Matori & Kyoken Men in the Back Alleys

Caught Between the Leash and the Teeth

I have spent enough time watching Japanese crime dramas to know exactly what usually happens when the neon lights of Roppongi start flickering. There is a stabbing in a club, an overdose on the bathroom floor, and a squad of brooding detectives arriving just in time to look intensely at the corpse. *マトリと狂犬* (Matori and Mad Dog) gives us all of that in its opening minutes, but then it does something much more interesting. It zooms in on the guy who sold the drugs.



Director Hiroshi Shinagawa is adapting a gritty manga here, and you can feel the pulp in the show's bones. He is built a world that feels permanently sticky, where every back alley smells like stale rain and bad decisions. What makes the five episodes released so far work is not the overarching mystery of the Tokyo drug trade, but the suffocating trap built around its protagonist. Umezawa, played with shocking fragility by Daigo Nishihata, is a washed-up former child star who now peddles cocaine to pay off gambling debts. Nishihata is mostly known for his glossy pop-idol persona in Naniwa Danshi, so watching him here is deeply jarring. His body language is a masterclass in defeat. He does not walk; he scuttles. His shoulders are permanently hiked up around his ears, waiting for a blow he knows is coming.



The machinery of the plot kicks in when Umezawa gets caught in a raid. I am still thinking about the sequence in the second episode where he tries to use his old acting skills to disguise himself and slip past the narcotics agents (the "Matori"). It is a pathetic, desperate piece of physical comedy that turns tragic the second he is slammed against a wall by Kurosaki (Yoshihiko Hosoda), an agent with an unhinged vendetta against drugs. Kurosaki does not arrest him. Instead, he turns Umezawa into his personal informant. The scene is shot in claustrophobic close-ups, Hosoda's erratic, almost twitchy aggression completely swallowing Nishihata's shrinking frame.



Things only get worse for our miserable protagonist when the regular police show up. Osamu Mukai plays Katsuragi, a corrupt police detective who also forces Umezawa to be his mole. Mukai usually plays refined, stoic men; here, his cruelty is entirely bureaucratic and cold. He barely raises his voice, which makes his threats infinitely more terrifying than Kurosaki’s screaming fits. A critic on *Medium* recently dismissed the series as "non-stop crying and screaming," and while I think that is an uncharitable reading of the show's chaotic energy, they are not entirely wrong about the volume level. Sometimes the script forgets to let the silence do the talking, relying too heavily on characters spelling out their trauma.

Whether that is a flaw or a feature depends on your patience for genre melodrama. Still, I couldn't look away. *マトリと狂犬* is not really about the drug war. It is about a former actor who realizes the only way to survive the criminal underworld is to give the performance of a lifetime for two different audiences, knowing that if either director catches him breaking character, he is dead. It is messy and loud, but there is a beating, terrified heart at the center of it that makes the whole desperate scramble worth watching.