Hiroshi Shoji made his feature debut in 2015 with “Ken and Kazu,” a gritty action film whose title punks are conflicted about their budding careers as outlaws. It won the best film award in the Tokyo International Film Festival’s Japanese Cinema Splash section and was widely screened abroad.
Eight years later, Shoji is back with a follow-up: “Tatsumi,” which is also set in a provincial backwater where the line between professional gangsters and criminally inclined working-class guys is porous and undefined.
This reflects present-day reality: Traditional yakuza are being supplanted by more loosely organized gangs that pay no heed to the old jingi (chivalry) code of loyalty and self-sacrifice. (Not that the yakuza themselves always did.)