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Asano has just climbed down from that bridge and is sitting on cracked steps leading up to a bronze, flower-laden statue of King Rama I. Incense sticks stuck into the shrine lend fragrant wisps of jasmine and lotus to the slightly fecal breeze coming off the river. He's been shooting for the past 11 hours, and the vacant stare he has trademarked through films like Electric Dragon 80000V, Picnic and next month's Woman of Water, seems deserved in this context: the guy's exhausted. He leans forward, resting his elbows on his thighs. A few strands of nascent chest hair poke out of his character's unbuttoned, steel gray salaryman special. "I just want to sleep and sleep and sleep," he says. Asano's reserve stems from easygoing confidence rather than insecure diffidence. He's had that phlegmatic cool from the start—it's reminiscent of the way certain kids in high school didn't have to actually do anything to earn their bitchin' reputations. And that's what his ostensible insouciance has inadvertently sold to the Japanese public—this idea that unlike the legions of manufactured teen idols and packaged rockers and cosmeticized TV talking heads trying desperately to win mind share and iconic status, his ascent has appeared effortless, like being the center of attention was his birthright.
He wasn't always the coolest kid, he insists. He used to be a freak, the tall kid with the fair complexion, drawn features and very light, almost blond hair due to being one-quarter Caucasian. He's never met his American grandfather, Jim Owen, but he attributes his easy slide into the rebel persona to being a bit different from the start. "I want to meet him. I'm missing a character from my life," Asano says.
Asano's upbringing in the Honmoku area of Yokohama was classically post-hippie, pre-punk. "Not many Japanese kids get their ears pierced by their own mom when they're only 13 years old," Asano laughs. He was shoved into the back of his mother's car and driven around with Led Zeppelin blaring as mom scoured Kannai thrift shops for vintage clothes. His father was a painter who shunned Japan's salaryman conventions, even taking the first part of his son's name—Tada—from Japan's pop-art maestro Tadanori Yokoo. At school, the young, pale kid was taunted as gaijin but soon found his way into a tight-knit gang of misfits who shared his obsession with Sid Vicious and harbored the same dreams of becoming rock stars. "I had a small band, I played bass. Music was my thing," Asano recalls of his first garage band. "I was listening to the Sex Pistols, Deep Purple, Bob Marley, and I didn't give a f____ about acting." Asano still fronts a rock band, and playing music remains his greatest passion as opposed to his acting job. "He really longed to be Sid Vicious," agrees his father, Yukihisa Sato.
Sato, who is now his manager, had a surprising parental insight when he saw a photo of his son's high school band and realized that this spiky-haired lad was more than just a snotty-nosed kid with an attitude problem; he was also his meal ticket. "I might have had a business motive," Sato concedes of dragging Asano along to his first television audition when the boy was just 14 years old. At the casting call, the precocious Asano noticed that all the other would-be child stars were hamming it up and as a result, coming across as pretentious, juvenile versions of adult actors. "There were all these kids at the audition being rehearsed for the role, and they were overacting," recalls Asano. "That looked s____y to me. I wondered why they couldn't just behave and speak like normal." That's when Asano made a fateful decision: "I knew I didn't want to look as stupid as them. It was best to do nothing, just be natural."
That resolve, to appear to do nothing, has been Asano's vehicle to celebrity. Ironically, that ability, particularly as it was showcased in the movie that established Asano as one of the most terrifying men in cinema, also made his reputation as an actor, inspiring directors and producers to wonder how they could package this pretty boy gone bad. Ichi the Killer, directed by Takashi Miike, grossed just $1.6 million in Japan, but more important than the paltry box office was the buzz around one of the goriest films of the year. (When the blood-drenched Ichi was shown at this year's Hong Kong Film Festival, the audience was issued with barf bags.)
The film falls into a genre of movies peculiar to 21st century Japan: the bully picture, in which disaffected adults wreak revenge for having been beaten up by their childhood peers. Ichi takes that genre to its logical, ultraviolent extreme before finally collapsing under its own weight of gore and convoluted plotting. If it weren't for Asano, the film would be utterly forgettable. Dressed throughout the movie like a mixture of chimpira (junior yakuza thug) and Malcom McLaren circa 1978, the bleach blond Asano injects into his role a curious blend of bored stoner and homicidal maniac—equal parts Jeff Spicoli and Hannibal Lecter—all played behind a leer similar to that of his boyhood idol, Sid Vicious. He delivers his dialogue in a soothing monotone, like a Japanese baseball player doing a postgame interview or a sumo wrestler explaining his grips. It's a deeply cynical interpretation, this gaudily dressed punk talking casually about the psychology of inflicting pain—"You have to mean it. That's what makes it hurt." Yet in a contemporary Japan where the disconnect between language and reality has taken on Orwellian proportions—when was the last time anyone believed what a Japanese politician was saying?—it makes sense to stay cool when delivering the most chilling of statements. Directors can't get enough of this poster boy for Japan's lost generation. "Too many stars who work with him think the only way to better him is by acting as hard as possible," says Ichi director Miike. His advice: "Don't try and outact Asano. You won't."
Asano hasn't remade himself for current cinematic tastes. It's more like Japan has now come around to appreciate Asano's starkly defined, low-key sort of screen presence. His first seven movies barely caused a stir, and it wasn't until he caught the eye of director Shunji Iwai and was tapped to play a mentally ill teenager in Picnic that his deadpan found its audience. The picture was a turning point for Asano in other ways: the female lead, singer Chara, eventually became his wife. "It was unusually hot that summer," Asano recalls, "and there I was in an unusual film, directed by an unusual director and met this very unusual woman." Chara has also specialized in offbeat roles, from a manic-depressive brat who dresses like a crow in Picnic to a Chinese hooker who becomes a nightclub singer in Iwai's Swallowtail. "The strange thing," says Asano, "is that when you get to meet and know her, you find she couldn't be more conventional. She's not wild at all."