Shinya Tsukamoto
Tokyo Fist

"In Japan, violence does not exist in everyday life. American films are violent and realistic because in America a kid can easily take a gun, go to school, and shoot his classmates. This does not happen in Japan where violence is systematically removed. Japanese employees get up in the morning, board an extremely crowded train, travel crushed against each other. They go to the office and bow to the boss for eight, ten hours. Then they return home and bow to their wives. Hour after hour, they accumulate an incredible amount of anger, yet their violence is always restrained. Only pain makes us aware of having a body" (Shinya Tsukamoto, 1995)

Man has lost, emerged defeated from the clash with the metropolis. He has nothing left but to resign himself to his condemnation of apathy, to be served out in concrete cages as tall as the sky, among plywood desks used to assign each his place, and streets, subways, corridors, and escalators that should be able to take him anywhere, but instead always bring him back to the same point.

Tsuda is just one of the many losers: every day the same office, the same return home, the same sofa, the same television, the same girlfriend (the beautiful and calm Hizuri) and her "How's it going?", "All good, I'm just a bit tired."

Until the fateful question: "How long has it been since we made love?"

Answer: "Why?"

Everything changes when Kojima arrives: Tsuda's schoolmate from high school, now a professional boxer, who, with his hard and nervous muscles and his demon-like face, seems the incarnation of all that Tsuda has ceased to be, of that violent and animal part which metropolitan life has managed to tame. Smitten with Hizuri, the boxer will forcefully insert himself between the couple's routines, subverting their balance.

In "Tokyo Fist" ('95, Tsukamoto's first feature film after the two "Tetsuo"), violence is, first and foremost, an awareness of one's state of apathy, of one's role in "social roles" that one has resigned to play: the punch that breaks nose and cheekbones, causing the blood to gush like a raging river, is also a blow dealt to that dam made of inhibitions, conventions, and "normality" upon which Tsuda and Hizuri built their lives and relationship. This awareness, however, seems almost unable to limit itself to the characters' mental sphere, but must also involve their bodies, understood as material to be shaped to make tangible and visible their changed approach to existence. As if from that awakening, from that renewed "need to feel alive," derives the urgency to act upon one's physique, to modify it and make it evolve, until it becomes a faithful representation of one's rediscovered soul.

Tsuda, humiliated and abandoned, channels his paranoid thirst for redemption into exhausting boxing training, to make his body a tool with which to realize his murderous desires. Hizuri, from a submissive wife, finds herself prey to new and morbid impulses, which she expresses by mortifying her flesh even deeper, almost "tetsuoian," subjecting herself to increasingly invasive Ballardian piercings. But even Kojima himself, from a mere catalyst of the reaction that led to the change in the two protagonists, becomes a victim of their mutation: he is left shocked and enchanted, fascinated and intimidated, and, in turn, becomes aware of having always been a victim of his fears, of never having fully freed himself from his nightmares, of never having been completely himself.

Tsuda, Hizuri, and Kojima thus end up being three tiny metropolitan caterpillars who have always lived in anticipation of a "something" (a past vow that one did not have the strength to keep, a strong and rough lover, different from one's boyfriend, the risk of dying in the ring), that came to break that cocoon of immobility and apathy that slowly covered their lives. Thus, the blood streaming down their faces, the bruises that deform their features, the swollen and battered eyes almost seem to be the stages of a growth and mutation process that will finally make them free and aware. Only then can the masks they have worn until now make way for the faces of those demons that they themselves, in their innermost being, have always been.