll give her sole control of her club. Masa, who has actual romantic designs on Sam and isn’t hiding it, should be easy pickings if Sam can get over her conscience. Betraying his confidence is against the hostess code, or hers anyway; that popular girl she fired was spying on Masa for Ishida all along, it turns out.
Katagiri, meanwhile, is firmly back on the yakuza beat, in a way basically no one ever has been before. His boss Nagata is adopting a policy of just showing up and arresting the yakuza at their headquarters, without the advance notice that is customary in the cops’ normal dealings with the gangsters. All they have to do is lay a hand on one of them and boom, obstruction charges for the lot of them. Couple that with the conspiracy charges they plan to bring after one of this tiny yakuza outfits’ soldiers stabbed a guy and they take an entire (albeit small) organization down in one day — a long with a few Chihara-kai guys who were there to assume control of the failing mini-mob.
This is all pretty engaging crime fiction. But it really is the look of the thing that makes it sing. Whether capturing the contours of Rachel Keller’s face as Sam drives a hard bargain with Ishida, showing a ruminative Mrs. Tozawa in silhouette as she receives the latest non-update about her husband, or just making the most of the location interiors and exteriors, Wladyka marries naturalistic lighting with the garish glamour of the big city. The world of the yakuza is the classic case of “a nice place to visit, but I wouldn’t wanna live there.” Tokyo Vice’s trick is to make you want to live there anyway.
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.
