Tag: Akira Takahashi

The Youth Killer (青春の殺人者, Kazuhiko Hasegawa, 1976)

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An angry young man railing against “family imperialism” eventually kills both parents in a moment of intense frustration, abandons his girlfriend, and ends up alone, but what he discovers maybe less the freedom he was seeking than only more loneliness and despair. Adapted from a story by Kenji Nakagami that was itself inspired by a real-life case of patricide, Kazuhiko Hasegawa’s The Youth Killer (青春の殺人者, Seishun no Satsujinha) is imbued with the nihilistic sense of powerlessness that coloured the 1970s as its Hamlet-like hero tries to free himself from an oppressive social system only to find it indifferent to his existence.

Part of Jun’s (Yutaka Mizutani) problem is a protected adolescence as evidenced in the opening scenes in which he and his girlfriend Keiko (Mieko Harada) run round playfully reciting nursery rhymes. The irony may be that his name means “pure”, and that he is too thin-skinned to survive in this overly complex world. His father (Ryohei Uchida) stopped him from going to university like many of his friends, preventing him from moving on into a more settled adulthood. He did this, he says, because of the student protests not out of fear that harm would come to him but fear that he would cause it. The farmland surrounding Jun’s parents has been earmarked for Narita airport and despite angry clashes between local farmers and an uneasy alliance with student protesters, will eventually go ahead. Those like Jun are being squeezed off of their land and have nowhere else to turn.

Perhaps sensing his listlessness, Jun’s father gives him the money to open a bar and capitalise ion the new custom from the airport, but this too leaves Jun feeling childish and emasculated, as if it’s his father who will actually be in charge. The two men hug and wrestle, alternately showing affection and tussling for power. His secondary problem is that his parents apparently don’t approve of his girlfriend Keiko with whom he is running the bar. His father has hired a private detective who tells him that Keiko was raped by her mother’s lover resulting in her mother hitting her and causing her to lose the hearing in one ear. Jun’s father does not believe that Keiko was raped and insists that it was Keiko who seduced her mother’s lover.

It seems to have been this fracture point that caused Jun to snap and kill his father, less because of his attachment to Keiko than because of the challenge to his masculinity implied by the suggestion that his girlfriend simply sleeps with anyone she pleases. In fact, Jun doesn’t seem to particularly like Keiko and is wary of committing to relationships owing to his fear of “family imperialism”. He becomes fixated on the question of her deafness, niggled by the possibility she lied about its cause and his father is right. Never examining why Keiko might choose to create a different truth around what happened to her, he in fact tries to rape her himself and is obsessed with tying to find out whether not there was a fig tree near their old home as Keiko says or an azalea as others would have it.

The conflict he has with Keiko is not so different from that with his mother who, on learning of her husband’s death, quickly shifts to protecting her son, but then seizes on it as a chance to claim her own freedom. Sick of the drudgery of working at the family’s auto repair shop, she suggests running away with Jun to start a new life in a new place just the two of them. Her language becomes increasingly romantic before she eventually asks Jun to make love to her. When he eventually kills her, she tells him to stick it in and be gentle as if she were talking to a lover. But she too also doubts him, fearing he means to take the money from the safe and escape alone. Not even maternal love can overcome this kind of cynicism in a society ruled by money.

Hasegawa frames Jun’s progress as a series of confrontations, between his father, his mother, Keiko, and eventually himself in which he discovers he is still a child. He has killed his parents, but has failed to become a man. Sitting on a beach with Keiko he is overwhelmed by loneliness remembering a happy family moment when his father sold ice lollies rather than toiling at the garage. Scenes in his student film contain imagery echoing self-immolations and this is what he eventually tries to do himself in setting the bar on fire with him inside it only to be rescued by Keiko. After fleeing the scene he stows away on a truck and removes the bandage from his hand symbolising the transgression of his parents’ murder, but he is quite literally being driven to a destination not of this own choosing. Rather than freedom in solitude, he’s discovered only loneliness and despair. Condemned to a limbo state, he has nowhere to go and can only travel in circles looking for an elusive exit from this very particular kind of hell.

The Youth Killer screened as part of Japan Society New York’s Kazuhiko Hasegawa’s Anarchic Ethos.

