What Is Demon City Shinjuku?
Demon City Shinjuku (Japanese title Makai Toshi: Shinjuku) is an 80-minute OVA released on 25 October 1988, produced by Japan Home Video and animated at Madhouse. It is Kawajiri’s second film from a Hideyuki Kikuchi novel in two years: Kikuchi’s Demon City Shinjuku, published in 1982, was the first of his Demon City books. Kawajiri directed and designed the characters; the screenplay is by Kaori Okamura and the score by Motokazu Shinoda.
The film opens with a duel: the swordsman Genichiro Izayoi faces the sorcerer Rebi Ra, who means to open Shinjuku to the demon world. Izayoi falls, an earthquake tears the district apart, and Shinjuku becomes a quarantined ruin where demons walk. Ten years later his son Kyoya enters the ruins with Sayaka Rama, the daughter of a world leader marked for sacrifice, and the enigmatic Dr. Mephisto, to stop Ra finishing his ritual.
In the West it travelled under other names and other people’s edits. Central Park Media released it in North America on its U.S. Manga Corps label in 1993 and 1994; Manga Entertainment renamed it Monster City for Britain. American cable carried it to the Saturday Anime generation on the Sci-Fi Channel, and its opening duel became famous a second time playing on television screens inside the 1995 film Johnny Mnemonic.
The paper trail is as long as the film’s: Shin-ichi Hosoma’s manga adaptation appeared in English from ADV Manga in 2003 and 2004, and Digital Manga Publishing issued the novel itself in English in 2011, bound with its sequel Demon Palace Babylon. On disc, Discotek’s remastered edition (DVD 2011, Blu-ray 2020) is the current home; Sentai Filmworks holds the digital rights and streams it on HIDIVE.
THE REAL SHINJUKU
Setting as the special effectThe city itself
The premise works because the place is real: after Rebi Ra’s duel and the earthquake, Shinjuku in the film is a walled-off ruin in the middle of a functioning Tokyo, close enough to see from the train.