The best Arata Iura’s thriller movies

Based on the best-selling novel about a woman who decides that her one goal in life is to have her tongue split, this is the sexy body modification movie you’ve been waiting for. While alone in a nightclub, straight-laced Lui meets sensitive but troubled punk kid Ama (Kengo Kora of last year’s SAD VACATION). Mesmerized by his split tongue, she becomes obsessed with body modification and soon wants the same treatment. After Ama’s heavily-tattooed friend Shiba (Arata, 20th CENTURY BOYS) pierces her tongue, Lui finds herself inexorably drawn to both men – and to her growing list of desires, she now adds a tattoo.

The film is told in three acts, beginning with a historical background of Japan's student movement of the 1960s and early 1970s, mostly using archive footage and a narrator. The second act follows the formation of the group to their mountain training camps in the southern Japanese Alps. It emphasizes the dogmatic (and eventually hypocritical) bullying of the group by Mori and Nagata, with 12 members being killed for infractions as small as improperly cleaning a gun, wearing make-up, and kissing. The third act shows the splitting up of the group after two members run off. It follows one group of five members to Karuizawa and a hostage-taking and police standoff known as the Asama-Sansō incident.

A couple of months have passed since the serial murder case. A new dead body is found in the same area. Detective Manabu Kagaya tries to find the truth. He goes to see serial killer Yoshiharu Urano in prison.