Retreat Through the Wet Wasteland (濡れた荒野を走れ, Yukihiro Sawada, 1973)

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Despite its lurid title which contains the classic signifier “wet”, Yukihiro Sawada’s Retreat through the Wet Wasteland (濡れた荒野を走れ, Nureta koya wo hashire) is more sleazy nihilistic drama than classic Roman Porno. Though it obeys many of the genre’s rules, the placement of its erotic scenes feels less formulaic and the film as a whole less about eroticism than abject despair in the wake of Asama-Sanso in a Japan that has become an authoritarian paradise ruled by bruiser cops driven fragile by egos and greed.

The central mystery is, for some at least, whether fugitive cop Nakamura (Hirokazu Inoue) is really “mad” or merely using the mask of mental illness to protect himself from his former colleagues who want him dead because he knows too much. The truth may be, however, that Nakamura has wilfully retreated inside his mind as a means of escape from a world of constant corruption. Or else, that his desire for the world to be better is in itself a mental illness that’s seen him institutionalised and tortured with shock treatment in an effort to cure him of his problematic humanitarianism. In any case, he has lost all his memory and knows himself only as “Number 19” having been robbed of selfhood and individuality. All of which might suggest that he isn’t as much of a threat to his colleagues as they seem to believe him to be, though the question is why exactly they fear him so much when it’s clear that they face no consequences for their actions.

The film opens with a gang of thugs raiding a church where the pastor has been collecting money to help villages in Vietnam rebuild after the war. The thugs beat the pastor and rape his daughter who is captured in a beatific pose with a crucifix on her chest as choral music plays. When the pastor calls the police, we see the policemen receive the call while one is busy stuffing the tracksuits the thugs were wearing into the boot. They are assigned to investigate the crime they have just committed while it appears that their superiors at the station are all well aware of these kinds of activities are taking place and are even encouraging of them. The police is now the biggest gang and anyone not a part of the corruption cannot tolerated in this system because it’s underpinned by an idea of mutually assured destruction. 

Nakamura appears to have been a more idealistic officer and though it is not clear whether he participated in the corruption himself, evidently opposed it at least philosophically, which is what has destroyed his mind. He was once Harada’s (Takeo Chii) mentor, cautioning against his desire to become stronger as becoming strong and powerful only makes you an oppressor which is not, evidently, what he considers the proper role for a policeman. To an extent, the film frames Harada as the hero as perhaps he would be in a certain kind of crime thriller. He’s effortlessly cool in his sunshades with a cigarette hanging from his lip, but he’s also a broken loser hollow on the inside and nothing without the authority granted to him by being a member of the police force. When he and Kato (Akira Takahashi) visit a sex worker, she complains that Harada can’t get it up as if signalling his essentially powerlessness and implying his violence is rooted in fear and insecurity.

Haunted by what seems to be flashbacks to an Anpo protest, Nakamura is apparently a counter to these authoritarian instincts. Having escaped the psychiatric hospital, he’s accompanied by a young woman who seems to be something of an outsider herself and the film’s real moral compass. She feels sorry for Nakamura and sees his inner purity, while in turning to Harada at the film’s conclusion and exclaiming that she pities him too reasserts her power over him. It’s she who takes Nakamura to her cousin’s travelling theatre troupe wandering the “wasteland” outside of the cities and thereby wilfully existing outside of mainstream society. Nevertheless, they are at first invaded by Harada and his partner Kato who have brought along Nakamura’s wife, and then by rightwing bikers who destroy their camp. Even these small enclaves cannot be permitted to exist and no attempt to escape the system can be tolerated. Sawada expresses this oppressiveness though the overuse of censorship bars many of which are not hiding anything that might be considered objectionable but are, in a certain sense, merely decorative. In Harada’s final demonic grin as he retreats across the wasteland, the film seems to suggest that there is no other way to escape this world of corruption other than madness or death.

Retreat Through the Wet Wasteland screened as part of Japan Society New York’s Kazuhiko Hasegawa’s Anarchic Ethos.

