Tokyo Fist (1995)

This must be Tsukamoto's most dramatic and emotional work. Again, he plunges head-first into the world of psychosexual violence and terror to lay bare the horror of man's animalistic roots, and oppression at the hands of an unfeeling advanced urban capitalist society. In Tokyo Fist Tsukamoto plays the uptight pencil pusher Tsuda who works as an insurance salesman who suffers from insomnia and a frigid relationship with his girlfriend Hizuru. But when his old friend from high school, Kojima, who is now a professional boxer re-enters his life and tries to seduce Hizuru, Tsuda goes mad and begins training obsessively to become a master boxer, beat Kojima to a pulp, and win his girlfriend back. Meanwhile Hizuru develops her own fixation with extreme body modification and tattoos, and begins mutilating her own body. Like with the eponymous character in Tetsuo, all of Tsukamoto's characters undergo physical transformations, but in Tokyo Fist, these transformations are as much a product of their own actions as they are of the outside world. Their free fall into sadomasochism is ultimately of their own doing, and ruins them all in the end. My own relationship with this type of filmmaking is conflicted in itself. On a visceral level, these high-octane, graphic, kinetic films are highly enjoyable; after all, they appeal to that part of us that relishes in this sort of thing. But at the same time, these films are repulsive on a gut-level; beautiful but at the same time, the antithesis of beauty. One can only handle so much. Uncompromising, but acknowledges essential truths we must confront.