What a viewGiri / Haji: BBC-Netflix show transplants Tokyo’s yakuza into London’s underworld
- Slow-paced and well-scripted, the crime series follows a rule-bending detective on a mission to bring his brother home
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When two underworlds collide there’s likely to be hell to pay, and so it proves in Giri / Haji, the Japanese-British crime drama linking Tokyo’s yakuza territory to London’s gangster turf.
Morose Japanese detective Kenzo Mori (Takehiro Hira), henpecked and harassed at home in Tokyo, is on a now-streaming, eight-episode Netflix mission: to flush out and return home Yuto (Yosuke Kubozuka), his missing yakuza brother, presumed dead but actually in hiding in London, having been run out of his homeland in disgrace.
In hiding, that is, until a rash flash of uncharacteristic bravery results in his hooking up with a London crime boss, then assassinating an inadvisable target – after which Tokyo’s yakuza bosses go international with their feuding, dragging more British mobsters into the action, despite having started small with a little domestic murder and mayhem.
Narrative twists and turns keep observers (and viewers) off balance when it comes to what’s really going on and who’s deceiving whom, all achieved by a script and a cast that allow the characters to breathe and work out – or not – their weighty problems.
Giri / Haji (“Duty / Shame”) is also a tale of notable double acts: the rule-bending detective and his egregious brother; the bitchily camp male prostitute (Will Sharpe) and the obstinate Japanese schoolgirl; the vulnerable policewoman (Kelly Macdonald) and her nemesis; the yakuza boss and the Tokyo chief inspector. Light and shadow, good and bad can be found in us all, the message seems to be – even hitmen wielding ceremonial Japanese swords.