Ichijo’s Wet Lust (一条さゆり　濡れた欲情, Tatsumi Kumashiro, 1972)

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The opening text at the beginning of Tatsumo Kumashiro’s Ichijo’s Wet Lust (一条さゆり　濡れた欲情, Ichijo Sayuri Nureta Yokujo) informs us that though the film might be inspired by the life of Sayuri Ichijo, queen of the strippers, it is fiction. Truth be told, Sayuri Ichijo isn’t in it all that much, but her presence seems calculated given the fact that Ichijo had also been having frequent troubles with the censors over her erotic cabaret appearances. Her signature set piece involved passing around a magnifying glass so that audience members could inspect her vagina, which got her charged with obscenity. 

Shortly before the film’s release, Nikkatsu had shifted production almost entirely to its Roman Porno line of erotic dramas. In 1972, a charge of obscenity was levelled at them in relation to the film Love Hunter, after which they became embroiled in a lengthy series of legal battles which continued until 1978. Kumashiro was the screenwriter for Love Hunter, though he penned it under a pseudonym. He apparently reached out to Ichijo as a gesture of solidarity and she agreed to be in the film, though she’d previously turned down an offer from Toei, because she thought the script seemed promising and was persuaded by Kumashiro. The dig at Toei appears to be mirrored in the film as Ichijo performs a routine dressed as a samurai noblewoman dancing to the theme from Red Peony Gambler, while her other acts mix a music hall sensibility with transgressive eroticism such as candle play.

In the wake off her legal troubles, Sayuri has quit the business to open a sushi restaurant while struggling to shake off her past. An obnoxious customer seems surprised about the idea of a stripper eating ramen, only for Sayuri to remind him that they’re normal people too and eat normal food like everyone else. She may be the queen of the strippers, but Sayuri still occupies a kind underclass in the regular world in which she’s looked down upon for her erotic art even if she personally regards it empowering. Even so, the slightly younger Harumi (Hiroko Isayama) seems to want to knock her off her perch and alternates between fawning admiration and resentment.

Trying to curry favour, she tells Sayuri that she identifies with her backstory of being an orphan that they may have grown up in the same children’s home in Saitama despite her broad Osaka accent. She also tells her husband, recently released from prison after being convicted of murder, that her father was sentenced to death, though this appears to be another detail pinched from Sayuri’s biography, which may not be true in her case either. Harumi later admits that nothing she’s said about herself is actually true, which could also be a lie, as she otherwise seems intent on stealing Sayuri’s identity and with it the top spot at the club. After getting arrested and fined, she tells her friend that she’s quitting their lesbian floorshow show because, she insensitively says, the lesbian stuff’s just for talentless hacks and she’s apparently turned off by other women’s genitalia.

To try to take down Sayuri, Harumi uses sex to manipulate the men around her including her besotted husband and another man he stabbed in the leg. Scenes of Sayuri’s show are intercut with Harumi having sex on a rollercoaster while a female attendant tries very hard not to laugh and another woman looks up in confusion from the ground. Harumi seems to be making a show of her life in a different way at least to Sayuri who is courting controversy and may have sensationalised aspects of her biography to give herself a sob story but otherwise affects refinement, every inch the queen holding court when questioned by reporters about her legal troubles and retirement. Nevertheless, she too may be threatened by Harumi, point blank telling her not to make trouble at her last show and or steal her candle act when she leaves. Sayuri’s acts become more extreme as a consequence which is what gets her in trouble with the censors, while Harumi tries to perfect a weird gimmick of squirting milk out of her vagina. Even so, she goes about it with reckless abandon and a sense of fun that lends the film a breezy, down to earth sensibility that itself is, in fact, a rebuke to the censor and a defiant depiction of a young woman living a life without constraints. 

Lovers Are Wet (恋人たちは濡れた, Tatsumi Kumashiro, 1973)

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Everyone keeps asking Katsu (Toru Ohe) if he’s Katsu, but he continues to deny it. No matter how insistent those around him are that this is his hometown, Katsu refuses to acknowledge it while claiming no other identity. It is in a way, the ultimate negation of the self and the town to him is a kind of liminal space in which he’s only ever waiting for something or else putting off the act of leaving as if prevented from moving on.

This sense of listless rootlessness may reflect that of a youth generation orphaned after the collapse of the counter-culture movement. Katsu sings bawdy folk songs in the manner of a protest singer with nothing to protest. Yoshie (Moeko Ezawa), the wife of the owner of the cinema where Katsu is working, asks him if he’s a member of the far-left movement on the run from the authorities, but Katsu says he’s not smart enough for something like that, though later admitting that he does seem to be on the run from something. 

