The Diner

Bored with her clerical job, Kanako Oba (aka Edie Otgurl), a thirty-year-old divorcee responds to an online ad: "Driver. Pay 300,000 yen. Entails some risk." Hired by a couple to be the driver of the getaway car in a cash heist, she soon finds herself entangled in a nightmarish world, gets nabbed by a gang of men and is about to be buried alive in a hole she herself has dug, when an unidentified benefactor pays for her deliverance. She is taken to a diner named Canteen, a members-only eatery for hit men. Bombero, the proprietor, is a former hit man turned master chef; Kanako is to work as his waitress under the condition that if she disobeys him she will be killed on the spot. Famous for its signature hamburgers in particular and its delectable gourmet menu in general, the shop is patronized by a parade of idiosyncratic assassins, among them Kid, who dresses up as a child and specializes in killing children; and Skin, whose face is crisscrossed by the tracks of his many wounds, said to have cumulatively required more than a thousand stitches. Bombero and his Canteen are under the protection of the Mafia, but then a suspicion arises that there may be a traitor or undercover agent in their midst in connection with a former mob boss's death. Can Kanako survive the deadly clientele and brewing mob civil war in order to earn her freedom and find her true vocation? Tarantino meets King in this made-for-the-big-screen suspense by Japan's premier horror/crime writer.