Films about Japanese organization men, from bureaucrats to salarymen, have long broadly divided into two categories — the serious ones, that portray work life as a sort of holy war, fought by loyal, self-sacrificing blue-suited soldiers, and the comic, whose characters range from pompous idiots to lovable slackers.
In the current decade, however, more films, especially by younger directors, have focused on the growing number of Japanese on the fringes of the work force or out of it altogether, such as the eighth-year college student hero of Satoshi Miki's road comedy "Ten Ten" ("Adrift in Tokyo," 2008) or the unemployed father in Kiyoshi Kurosawa's family drama "Tokyo Sonata" (2008).
In his observant, if frantic, comedy "Black Gaisha ni Tsutometerundaga mo Ore wa Genkai Kamo Shirenai" ("A Man on the Verge at a Black Company") — try saying that in one breath — Yuichi Sato descends into the underworld of "black companies," which provide jobs to the otherwise unemployable, but then so did the galleys of ancient Rome.