Though she’s curious about his past, Yoshie doesn’t seem to question him about being Katsu and rather appears to want him to be an embodiment of her projected desires. She is too is trapped in this place, pinned behind the box office window with only a cat for company. Her husband rarely comes home and spends all his time with a mistress. He knows that Katsu is sleeping with his wife, but couldn’t care less. Or rather, he’s sort of grateful because it’s one less thing for him worry about. Yoshie, meanwhile, clings to him because Katsu is her only means of escape from this moribund existence. She pleads with him to stay and to love her, but Katsu doesn’t seem to be capable of love and is only sticking around for the occasional tryst. 

Catching sight of another couple having sex in the wild, he stops to peep and gets into a fist fight with the man, Mitsuo (Rebun Hori), after which they become awkward friends. Mitsuo sets him up with another girl despite Katsu’s insistence that he’s not hard up for them, but Katsu immediately tries to rape her as if asserting his primal masculinity. Ironically enough, he rides around with the banner for Sex Animal on his bike as a means of advertising and Yoko (Rie Nakagawa), the girl, later remarks that he’s reenacting the poster in his attempt to rape Sachiko (Chizuyu Azami). A sex animal seems to be what he’s become as he purses meaningless and impulsive sex that care little for the woman’s feelings, only about dominance and conquest. Sachiko later brings Katsu’s mother as if to remind him of his true identity but her rejects her, while the girl later gets the upper hand by telling both the men to get lost and no matter how much they might think they’ve won, they really haven’t.

As Katsu rapes Sachiko, Yoko and Mitsuo share ironic banter in voiceover offering a running commentary while doing nothing to help Sachiko. They too seem bored and listless, which might be why Yoko seems drawn to Katsu even if in him she perhaps sees a shadow of death which would be another way of leaving this town. He later tells her that he killed someone for money, offering the money as proof, though it’s a fairly meaningless gesture as is the money itself which doesn’t seem to have increased his possibilities. Probably, he doesn’t know what to do with it. He describes Yoshie’s warmth as like a womb, and is apparently in this town waiting either for death or to be reborn, though Yoshie’s own failed suicide attempt seems to suggest there is no real escape from this purgatorial existence. When he tells her he wants to go somewhere else, Yoshie tells him that it’s the same everywhere anyway, so leaving will make no difference and there is nowhere he can go. 

The increasingly prosperous Japan of the mid-1970s in which the student movement has died seems to have no place for him. Kumashiro kicks back against this sense of ennui partly through his ironic use of censorship which cannot help but suggest what it hides. The large black bars and scratched out pools of white hint at an attempt to erase and oppress sexuality, which is the means by which Katsu and fails to find freedom, just as they oppress freedom of expression. Katsu meanwhile continues to block things out, rejecting his identity and behaving like a character from a film more hollow archetype than man just as Yoko seems to be an embodiment of his projected desires. She too may have only one destination available to her in this inescapable cycle of unfulfilled longing and crushing ennui.

Female Teacher: Forbidden Sex (女教師日記 禁じられた性, Hideo Nakata, 1995)

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Hideo Nakata maybe best known for his films in the horror genre, but he made his feature directorial debut for Toei’s V-Cinema with a tale of forbidden love between a besotted high school boy and his Japanese teacher. Though with a title like Female Teacher: Forbidden Sex (女教師日記 禁じられた性, Jokyoshi Nikki: Kinjirareta Sei), one might expect something fiercely erotic or sensationalist, the film is really a sensitive melodrama in which a young man who feels suffocated by his doting single mother and a female teacher who feels constrained by patriarchal social codes fall into an impossible love. 

Then again, it does have its troubling themes. Lovelorn Mitsuru (Kosuke Kawana) has been leaving mildly ominous messages on Noriko’s (Hitoe Ohtake) answerphone declaring his love and pleading with her to notice him. Noriko knows that the messages are from one of her students, but she doesn’t know which. In any case, the messages make her uncomfortable on several levels given her position as a teacher. Meanwhile, she’s in a relationship with another teacher at the school, Morimoto (Hiroyuki Okita), who is popular with female students. Noriko obviously thinks the relationship is serious as she asks Morimoto to meet her parents, but he appears reluctant in part because Noriko wants to continue her teaching career after marriage and Morimoto is presumably after more of a traditional housewife.

