Review: Three Assassins + Bullet Train

A while ago, listening to the podcast where Daniel Hardcastle tries his hardest to get Mike Bithell in trouble with Disney,¹ Dan went on an angry tangent about how good of an action movie Bullet Train is, and how dirty it was done by critics. This did intrigue me, because while my tastes didn’t always align with his, the fervour he spoke with was compelling. “The best action movie ever made” stuck out to me.

I watched it while I was visiting a friend’s house. We’d planned to watch something, and lo and behold, Bullet Train was on one of the 3 streaming services she got for free. I don’t remember and do not care which it was. Telling her it came on a recommendation, we put two pizzas in the oven, and start watching.

As we get into it, she swears she recognises Tangerine from something. This happens for several scenes, certain she knows that face, but not quite remembering from what.

Then, she realises: Angus, Thongs and Perfect Snogging.

If you’re British, and grew up in the 2000s as a girl, these words will plunge you into a dark past you thought you escaped long ago. If you’re not, it’s impossible to describe the social and cultural grip this movie had on the pre-teen UK of 2008, and what a symptom of the horrific societal expectations placed on teen girls of the era it was. Tangerine, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, was the primary romantic interest of Angus, with some very particular, and very quotable lines.

Thus, throughout the entire movie, whenever Tangerine was on-screen, my friend yelled: JORJAAAAAH, AH FOUT IT WUZ DIFRUNT.

I enjoyed it a lot. The JORJAHs really added to the experience and is unfortunately something you can’t easily replicate. Even without them, the fight scenes are tight, everything’s heightened to a point where being over-the-top feels natural, and the visual style tickles my brain. The criticisms over replacing many of the original Japanese characters with white people for the sake of terrified Americans are entirely valid, but it’s still a fun time.

It’s after I watched Bullet Train with another friend, who lovingly described it as “a suda51 movie”, that I got the book. We were in Waterstones shortly after, both of us curious about the source material, and I was willing to be the canary. While there, we learnt that Bullet Train was a sequel, and the original, Three Assassins, was also available. So, they both joined the pile.

But here’s a thing with reading Japanese authors, for me. I’m now starting to pick up learning Japanese again, now actually taking it seriously instead of just drilling a single Anki deck and hoping that magically makes me fluent. It’s now left me in an awkward limbo with a lot of authors² that I, ostensibly, want to read right now, but keep having this back-and-forth over if I should wait until I’m at a level I can read the original Japanese off-the-shelf. And in order to actually get to the level where I’m breezing through novels, I’m going to be stumbling through several dozen dual-weilding a dictionary and not knowing what half the sentences are telling me. Do I “waste” the experience reading this for the first time in my learning period, or do I seek out mindless mid to practice on first?

In this case, it was the sunk-cost fallacy of, fuck it, I already have the books in English on my shelf, so I’ll just read it now.³

Three Assassins was fun. I’m down for anything that fully commits to its own brand of bizarre and doesn’t apologise for it. Here’s the Japanese criminal underground. Everyone has weird and thematically relevant names that are just nouns. One guy can make you kill yourself by looking into his eyes for too long. Ghosts are real. One of them has a foot fetish. You know how it is.

I also caught onto this subtextual undercurrent of, look, these people are absolutely horrible, but at least they aren’t politicians. Cicada murders people without remorse but he’s not a racist about it.⁴ Iwanishi saying “facism doesn’t always look like facism” felt like Isaka winking through the page with a comically-loud chime to garnish it.

Also something to note about my experience reading this, coming hot off the heels of finishing RoTK, I blazed through it. One train commute for my T shot and an hour before my contract gig began and I was halfway through the whole thing. Within a week I was done and onto the next. RoTK took me three months. Whether that’s the information density of RoTK, or tighter line spacing on the actual pages, I’m not sure. Maybe a combination of both.

I liked Three Assassins. The plot is fast and fun, I was invested in the characters (and/or wanted to watch them run around on a hamster wheel), and it even managed to have some heartfelt moments. The reveals felt natural and/or solvable in the unreality it sets up, and a few even caught me pleasantly off-guard. It’s confident, and does what it wants to do. I was excited for what Isaka could do next.

Which is why I’m so annoyed to say I really didn’t enjoy Bullet Train at all.

Three Assassins felt like the perfect debut. It proved he could do these kinds of stories, and do them well with his own stylistic twist, and this was just… bad. It’s a bad book.

Here’s the thing. The characters are great. Kimura is a genuine dirt bag, but has just enough qualities to make you believe he can turn himself around. Nanao (my beloved) is the epitome of pathetic wet man. Tangerine and Lemon are just a comedy duo and really telling of how the underground operates that they’re some of the top assassins. There’s one, single character who fucks the entire thing.

