“The truth is,” says Ansel Elgort as journalist Jake Adelstein in an early episode of Tokyo Vice (Starzplay), “I don’t know what I’m doing.” Most people don’t know what it’s like to be the first American reporter to work the crime beat on a major Japanese newspaper, or indeed to end up entangled in a gang war as a consequence, but the feeling that sets this drama in motion is near-universal. Here is a story of people in their 20s, alone in a big city, thrilled to be making their own way but with no real idea how to do it.
The city is Tokyo at the end of the 1990s and Jake is based on a real person – Adelstein’s memoir is the basis for this series created by playwright JT Rogers, and directed, for the first episode at least, by Michael Mann. The Hollywood veteran brings the brooding noir shimmer of his 2004 movie Collateral to early scenes, which set Adelstein up as a pale tyro, driven and self-sufficient, with the cocky glint of an academic high-achiever still in his eye. He practises aikido, teaches English charismatically to a room full of nervous housewives, knowledgeably orders “liver, leek and chicken thigh” at a cafe thronging with locals, loses himself dancing at a club and studies the capital’s organised crime activity by night, cross-legged on the floor in his flat above a shop. Tokyo feels like it’s his and, when he passes a supposedly forbidding Japanese language test to get a job writing news for the biggest paper in town, young Jake has a chance to prove it.