In fact, despite his status as an alpha male PE teacher, Morimoto is rather insecure and actively threatened by Mitsuru when he catches him having dinner with Noriko. This is right after a rumour has begun to spread around the school that he’s slept with a female student, Yumi (Asami Sawaki), who faked a story about being raped to get him to take her to a hotel where she tried to seduce him. It seems that he did not actually sleep with her, but took things father than he should have in an attempt to scare her off doing the same thing again. As such, his conduct is extremely questionable, but he is never questioned about it in the same way that Noriko is even though she only took Mitsuru for dinner even if Yumi’s friends might have a point in suggesting she’s getting back at Morimoto. She did, however, give him alcohol which is not an appropriate thing for a teacher to do, though nothing about this entire situation is really appropriate. The legal drinking age in Japan is 20 and Mitsuru could have been suspended from school just for underage drinking if his teachers found out. 

The real mystery might be why Noriko suddenly takes to Mitsuru, who was after all stalking her. But the reasoning seems to be that he’s the opposite of Morimoto. He treats her with kindness and respect and never tries to constrain her in the same way that Morimoto does even if the natural consequence of their affair is that she will lose her teaching career which had been her dream since high school. She seems to know on some level that their affair is wrong, but gets swept up in the moment and the false hope of escaping the pressures of her life such as the patriarchal expectations of marriage. While Morimoto drags his feet, her friends call inviting her to mixers and her parents try to set her up for arranged marriage meetings to hurry her along to a seemingly inevitable rite of passage. 

Mitsuru, meanwhile, feels hemmed in. He’s on track for a place at the prestigious Tokyo University and under immense pressure while resentful of his mother whom he finds overbearing though mainly just appears caring and interested in his future if a little possessive while chasing after the fugitive Mitsuru and Noriko. What he might paradoxically be looking for is an escape from adulthood, as is Noriko in a way, though his reasons for loving her are otherwise superficial and only to do with her physical beauty. Nevertheless, he resents Morimoto for his boorish, ultra-masculine attempts to dominate Noriko and thinks he’s rescuing her while unaware that in other ways he’s ruining her life. He too railroads her into staying with him, insisting that he’ll look after her by getting a job which only bears out his naivety and makes him little better than Morimoto.

Perhaps with a little male wish fulfilment, the film treats the love story as if it were pure and innocent and it’s only society that’s in the way as reflected in Noriko’s wish for time to run faster but only for Mitsuru. Nevertheless, it too acknowledges that the love is impossible because it is inappropriate given Mitsuru’s youth and Noriko’s position as his teacher, so they can only really be together in death. As such, the film ends on a melancholy note and is filled more with romantic tragedy than the purely erotic content suggested by the misleading title.

Screened as part of the International Film Festival Rotterdam’s Focus on V-Cinema.

Don’t Look Up (女優霊, Hideo Nakata, 1996)

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“Have you ever seen an old movie and not been able to get it out of your head?” For those of us who grew up in the pre-internet age, daytime television was a treasure trove of classic cinema where unexpected discoveries were made. Maybe you only caught a few minutes of a film whose title you never knew, but the images are burned into your brain like nothing before or since. It’s tempting, then, to wonder if it isn’t Muroi (Yurei Yanagi), the nascent director, who’s projecting the darkest corners of his mind onto this haunted celluloid, though as it turns out this film was never actually aired.

If Muroi saw the haunted film as a child, it was because the ghost within it chose to broadcast herself by hijacking the airwaves. As his friend points out, however, perhaps he just saw a newspaper report about an actress dying in an on-set fall and saw it in his mind, creating a movie of his own or perhaps a waking nightmare that continues to plague him into adulthood. In any case, the film he’s trying to make is a wartime melodrama rather than a ghost story, but it’s one that’s clearly built around dark secrets and hidden desires. Hitomi (Yasuyo Shirashima) reveals that her character killed her mother in the film to take her place and later kills a deserting soldier with whom she’s been in some kind of relationship that the younger sister threatens to reveal in fear that should the villagers find out they’ve been hindering the war effort by hiding a man who’s shirked his duty to the nation they’ll be ostracised and people will stop sharing their food with them.

