This review contains mild spoilers, but they won’t really make sense until you’ve actually watched the show, so I think you should read this, which will convince you to watch it. That’s my evil plan for the week.
The inciting event of this limited-run series is when a low-level member of the Yakuza, Yuto (played by Yosuke Kubozuka) kills a mob-connected Japanese businessman in London. That brings Yuto’s policeman brother Kenzo (played by Takehiro Hira) to London to solve all resultant problems, not least of which is a brewing Yakuza war and serious complications for Scotland Yard and at least one delightful London gangster.
At first glance, none of that sounded like my cup of tea, and although Netflix kept recommending Giri/Haji to me, I delayed clicking on it: I’d originally thought it was about people on pilgrimage to Mecca (or worse, the slang term used by the American military for all men in Muslim-majority countries). Once I realized that “haji” was a Japanese word rather than an Arabic one, I was even more put-off, convinced it was going to be some annoying Orientalist crime thriller.
Giri/Haji defied all my expectations. Creator Joe Barton, whose praises I’ve already sung in my review of The Lazarus Project, once again creates a nuanced network of complicated characters, none of whom is perfect, but very few of whom are truly flawed.
Kelly Macdonald’s police detective Sarah is a great example: on the outs with her department (for ratting out another cop), she’s pulled between her desire to do the right thing and the occasional selfishness from which that desire stems. Her relationship with Kenzo, which goes through numerous permutations over the course of the eight episodes, winds up leading to her involvement with a bilingual rent boy Rodney (played by Will Sharpe) and and Kenzo’s teenage daughter Taki (played by Aoi Okuyama): for a few short weeks, the four of them, and even Yuto, wind up as a complex, imperfect found family.
The show’s characters and plotting remind me, in a good way, of that cliché phrase “three-dimensional chess.” It is perfectly arranged in a way that feels both natural and like the highest mimetic art. At one point, Kenzo describes meeting his wife: she was stocking shelves in a store, and she displayed objects to perfectly that it was “like art.” Later, we see Kenzo’s mother (who has just told her daughter-in-law how much alike they are) similarly arranging fall foliage with delicate perfection, a perfect combination of the natural and the artificial.
In the same delicate way, Giri/Haji is not just about its characters but about their relationships, which transcend, or perhaps transform, questions of affinity, much less such quotidian concepts as “shared values” or “common interests” or “mutual goals.” Like the objects in the shop, like the fall leaves, these characters make the most sense when they are next to, opposite, aslant from, and otherwise considered as part of a larger whole. Art not in the sense of falsity, but a beautiful distillation of reality.
Throughout, the show subtly reminds us that we’re watching something, rather than letting us comfortably inhabit the false reality of television. Split screens, brief animated sequences, a shift in screen ratios, and more stylized devices call attention to the artificiality of any storytelling medium, but not in a heavy-handed way.
The hallmark example—the thing that anyone who has watched this show would mention—occurs in the final episode, when the action pauses on a cliffhanger moment and many of the characters break into an interpretive modern ballet. They move together and apart, they run around, fall, are lifted, or pull others down, each movement representing just how intertwined and shifty our relationships are. It is a brave choice, by which I mean that it probably sounds horrible just to read about it. But the show sticks the landing perfectly, which made me love it, not just for the bravery, but the scene reminds us, sans postmodern irony, that we are watching a story, and thus that stories and art are how we make sense of our lives.
My favorite character is Kenzo, because I love a stoic guy with a heart that is both golden and, when needed, quite stony. But I also loved the London gangster Connor Abbot (played by Charlie Creed-Miles, who was Billy Kimber in Peaky Blinders), because he disappears for a while and then pops back up again, revealing that he’s actually a much nicer bloke than we may have thought, at least sometimes. Plus, Abbot’s tattoos, which show his various changing interests, like “Russia” and now “Japanese stuff” is a great acknowledgement of the cheesiness of that type of Orientalism, exactly what I thought the show was going to be.
And although my favorite scene is the dance scene, my favorite episode is the sixth, when Kenzo, Yuto, Sarah, Taki, and Rodney all go to the beach (in the middle of a international gang war!) to mourn the passing of Kenzo and Yuto’s father. That’s not a big spoiler; their father doesn’t have a significant role in the story. But they must mourn him, so they do, because people are never just one thing, and if there’s any point to anything at all, it probably involves taking time to honor, support, and care about loved ones.
I don’t want to say more about any of these characters, because I want all of you to enjoy the pleasure of getting to know them on your own. But spoilers are permitted in the comments, so scroll down with care!
Four out of four Roys.
Josie Kafka is a full-time cat servant and part-time rogue demon hunter. (What's a rogue demon?)
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