Three episodes of the eight-part series Tokyo Vice debuted Thursday on HBO Max, the streaming service of HBO.  The series is based on a 2010 memoir of the same name written by Jake Adelstein, an American who became a crime reporter for the Yomiuri Shimbun in the 1990s, which in itself is quite an amazing story.  The real-life Adelstein learned Japanese well enough to take an hours-long entrance exam in Japanese and go to work in the newsroom of the world's largest circulation newspaper, assigned to the police beat in Tokyo, which is where rookies are broken in.

The first episode, the series pilot, was directed by Michael Mann, famed for directing Miami Vice and Heat, among other projects, and he brought a visual style and pacing that were sustained in the subsequent two episodes I compulsively viewed yesterday.  The series begins with Adelstein, played by Ansel Elgort (The Fault in Our Stars, Baby Driver), being suited up in a bulletproof vest accompanying police on a raid, and then flashing back two years earlier to explain how he got to this position.

There are multiple storylines being told simultaneously in the three episodes I've seen so far.  The first is a crime story that reporter Adelstein latches onto after being sent to cover a suicide.  It involves a mysterious loan company whose borrowers, when they default, end up dead of an apparent suicide.

The second story is about journalism, specifically Japanese newspapers, and the ways in which official versions of stories get told, even when reporters may know they are not the exact truth, as well as the struggle to get published and to pursue stories that editors may not appreciate.

The third story is about police, and the way that they use and are used by journalists.

And the fourth story is about vice and gangsters, specifically in Tokyo about 30 years ago, centering on the character Samantha, played by Rachel Keller (Fargo, Legion), who works as a bar hostess in an establishment that has to pay off yakuza gangsters as well as serve them as customers.  The Japanese term for this shadowy entertainment world linking the legitimate and the less legitimate realms of society is mizu shobai, literally "the water trade," a wonderfully evocative expression.   

Jake Adelstein avidly pursues and becomes something of a protégé of veteran police detective Hiroto Katagiri, played by Ken Watanabe, one of the biggest stars in Japan and a formidable screen presence, whom he cultivates as a source, and who introduces him to the layers of reality beneath the surface that everyone agrees to pretend is real.

As it happens, almost three decades before the real-life Adelstein joined the Yomiuri Shimbun as a cub reporter, I spent some time writing for its great rival, the Asahi Shimbun (circulation at the time: over 8 million), though I didn't enter through the recruitment process and serve as a cub reporter or full-time employee.  But I can attest that the newsroom atmospherics in the series are spot-on accurate.  I can also attest that Ansel Elgort did his homework well and speaks his Japanese lines very passably.  It is a little odd how often the Adelstein character, who is fluent in Japanese, ends up speaking in English to Japanese characters, but I am reasonably sure that is a concession to American audiences.  The series is also to be shown on Wowow, Japan's largest subscription television service, and I suspect there will be less English dialogue in that version.

While Adelstein's memoir is nonfiction, the series producers openly proclaim that they have fictionalized it for dramatic purposes.  I suspect that the romantic subplot with Samantha may be part of that adaptation.  But so far, I have not yet seen a false note in its portrayal of Japan or of the life of a young American struggling to understand and function smoothly in a society with no European roots.