It requires suspension of disbelief, but many reasons to watch Giri/Haji

You really have to just give yourself up to the flow of the story to enjoy the powerful and unusual multicultural gangland/crime drama/melodrama 2019 British-Japanese co-production, Giri/Haji (Dury/Shame). Is the story credible? No, not at all – but you don’t want to watch this and expect it to be an account of how police (or gangs for that matter) actually operate; it’s not the Sopranos, not the Wire, nor is it mean to be. It’s tempting to say it’s like a Japanese action comic or manga, but none of the characters has superpowers and there’s no element of surreal fantasy (though there are some well-crafted dreamlike sequences). What we do have this: a Japanese police officer (Kenzo, played vby Takehiro Hira) is ordered to go to London to bring home for justice his long-disappeared brother (Yuto, Yosuke Kubozuka) who’s now wanted on a charge of killing a leader of one of the two powerful, warring Japanese crime syndicates. There’s a long and complicated history between these two brothers (cf the Providence-set American series Brotherhood) – and in fact the story line was, for me at least, sometimes difficult to follow, involving multiple shifts in time and cross cuts between a story line in London and one in Tokyo. That said, it’s enough to just follow the development of the relationships among the leads and the secondary characters, esp London police officer Sarah (Kelly Macdonald) and troubled rent-boy Rodney (Will  Sharpe). There are some eye-closing scenes of violence and many shootouts – plus some surprisingly tender and thoughtful scenes as the brothers come to terms w/ one another and as Kenzo struggles with his foundering marriage and w/ his headstrong 16-year-olod daughter (her relationship w/ a much-older woman is surprisingly unexamined in this drama). The final episode includes one of the most unusual and moving surreal sequences I’ve ever seen in a crime show – a total surprise and worth the admission price. And of  course the doors are left open for an inevitable 2^nd season. All told, it’s a powerful production, worth watching and not examining all too closely for its sometimes wavering credibility.