Movies are an unreliable yardstick for gauging the most pressing social issues of the day. But based on what’s been playing in Japanese theaters over the past year, you might conclude that Tokyo’s Kabukicho neighborhood is one of them.
Despite repeated efforts to clean it up, the former red-light district near Shinjuku Station is still synonymous with vice (and “Tokyo Vice”). It recently provided the setting for a string of films delving into the dark side of Japanese society: Daigo Matsui’s “Meets the World,” Koto Nagata’s “Baka’s Identity” (both 2025) and Ren Akiba’s “Tokyo Strayers,” released last month.
Makoto Nagahisa’s “Burn,” the story of an abused teen runaway who gets sucked into a life of prostitution, is the latest and most harrowing of the bunch. It’s also the most eye-popping — though that shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone who saw the former ad-man’s hyper-stylized debut feature, “We Are Little Zombies” (2019), or his acclaimed 2017 short, “And So We Put Goldfish in the Pool.”
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