This work is grounded closely upon a popular 2006 Japanese television series, KUROSAGI, and casts its lead actor from the series, Tomohisa Yamashita, for his initial feature starring role. It is a somewhat stolid transcription from the source set, that in turn is based upon a successful manga also named "Kurosagi", created by Takeshi Natsuhara, designer of many similar cartoonish melodramas. Three types of confidence swindlers are defined at the beginning of the narrative: Shirosagi, or "white", whose greedy quarries are targeted fully for monetary purposes; Akasagi, "red", those who lure their marks through blandishments of the opposite sex; and Kurosagi, "black", who feast upon the other two categories. Yamashita plays as Kurosaki, a young man who has joined the ranks of kurosagi in order to victimize other black swindlers as means of completing symbolic acts of revenge. His desire for retribution is due to the ruination of his family by kurosagi only a few years prior. After being reduced financially by a kurosagi scam, Kurosaki's father killed his wife, daughter, and himself. As result, Kurosaki has spared no efforts toward the swindling of other kurosagi, along with the subsequent return of all monies to the prey. One particularly ironic element that dominates the story has Kurosaki purchasing information that he requires for the manipulation of his kurosagi victims from a master con man known as "The Fixer", Toshio Katsuragi (Tsutomo Yamazaki), in return for a thin percentage of the profits. Katsuragi is also the planner behind many of Kurosaki's capers, additionally becoming a father figure of sorts to the young man, bizarre by and large as the same Toshio is the man responsible for the destruction of his family! As might be expected, other characters are retained from the single season television series, including Masaru Kashima (Shô Aikawa) an assistant police inspector of Eastern Tokyo's Intellectual Crimes Division, who is fixated upon bringing Kurosaki to justice; and several from the distaff side, markedly a youthful law student, Tsurara Yoshikawa (Maki Horikita), with whom Kurosaki plainly is enthralled. A large segment of the film depicts Kurosaki in his endeavours to entrap an adroit corporate fraud artist, Tetsu Ishigaki (Naoto Takenaka), whose usual scamming method involves the cunning usage of a counterfeit corporate seal along with promissory notes, and who has actually damaged the nation's international financial standing with one of his ploys. At the same time that he is stalking Ishigaki, he becomes aware that Katsuragi is the one who is culpable for his family's tragedy. He must then determine whether or not to slay a man who has become a type of surrogate father to him. The film opens with a text frame that displays lines from Act 5, Scene 5 of Macbeth: "Life's but a walking shadow." The narrative returns to this quotation throughout the scenario, in addition to a good many other citations taken from Shakespeare's Julius Caesar. However, these seem only incidental to the plot as do Kurosaki's relationships with a number of principal female characters. These become the thorniest problem of the work because whenever various confidence episodes are removed from the action, the entire affair becomes phlegmatic with its weak construction being apparent, principally due to a torpid editing process, although lead Yamashita's lack of emotional range is of no help, his customary facial expression seemingly indicative of some form of digestive distress.