The central plot of this book circles around the Prince. The Prince is a 14 year old abusing his position as a 14 year old to get away with psychologically and physically torturing people.

That’s his entire character. There’s no depth. No complexity. No reason why he’s doing any of this beyond “funny lul”. Why is he kidnapping Kimura and holding his kid hostage? He wanted to see what would happen. Why is he using Kimura to get at Terahara? He wanted to see what would happen. Why is he fucking with the briefcase? He wanted to see what would happen. And all of that ends with him getting dunked on by a teacher and killing himself months later.

I have no investment in what happens. The other people are invested, sure, but if this central character everything turns about doesn’t give a shit, why should I give a shit? And it’s not like I sympathise with his viewpoint, either. He’s fucking awful at proving his point. His argument is simply “well, your argument is entirely based on emotion, and now you’re just going to say I’m an inexperienced child”. Of course I am. Stop going on 4chan.

One of the key questions of the book, repeated by the Prince, is “Why is it bad to kill people?”. It’s a good setup. From every assassin’s POV, we can see how they attempt to rationalise that question and come up with an answer to a kid. Maybe they don’t. Maybe they say one thing to the Prince, and internally have an entire other conversation.

And instead, every fucking time, we’re from the Prince’s POV. Every time we read his same dogshit refutal. Maybe this would have been nice, like, once, and instead all this interesting development is wasted listening to this shithead repeat himself over and over and go on about how every adult disappoints him.

I hate this fucking kid. I know that’s the point of the book, but I don’t hate him because it’s fun to hate him. I hate him because he’s making the book terrible.

The thing is, to make this bearable, you could leave the rest of the book mostly unchanged, and all you have to do is adjust things around the Prince. We get one or two chapters from his POV, maybe hint that he’s doing certain things for no reason, and the rest of him is left as a mystery. Even if the unstated answer is just “doing it for fun”, it would have been so much stronger. Having no idea why a 14 year old’s got beef with Terahara, why he needs to kidnap Watoru, then offing himself once his plan fails. Instead I have to listen to him bitch and whine about being superior to everyone while knowing he’s going to lose at the end.

The book also has, for no fucking reason, transmisogyny out of nowhere. On the platform, Nanao stands next to a couple, very obviously some rich cunt and a sex worker. Taking another look at the sex worker’s getup, he realises that she’s “actually” a “man”, and “the crossdresser” starts getting hostile while he stares at her, framed as her being the bad person.

Okay. Cool.

I thought that was it, but later on, she’s brought back as part of one of Nanao’s schemes to escape Tangerine. Skipping the details, they both end up in the bathroom. She starts physically coming on to Nanao despite him clearly not being into it, which he rejects. He also makes a specific comment questioning why he’s been using “she” without thinking.

Okay. Really cool.

At first I thought, partially because of the movie, this was foreshadowing the final reveal of the Prince. He’s “actually” a “girl”, “pretending” to be a boy for the sake of social standing and/or manipulation. The amount of comments made about how feminine the Prince looks certainly added to this theory. Maybe the “crossdresser” would get redemption later on. Maybe she’s part of the underground doing an act.

Nope. There’s a trans woman who’s a sex worker. Broad shoulders. Laugh.⁵

For an author that’s praised so much for meticulously planning out every plot point, re-incorporating every tiny detail, this is just… sloppy. Even beyond how egregious it is, there is literally no point for this to be in the book. It ties to nothing. Every other moment or character gets brought back or mentioned again to specific effect. The only conclusion is that Isaka just genuinely thinks “trans woman sexual predator” is so funny you can put it anywhere without thought.

And that’s the other part of this, beyond whatever the hell that was. Three Assassins felt relatively simple, but all the parts moved in tandem, and the bits I didn’t figure out felt like solid reveals or on-tone enough I enjoyed them regardless. Bullet Train feels like everything coming together was a complete coincidence, and all the parts you can tell were being banked on as big ah-ha! moments, just, didn’t land. Nothing was interconnected. Everything felt like a kid telling a story and suddenly going “Oh, by the way, Jimmy has superpowers and can actually fly so he runs away,” or coincidentally remembering a thing they mentioned 20 minutes ago.

Maybe it’s the translation. Maybe the original has nuance that doesn’t make it feel like a slog, but I really doubt that. Either way, this marks the first time I’d recommend someone watch a movie over the original book.

The single thing I can be positive about is that, by far, the best parts of the book were Nanao having the worst day of his life, and it looks like the later books keep him around as a central character. I’m definitely not getting to them anytime soon, and I’ve got no interest in buying them blind instead of borrowing them. If there’s a second case of Trans Woman Punchline, I’m writing them off entirely.