But Hitomi has real-world issues too. There’s something going on with her overbearing manager who seemingly didn’t want her to do this film which is why she’s not on set with her. When she eventually turns up, she seems to have some psychic powers. After handing Hitomi an amulet, she runs from the studio screaming. Hitomi agrees there’s something eerie about this place. As the projectionist remarks, this studio is 50 years old, built during the post-war relaunch of the cinema industry. Many things have happened here. But Nikkatsu is now a ghost itself and these disused production facilities are a haunted spaced. The floorboards creak and the rigging may give way any moment, bringing down with it the dream of cinema.

That’s one reason Muroi is advised not to look up and break this sense of allusion, along with recalling the more recent tragedy of an actress’ accidental fall. As much as Hitomi and Saori (Kei Ishibashi) begin to overlap with the image of the ghostly actress, it’s Muroi who is eventually swallowed by his dream of cinema in his determination to climb the stairs and find out what horrors are lurking in the attic before being dragged away to some other world. Nevertheless, this is a film that could only be made with celluloid. Nakata slips back and fore between the film that we’re watching and the cursed negative with its ghost images from previous exposure. This is evidently a low-budget production too, made using end cuts from other reels. As someone points out, this unused footage would usually be thrown out but has somehow mysteriously ended up infecting their film and releasing its ghosts. The projectionist burns it, describing the film as “evil” and suggesting that it’s better to let sleeping dogs lie.

But Muroi seems unable to let it go, chasing his childhood nightmare in trying to explain the mystery behind the footage. Hitomi describes herself as being haunted by a role long after the film as ended. It’s the same when someone dies, she says. They hang on for a while. The actor too remarks that he feels like the camera hates him, as if he were feeling the ghost’s wrath directly but otherwise unable to see her. Yet we have this sense of history repeating and a curse that’s sure to recur while this film too will remain unfinished and linger in the realm of the unrealised. Nakata too only undertook this film after losing his job to Nikkatsu’s collapse and trying to finance a documentary about Joseph Losey as if captivated by his own dream of the cinematic past and the haunting images of a bygone world.

XX: Beautiful Hunter (XX ダブルエックス 美しき狩人, Masaru Konuma, 1994)

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An assassin raised inside a weird Catholic hitman cult begins to reassess her life after falling for a reporter trying to expose the cult’s wrongdoings in Masaru Konuma’s adaptation of the novel by Mangetsu Hanamura, XX Beautiful Hunter (XX ダブルエックス 美しき狩人, XX: Utsukushiki Karyudo). In the classic V-Cinema mode, the film is a guns and girls crime thriller, though in other ways perhaps unusual in exploring the heroine’s gradual liberation in the wake of her sexual awakening. 

Shion (Makiko Kuno) comes of age twice, in the sense that in the opening sequence in which she undergoes a kind of baptism to become a “warrior of God,” she appears to get her period shortly after shooting her first target. Raised by the priest whom she calls “Father”, Shion is an emotionless killing machine with seemingly no thoughts at all beyond completing her mission. She does not even really seem to subscribe to the religion and is killing because Father told her to rather than for the glory of God while most of her targets are political figures that have become inconvenient. We can see both how little women are valued in this world and what a bad guy Ishizaki is when he uses his wife as a human shield before being dispassionately assassinated by Shion who does not particularly care about the collateral damage as long her primary target is killed. When the reporter she falls in love with, Ito (Johnny Okura), asks her what she’d do if he tried to run in a crowded public place, she says that she’d shoot him and that a lot of people would die, as if didn’t matter to her on either moral or practical grounds. Strangely, no one seems to react very much to the sound of a gun being fired even when Shion uses hers to bust open a coin locker, so perhaps she simply doesn’t worry about the laws of man.

But she is rattled by Ito’s photo of her executing his friend Sakuma because it reflects something of herself she didn’t want to see and has perhaps been repressing. Ito suggests that maybe she just likes killing people, which seems to bother Shion on some level, but an attempt to masturbate with her gun does indeed suggest a link between killing and sexual pleasure. It is though sexual contact with Ito that seems to awaken her when he rather strangely begins giving her oral sex after tearing at her clothes pleading for his life. As though imprinting on him, Shion becomes fascinated by Ito and the “normality” he represents. He gives her a crash course in dating while seemingly deprogramming her by getting her to eat meat and do “normal” things like going on drives in her sports car. Shion also starts dressing in more noticeably feminine fashions echoing the link between her baptism and coming of age with the suppression of her womanhood. 

