Tokyo: The Last Megalopolis (1988)

Original title: Teito monogatari

Yasunori Kato (Kyusaku Shimada), a horrifyingly powerful, deathless onmyoji who looks as if he stepped right out of a Suehiro Maruo manga, has a burning desire to destroy Tokyo.

Beginning in 1912 and continuing through the next decade, he makes various attempts at awakening the vengeful warlord Tairo no Masakado, whose head is buried somewhere below Tokyo to protect it, but who’d destroy everything around him once awoken. Kato’s main enemies are the good – or at least not batshit insane – onmyojis of the Tatsumiya line. As Masakado’s descendants they are, ironically, also the ideal mediums to wake up the grumpy old sleeper if controlled by Kato.

In a myriad of side and parallel plots we witness the plans of cigar-chomping millionaire Shibusawa (Shintaro Katsu) to drag Tokyo into the modern age via the dubious magic of urban development, listen to scientists and mystics espouse wild theories and just as wild exposition and witness a city changing at lightning pace.

It’s all rather confusing, which probably has a lot to do with the fact that this is an adaptation of several volumes of Hiroshi Aramata’s influential “Teito monogatari” series of fantasy/horror/weird fiction. A body of work which has alas not been translated into a language I speak or even dabble in. Basically, this often feels like several seasons of a modern streaming show pressed into a two hour runtime, with frequent leaps in time and space, and subplots and characters that disappear before you can blink.

I suspect full comprehension of the film would need a better understanding of various aspects of Japanese philosophy and religion than I have as well as actually having read the books.

It’s all very Lynch’s Dune in this regard, and even though this approach certainly isn’t the most obvious approach to filmmaking, one might even call it somewhat perverse, I can sympathize with a film just not wanting to compromise with its audience in any way whatsoever. Either you’re getting on board, or this thing is simply going to roll over you.

At the time this was made, it was apparently one of the highest budgeted Japanese movies ever produced, and you can indeed see every yen spent on it on screen. While the plot – and the clearly huge amounts of philosophical and social subtext – can fly over a Western viewer’s head, one can’t argue with the intense visual power of the film, full of memorable shots that do more for the emotional understanding of the film’s content than another hour of detailed plot or characterisation, its intense aesthetic mixture of historical authenticity and late 80s neon, nor the way its star-studded cast (including favourites like Katsu and Shimada, the incredible Mieko Harada, Jo Shishido and dozens of other Toho stalwarts) fills the underwritten characters with life by the sheer power of their presence. Well, returning to the subtext, even I understand that this is very much a film about the pace of the changes to Tokyo and Japan in the first three decades of the century, and the toll this took on the national psyche, the difficulty of reconciling the traditional and the new without falling into insanity and sick dreams of empire.

That this is portrayed, among other things, via duelling magicians, wonderful stop motion creatures, and a steam-driven (I believe) robot just makes the whole thing even more wonderful, obviously.

Responsible for this astonishing, overwhelming film is Akio Jissoji, well known around here as a director at home in pink cinema, arthouse about matters sexual and spiritual and tokusatsu TV – if I had actually seen more of his stuff, he’d be a patron saint around these parts, that much is clear.

Even having seen perhaps half a dozen of his films (and a few tokusatsu episodes), it’s clear that Jissoji managed to get his personal handwriting and a focus on certain core interests into whichever kind of project he worked on – Last Megalopolis certainly isn’t some disinterested work for hire bit, but something created with full artistic focus and passion.

That I have the feeling I’ve barely understood half of it, and even less of the intricacies of its plot, doesn’t make Tokyo: The Last Megalopolis less of an achievement.