It's a good "WHAT IF" movie, watched again after several years, it could give a different feeling.

I guess for Japanese metaphorical movies, it would be easy if the audience speaks the language or understand the culture a bit, also the transition takes a big part. In this author's books, name of the characters even carry meanings. When it translates to Chinese it sort of still make sense because of the word characters are about the same, but when translation to other alphabetical words, the meaning could be gone.

The film opens with two people apparently throwing an enormous, excessive party, and a heist where one steals millions of Japanese yen. What's going on? I honestly thought my DVD might have mixed up the reels, but the story steadily unfolds through flashbacks and current events. The subplots are all about money, some comic, some tragic. Every major character in the film has made or lost enormous sums of money and for the most part it obviously didn't make them happy or better people.

I enjoyed this far more than I thought I would and even though the running time is quite long at a full 2 hours I was never bored. At the time of writing this has an average score of 5.2 and no english reviews at all, but I think if you can find this film with subtitles it's well worth taking a look.