It’s through this sexual liberation that Shion begins to break away from her programming and ask questions of the cult such as who her real parents were. Father seems to have a stoical attitude, exclaiming that “women are all the same” as if he knew this day would come and that Shion has evolved on falling in love. He seems to welcome this development on one level, but at the same time reduces Shion from the beautiful weapon he’s created to maternal vessel in suggesting that her true destiny lies in childbirth and that his dream is to hold her child whom he will presumably also train as an assassin. 

Meanwhile, the cult also paradoxically tries to use sex to control by subjecting her to a torture session at the hands of a lesbian dominatrix who insists she’ll show her a heaven men can never know and make her forget all about men. She does this by inserting a giant electrified dildo, which paints a very confusing picture of the cult’s views on sex, whether hetero or homosexual, penetrative or not. Ito turns up to “save” her, but thankfully it isn’t a case of a random man walking in and taking over, so much as providing a distraction for Shion to save herself while further empowering her with the motivation of love. In this world, however, love is futile and elusive. Even after freeing herself from the oppressive control of Father, Shion loses everything and intends to end her life only to turn around with another gesture of defiance though whether one of the killing machine reasserting itself or the desire for life overriding her nascent pain is difficult to say.

Carlos (カルロス, Kazuhiro Kiuchi, 1991)

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Fleeing a gang war with Columbian drug lords, a Brazilian gangster of Japanese descent tries his luck on the mainland but finds himself a perpetual outsider who can’t get himself taken seriously in Kazuhiro Kiuchi’s moody adaptation of his own manga, Carlos (カルロス). Owing a little bit to Brian De Palma’s Scarface, the tale takes place in a Japan mired in hopelessness and despair amid the spectre of economic collapse, while Carlos tries to play one gang off against another to exploit the terminal decline of the old school yakuza.

What we have here is a succession crisis. The Yamashiro boss (Minoru Oki) is planning to step down due to ill health though in the middle of a long-running dispute with the Hayakawa gang. When two of their guys are randomly killed, they assume only Hayakawa could be behind it little knowing that Carlos (Naoto Takenaka), a Brazilian-Japanese gangster on the run in Japan after killing eight policemen in a gang war in Brazil, killed them because they thought they didn’t need to obey the rules of the underworld with a “foreign” gangster. “We don’t need to treat those Brazilians as equals,” one says while already late to their appointed meeting. They haven’t paid Carlos for the guns he sold them, and when challenged, try to intimidate him into giving them away for free. But Carlos is sick of being intimidated and bumps them off himself. 

Carlos faces constant microaggressions about not being Japanese enough, though he speaks the language fluently without an accent. “Your crude taste doesn’t fly in Japan,” a yakuza tells him, criticising his outfit for being too informal when yakuza of this era generally dress in fancy suits and style their hair with military precision. That’s not really something that bothers Carlos, but he’s annoyed to be so easily dismissed and it’s true enough that he’s being used because they think he’s disposable. Not only is he not a “yakuza”, but as they don’t see him as Japanese either, they don’t need to accord him even the dignity they’d grant to a gang member. When Katayama hires Carlos to knock of his rival for the succession, Sato, he’s pissed off when Carlos takes things too far and puts on a show that threatens to blow the whole thing wide open by massacring Sato’s guys at baseball practice. To a man like Katayama, this is total idiocy and attributable to Carlos’ foreignness, both in his capacity for unnecessary violence and his lack of understanding of the rules of Japanese gangsterdom.

But the one place Carlos and his brother Antonio are fully Japanese is in the home of his aunt who also migrated from Brazil and their Japanese-born cousin Tomomi. Carlos’ aunt refers to them both by their Japanese names, Shiro and Goro, and cooks them Japanese food like sukiyaki. This pleasant domestic environment seems to represent a more settled life Carlos could have found outside of a crime family, especially as his brother Antonio grows closer to Tomomi, but there are also hints of darkness in his uncle’s early death from cirrhosis of the liver which suggests he may have had a hard life in Japan and taken to drink. Nevertheless, his aunt seems to have made a nice life for herself and her daughter and is overjoyed to expand her family by welcoming Carlos and Antonio.

