Overview: When his police detective best friend is killed, down-at-heel private eye and part-time blues singer BJ (Yusaku Matsuda, The Game Trilogy) gets the blame. He must start his own investigation to clear his name, but what he uncovers is a tangled web involving crooked cops, drug-dealing gangsters, the city’s underground gay and biker scenes, and even his own past.

A loose remake of Robert Altman’s The Long Goodbye that also draws from Visconti’s Death in Venice, this was Matsuda’s break with his action hero image. Samurai movie veteran Eiichi Kudo (The Fort of Death) relishes his chance at directing a neo-noir that captures urban Japan at the height of 1980s decadence.

Blu-ray Verdict: The ineffably blue sky flirts between seraphic and melancholic; not long before settling on the latter. Looking at the sky isn’t enough to distinguish between night and day. Under this infinite azure heaven, he runs on the wet sidewalk where the water feels inseparable from the concrete.

His past is a blur that lost its meaning ten long years ago. His present is a humdrum routine in purgatory; he’s numb. He possesses keys to the rooms of the women in his life; he loves none of them. He sings in a seedy bar drowning in cigarette smoke and a hypnotic shade of blue. It feels like he’s howling his pain away. Since that’s not enough to pay the bills, he moonlights as a private eye.

Stumbling upon a twisted and hazardous case, he’s thrust into the murky depths of deception and murder where trust is poison and escaping the eternal closure of death for long enough is his only path to achieving closure in life. In this netherworld of gangs, sex slaves and gay prostitutes, guns are fired without restraint and everyone is walking on a tightrope between life and death; one betrayal away from meeting their demise. Deaths achieve the paradoxical effect of being abrupt and expected.

Like a perpetual hangover fueled by repression and introspection. Lonely walks by the harbor, casual sex and cigarettes. Taking advantage and getting taken advantage of. He wails for all the innocents engorged by the blackness, too many to count, and he keeps his word to the one he knew with the purest heart; dressing the deceased, he performs now what he could not before, trying to salvage for him some dignity in death, or at least stave off the sempiternal silence just a little while longer.

The teeth of the city will gnash on, its stomach ever-growling. What else is there to do but sigh and sing the blues?

Special Features:
High-Definition digital transfer, world premiere on Blu-ray
Uncompressed mono PCM audio
Interview with star Mari Hemmi
Interview with screenwriter Shoichi Maruyama
Interview with writer and Yokohama expert Toru Sano on the film and a look at the locations
Trailer
Newly translated English subtitles
Reversible sleeve featuring designs based on original posters
Limited edition booklet featuring new writing by Dimitri Ianni on Toei Central Film, a subsidiary of Toei studios famed for releasing Pink Films and independent productions such as Yokohama BJ Blues and an archival review of the film
Limited edition of 3000 copies, presented in full-height Scanavo packaging with removable OBI strip leaving packaging free of certificates and markings

Official Purchase Link