Directed by Seiji Tanaka, Demon City is just a bunch of high-octane, adrenaline-pumping, blood-soaked action sequences put together. I don’t deny that the premise of a man wanting to take revenge on a local Yakuza group for the murder of his family had potential, but there is absolutely no depth in the narrative. We have a man who is capable of doing things that defy logic and science, and he just walks into the Yakuza den and kills them all. We never get to know what kind of people inhabit the world, what their motivations are, what their belief systems are, and what they want to achieve in their lives. Also, I couldn’t help but observe how much the writers were inspired by John Wick; if only they understood that having a similar kind of a backstory and making the protagonist drive an old car is not enough. The twists and turns that come at the end of the film do not startle you because they are so abrupt and convenient. So, let’s find out what happened in the film and if we can make any sense of the story.
Spoiler Alert
What happened to Sakata and his family?
Shuhei Sakata worked as a hired gun, but he wanted to lead a normal life. Sakata didn’t care about what happened to him until he met the love of his life, Aoi. He also had a beautiful daughter, Ryo, with her, and he wanted her to have the best life possible. But that wasn’t possible until Sakata stopped working for the mafia bosses. A group named the Kimen-gumi told Sakata that if he wiped out each and every member of their rival faction, the Kono-gumi gang, then he could take voluntary retirement, and nobody would bother him anymore. That day, Sakata went and killed each and every member of the rival gang. Later, when he reached home, he realized that he had been deceived. He was actually betrayed by a police officer named Akira Fujita, who also worked for the Yakuza gang. The leader of Kimen-gumi, together with his men, broke into Sakata’s house, and they killed his wife, Aoi, in front of his eyes. The gang members were wearing masks, so Sakata couldn’t see their faces. The leader shot at Sakata’s daughter, but call it fate or destiny, the bullet missed her. Sakata was under the impression that his daughter had died, and so he pledged eternal revenge on them. The gang members shot at Sakata and left. Demon City then took a 12-year jump, and we found out that Sakata had miraculously survived that night, though for more than a decade, he had been in a vegetative state.
How did Sakata find out about his daughter?
Sakata’s daughter, Ryo, was alive, and she’d been groomed by one of the gang members who wanted to keep her for his own pleasure. The man had raised Ryo as his own daughter for the past 12 years; and she believed his lies. She had no clue that her father was in a coma and that her mother had been killed by the same man who was raising her. Sakata got discharged from the state-owned medical facility probably after he showed signs of improvement and his limbs started to move. Akira Fujita, the police officer who had betrayed Sakata back in the day, came to take him, probably because he felt guilty for what he had done. Akira stashed Sakata in a safe house, and he asked his worker to look after the man. But then, one day, Sakata was stabbed by an old foe, and Akira had no choice but to get him admitted to a local hospital. That’s when another police officer, Shinozuka, who worked for the Kimen-gumi gang, got to know about Sakata and went to the hospital to kill him. But once again, miraculously, Sakata was able to defy the odds.
Sakata, who, apart from moving a finger or two, hadn’t been able to do anything so far, got out of his bed and attacked Shinozuka in full force after seeing him in his mask. The drive to take revenge made him react. Sakata was able to kill Shinozuka, and he announced his arrival at Shinjo City. Sakata then got to know about a man named Ikkaku, who apparently ran the local Cleaning System Factory, which was just a front to launder the black money of the Kimen-gumi gang. Sakata killed Ikkaku, but he was still unable to find out who the leader of the gang was, on whose orders his family had been killed. The mafia kingpin, who was operating from the shadows, bombed the entire factory, but Sakata was still able to survive. Sakata, after the destruction, got to know that Akira Fujita was the one who had betrayed his trust and given information about his family to the gang. Akira asked for Sakata’s forgiveness, but the former didn’t show him any mercy and killed him. Sakata met Takigawa Yoshifumi, an informant who had worked closely with Sakata back in the day. Takigawa told Sakata how he fell in love with Hiromi, who happened to be the wife of Shinozuka, the man who had attacked Sakata in the hospital.
Takigawa further revealed how he had hired a private detective back in the day to find out about Shinozuka’s affair, but instead, he’d ended up discovering information about the Kimen-gumi gang. Takigawa told Sakata that the people who ran the Shinjo security company were somehow involved with the mafia gang. Sakata didn’t take long to break into the premises of the security company, and he found out that his daughter was still alive. The poor girl didn’t recognize her father, and she ended up shooting an arrow at him, as she felt that he had come there to kill the man she saw as her father. It was a disheartening feeling for Sakata, and as he was still digesting everything that had happened and coping with his injury, he got a call from the leader of the mafia gang.
Was Sakata able to save his daughter?
At the end of Demon City, we learned that it was Sunohara, the mayor of Shinjo City, who was the head of the Kimen-gumi gang. The man channeled all his black money into a project that he was developing called the Mahoroba. He wanted to build a multipurpose commercial complex and meet the utopian expectations of every privileged individual. Many local people who lived on the same piece of land where his project was being developed went missing overnight. The moment any journalist dared to ask any questions about those people, they too died under mysterious circumstances. Sunohara and Sakata came face to face at the end. After a fierce battle, Sakata was able to overpower Sunohara, though he, too, succumbed to his injuries in the process. The police came and took charge of things. Ryo was given first aid, but she suddenly disappeared from the scene without telling anybody anything. Ryo hadn’t had time to process everything that had happened with her. She got to know that the man she believed to be her father was merely a criminal who wanted to take advantage of her. Ryo hugged her father for one last time before he took his last breath, and probably it was then that she realised she needed to take revenge on the perpetrators. Even Ryo wouldn’t have known that her resolve would turn her life completely upside down. For the next one year nobody knew where Ryo was, and where she had vanished all of a sudden.
Was Sunohara Dead Or Alive?
In the end, we saw that when the dead bodies were being picked up from the crime scene, there was one man who was still alive. A year later, we learned that, surprisingly, Sunohara had survived the attack, and he had been elected as the mayor of Shinjo City for a second term. But that man who was pretending to be Sunohara was actually his twin brother, Jin, who donned the swordsmith mask. Nobody knew that Sunohara had a twin brother and that he was also a part of the same gang. Jin believed that nobody would get to know about his secret, but he had no clue that Ryo, who had seen everything happening in front of her eyes, was still alive. Jin and his brother were Satan/oni worshippers, and they believed in folklore that, every 50 years, a demon came and painted the city red. At the end of the film, we saw that Jin was praying and performing a dance to Satan when Ryo arrived out of nowhere and shot him dead with her arrow. She took revenge for her family’s death, and I wouldn’t be surprised if she becomes the new leader of the Yakuza gang in the future or becomes a merciless gun-for-hire like her late father.
