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Giri/Haji: London and Tokyo combine for a gangster thriller with a difference

BBC / Sister Pictures
BBC / Sister Pictures

Don’t, whatever you do, tune in late and miss the first three minutes of Giri/Haji. They’re a calling card for just how different it’s going to be from run-of-the mill police/gangster thrillers.

We’re in a Japanese-speaking office but it’s in London. A young man in a suit heads home, his journey economically revealed — the Tube, a lift, a switch to slippers in a big apartment with a panoramic view of St Paul’s and the Shard.

The entrance-phone rings. The man pours two whiskies in preparation for his visitor, putting one of them down on a table-mat. Suddenly, in a jump-cut, that cut-glass tumbler is being flash-photographed as evidence in a crime scene.

The camera starts moving across the room, filled with crime-technicians in white overalls at work, to settle on the corpse of the man we followed home. Sprawled on a white carpet, he has a short samurai sword stuck in his back. The flash goes off again.

Kenzo Mori plays Takehiro Hira (BBC/Sister)
Kenzo Mori plays Takehiro Hira (BBC/Sister)

And with that we’re in Tokyo. That very photograph of the murder scene is on the table of a middle-aged man enjoying his lunch, while jolly music plays. His phone rings and he asks the caller, in Japanese, “How bad is it?” Then he rings off, complaining his food is getting cold. He takes one more mouthful of rice and dies in a hail of bullets.

And here already, in these stunning scenes before the credits have come up, is the premise of Giri/Haji (which means Duty/Shame).

An assassination in London sets off a war between Yakuza families in Japan. We’re not likely to find out what it’s all about until a lot further on in this eight-episode series (not out on Netflix until next year, by the way). But no matter. We’re hooked already — so much so that scriptwriter Joe Barton (Humans) and director Julian Farino, working with Sister Pictures (the company behind Chernobyl), have had the confidence to make the next 20 minutes entirely in Japanese with sub-titles.

That sword belonged to a Yakuza boss, Fukuhara, but a year ago a rogue gang member called Yuto Mori stole it, before apparently dying in a crash. Now the sword has been used to kill Fukuhara’s nephew in London — and Yuto (played by Yosuke Kubozuka) appears to be still alive.

In the hope of averting a gang war, Yuto’s detective brother Kenzo Mori is sent to London to bring him back. Kenzo (Takehiro Hira, wonderfully self-contained) is a man worn down by family worries, taciturn and apologetic but with a dark past of his own: our hero.

Lonely in London, he makes friends with pert Japanese-English rent-boy Rodney (charismatic Will Sharpe) and a troubled detective teaching the course in forensics he is attending as a cover, Sarah Weitzmann (fetching Kelly Macdonald). But he also comes to the attention of London mobster Abbott (Charlie Creed-Miles) who turns out to be connected to Yuto…

Giri/Haji is sharply shot and edited and not afraid of adopting radical devices, like switching into animation for some scenes. Moreover, this cross-continent production avoids turning London or Tokyo into travelogue or cliché.

We haven’t seen the perspective of a Japanese detective on London before — this looks like the difficult city we know. Maybe the mystery-story will turn out to be yet another farrago? But if you start watching, you’ll surely want to find out.

Giri/Haji is on BBC Two at 9pm tonight.

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