Everything in Sion Sono’s Tokyo Gets Sung, Even the Gang War

For about fifteen years, the manga Tokyo Tribe 2 ran in Boon, Japan’s street culture bible—a magazine that covered hip-hop, skateboarding, and the kind of fashion that never makes it onto runways, before it quietly folded in 2008. The story it carried was sprawling and violent: after a bomb goes off in the heart of Shibuya, rival gangs carve up the city and hold an uneasy truce that everyone knows is temporary.

The truce breaks when the Bukuro Wu-RONZ start hitting their rivals. Kai Deguchi of the Musashino Saru wants blood. His leader Tera, committed to a pacifist future, holds him back. The tension radiates outward from there, tribe against tribe, until something has to give.

Sion Sono’s live-action adaptation landed in Japanese cinemas in late summer 2014, and the thing that matters most about it isn’t really the plot—it’s the format. Sono made it a rap musical. Most of the dialogue is delivered in rhyme, over beats. For a story about gang violence and territorial nihilism, it’s a genuinely strange and committed choice, the kind only Sono would make and only Sono could sell. This is the director who gave us Suicide Club, the existential nightmare of bodies on train tracks, and Love Exposure, the four-hour Catholic-pervert odyssey. He doesn’t treat his source material with reverence. He treats it like a playground.

The result is trash in the best sense—lurid, loud, gleefully overcrowded. Not all of it lands. But a gang war conducted in sung verse is so committed to its own absurdity that the film earns something from the sheer audacity of following through.