In this epic fresco, Sai explores social history through one man, a Korean emigrant to 1920s Japan (played by Kitano Takeshi), who works his way up to head a small criminal empire. Sai’s brilliant recreation of a vanished community raises difficult questions about Korean-Japanese identity.
A virtual companion piece to Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s The Puppetmaster, Sai’s epic fresco uses the biography of one man as a key to an entire social history. Kim Shun-Pei emigrates from Jeju Island in Korea (a Japanese colony at the time) to Osaka as a young man in 1923. A lifelong fear of poverty meshes with his compulsive womanising and his capacity for violence to make him a monster as he moves from initial success with a fish-cake business to heading a small criminal empire as a loan shark.
Sai’s film (based on a factual novel by Korean writer Yan So-Gil, also the author behind All Under the Moon) is a brilliantly staged and acted recreation of a vanished community, but it raises difficult questions about Korean-Japanese identity. Is Kim (a defining performance by ‘Beat’ Takeshi) a Darwinian product of his environment? Or a psychopath who’s able to flourish in this environment?