Movie Reviews : ‘Break Town Story’: Life Lived in the Trash Lane

Of the major Japanese studios, Nikkatsu has always had the most raffish image. Its films typically have more violence and sex, and, in fact, the company has been producing soft porn in recent years in addition to its regular product. But the firm has always offered fledgling film makers more opportunity and more freedom than other studios. Nikkatsu is Japan’s answer to Roger Corman.

“Break Town Story” (Little Tokyo Cinema 1) represents Nikkatsu at its quintessential best. Director Masayuki Asao and his co-writer Kazuo Eto are clearly film makers of talent, and they have made an honest trade-off. Their tale of two pretty, naive high-school dropouts who take jobs at a massage parlor in the racy Kabuki-cho section of Tokyo’s Shinjuku shopping and entertainment district is inherently lurid. Yet what Asao does with this story is as entertaining as it is impressive.

Neither preaching nor sensationalizing, Asao does not exploit the girls and their profession, which is just one easy step from full-fledged prostitution. (One girl, deciding to move from “masseuse” to prostitute, tells herself sex involving a condom isn’t really sex.) Instead, he depicts with matter-of-factness and discretion a way of life in which young people become as disposable as any other commodity in a modern consumer society. (The film’s English title refers to how the Kabuki-cho breaks and destroys its denizens.)

Kabuki-cho’s main drag is as bright with lights as the Vegas strip, but it’s essentially a seedy alley. It is as much a magnet for the young as Times Square, tempting girls to sell their bodies and boys to become members of the underworld which controls the area. The outgoing Megumi (Yuko Kimoto) convinces her shy friend Maiko (Minako Tachibana) that the Opal Fashion Massage will be their ticket to good easy money. Megumi soon enters an affair with Koji (Koichi Sato, the gifted son of veteran star Rentaro Mikuni), a flashy young yakuza (gangster). He’s a punk stuck on his own looks, who has no idea that the goofy expressions on his face reveal his stupidity with such clarity. Asao follows the lives of several young people, including the pathetic 15-year-old (Asako Maekawa) coldly discarded by Koji in favor of Megumi.

The unexpected center of the film is Maiko’s relationship with the new manager of the Opal Fashion Massage, a middle-aged man named Ando (Tatsuo Umemiya), a tough-looking guy built like a fireplug. One look at him and we expect the brutal worst. Instead, he proves to be a tender, caring man who philosophically accepts that his very young mistress soon will become bored with her “old Uncle Ando.” Umemiya is perhaps the most memorable actor in an exceptional cast.

Photographed expertly by Koichi Suzuki to capture its hard, dazzling brightness, the Tokyo of “Break Town Story” (Times-rated Mature for sex, adult situations) is cramped and congested to the point of claustrophobia. The sprawling city seems an immense infernal machine in which the unskilled and the none-too-bright haven’t a prayer. Asao’s vision of contemporary urban society is as soul-withering as it is universal.