The Eel ("Unagi") is a 1997 film directed by Shohei Imamura.
The story opens in 1988. Takuro is an office worker somewhere in Chiba Province (basically a part of the Tokyo suburbs). He leaves work one day and gets on the train, where he reads a letter. The letter tells him that his wife is cheating on him. It further informs him that Takuro's wife always makes a date with her lover when Takuro, a fisherman, goes off on his midnight fishing trips.
So Takuro puts it to the test. He tells his wife he's going fishing. She packs him a lunch, and he leaves, but he returns early. He finds his wife enthusiastically bonking a man. Without a word, he picks up a big knife and brutally stabs her to death. Then he bikes to the police station, still wearing his blood-drenched clothes, and turns himself in.
Cut forward eight years. After a ludicrously short sentence Takuro is out on parole. He leaves carrying in a bucket the pet eel that he kept behind bars. His parole officer, Jiro, escorts him to the parole officer's home town, a little riverfront fishing village in the middle of nowhere. Takuro learned how to cut hair while in prison, and Jiro is going to set Takuro up in an abandoned barbershop.
Takuro opens shop, and makes the acquaintance of the locals, although the only thing that he really talks to is the eel. One day Takuro is out by the riverside looking to find food for his eel, when he sees an unconscious young woman lying in the grass. It seems the woman, a lovely young lady named Keiko who vaguely resembles Takuro's wife, tried to kill herself by an overdose of pills.
Takuro calls for help and Keiko is saved. She soon asks for and gets a job in Takuro's barbershop as a hairdresser/assistant. Will love bloom? Can Takuro get past the horrible crime he committed?
Tropes:
- Brick Joke: Keiko's mother is dancing the flamenco in a scene where she comes on inappropriately to Keiko's boyfriend Eiji, in the first scene that indicates that Keiko's mom isn't all right. Later, when Keiko goes to the asylum to pick her mom up, her mom has all the other mental patients dancing the flamenco.
- Bedroom Adultery Scene: Played as dark as this trope can get. Takuro comes home, catches his wife in bed with another man, and kills her.
- Call-Back: Twice when Takuro goes out fishing, he ignores the packed lunch Keiko offers him, because he's afraid of making an emotional connection with her. At the end, when he's going back to jail, he accepts her packed lunch.
- Catapult Nightmare: Taken to the extreme in a scene where Takuro has a nightmare of an eel wriggling on a spear (his buddy took him spear-fishing for eels). Takuro doesn't just bolt up, he thrashes around until he falls out of bed.
- Crop Circles: Invoked. Takuro has a gentle but weird neighbor named Masaski who wants to attract UFOs to come visit. So he makes his own crop circle in the grass, then livens it up with a bunch of neon lights to make a sort of beacon (he borrows Takuro's barber pole).
- Distant Prologue: Eight years between the opening murder scene, which takes up the first five minutes of the movie, and the main story.
- Fanservice: When Takuro peeks through the window of his bedroom, and sees his wife vigorously bonking her lover.
- Fan Disservice: Immediately afterwards, when he stabs her to death.
- Flashback: Several sketch out Keiko's backstory. A couple introduce her mother, who is both very vivacious and very mentally ill.
- Hallucinations: Near the end the garbage man pops up out of nowhere, in the middle of the river. He tells Takuro that there never was a letter, that he hallucinated it. That may or may not be true, but the garbage man definitely is a hallucination, as he disappears from the scene immediately after.
- High-Pressure Blood: When Takuro stabs his wife to death, the blood spurts at fire hose pressure.
- Interrupted Intimacy: The sex between Takuro's wife and her lover is interrupted abruptly when Takuro charges in, wielding a knife, and kills her.
- I Will Wait for You: The movie ends with Takuro being taken away for a parole hearing after slashing Eiji's face; he's likely to go back to jail for a year. Keiko, who has been revealed to be four months pregnant, says that she and the baby will wait for him.
- Left Hanging: Who wrote the note about the wife's adultery? The garbage man suggests that there was no note and Takuro hallucinated it, but the film is unclear.
- Prison Changes People: When Jiro leads Takuro out of jail, Takuro marches behind them military-style. Jiro has to make him walk alongside instead of march from behind.
- Protection Racket: A two-bit hoodlum comes to Takuro's newly opened barbershop, says that it needs protection, and says that Takuro can pay him on a schedule. Amusingly, Takuro just stares at him blankly, and the hoodlum gives up.
- Time Skip: Eight years between the opening murder scene and Takuro getting out of jail.
- Voiceover Letter: The letter in the opening scene, informing Takuro of his wife's adultery, is presented in this way. Curiously, it's with a woman's voice.