Yet this sort of life seems outside of Carlos’ reach while he continues to play the yakuza gangs off against each other while simultaneously longing for some kind of recognition and almost willing them to figure out it was him who killed Sugita and Yano, the obnoxious Yamashiro guys. Meanwhile, the weakened yakuza have also turned to a foreign hitman, a brooding and robotic American who lacks compassion or compunction and unlike Carlos seems to be a mindless killing machine. When Carlos bests him, it’s an eerie moment echoing Blue Velvet as his body rocks and then falls. By contrast, when Carlos fights his way to the head of the Yamashiro gang, Yamashiro gets puffed up and draws his sword swearing he’ll teach Carlos what a mistake it is to underestimate the Japanese mob, only Carlos simply shoots him in a moment of clear victory over this outdated adherence to a traditional code. Nevertheless, it’s clear that Carlos can’t win here either and there is no room in Japan for a man like him. His only option is to go out all guns blazing as a means of validating himself as a force to be reckoned with, someone who was worthy of attention and of being taken seriously. Shot by the legendary Seizo Sengen, Kiuchi’s manga-informed compositions dissolve into visions of loneliness and despair but in its final moments reaches a crescendo of defiance if discovered only in futility.

Stranger (夜のストレンジャー 恐怖, Shunichi Nagasaki, 1991)

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Driving through the city by night, a young woman finds herself plagued by a mysterious force while struggling to break out of her self-imposed inertia in Shunichi Nagasaki’s moody thriller, Stranger (夜のストレンジャー 恐怖). The film’s Japanese title, “night stranger terror”, perhaps more clearly hints at a sense of urban threat while surrounded by so many unfamiliar people, yet it is in many ways Kiriko’s (Yuko Natori) mistrust and suspicion that isolates her from the surrounding society and keeps her trapped in a kind of limbo unable to escape her past.

It might be tempting to read her aloofness as a direct consequence of her experiences, but in an early scene when she was still a bank employee we hear a colleague criticise her for being “anti-social” while Kiriko’s rejection of her seems born more of contempt than shyness or a preference for solitude. Working as a cashier at the bank at the tail end of the bubble is a pretty good job, especially given the still prevailing sexism of the working environment, that positions Kiriko firmly within an aspirant middle-class. She still lives at home surrounded by her family, but is in a relationship with a man who pressures her for money to invest in the stock market. She begins embezzling and lives as if there’s no tomorrow, splashing out on fancy sunglasses before meeting her boyfriend having left work early feigning illness. Unfortunately for her, she gets caught and her boyfriend predictably abandons her.

Just like the asset bubble, her life implodes and plunges her into a lower social stratum as a woman with a criminal conviction for financial impropriety and a hefty debt in needing to pay back the money she stole from the bank for her ex’s harebrained stock speculation schemes. All in all, you could say she’s been betrayed by economic forces, but also as she later admits, but her own uncertain desires in being wilfully deceived by Akiyama (Takashi Naito) and making a clear choice to defraud the bank. She realises that it might not have been a desire to please Akiyama that led her to do it, but the illicit thrill she felt in tapping away on her keyboard stealing the money and otherwise being in a position of economic power over a man, buying him things and taking him out for fancy food. Her sense of malaise is only deepened when she meets Akiyama by chance and tries to tell him all this, but he isn’t really interested. He seems to have moved on and planning to marry another woman. 

Kiriko tries to look at his hands to see if he has burn scars like the man who attacked her in her taxi, but he doesn’t. Perhaps there was a small part of her that wanted it to be him. At least if it was, it would mean he still felt something for her, which would also prove that he ever did. And it would make sense, which is less frightening than her stalker just being a nutty fare, another irate man with a nondescript grudge wandering the city. Taxi driver is one of the few jobs open to her with a criminal record, but it’s also an unusual profession for a woman which further isolates her in her working environment. Her boss keeps calling her “little lady,” while patronisingly offering to put her on the day shift because it’s less dangerous. Kijima (Kentaro Shimizu), an obnoxious colleague, picks at Kiriko for thinking everyone who strikes up a conversation must be sexually interested in her. But the truth is that they are and like Kijima demand her attention. When they don’t get it they’re pissed off. The cab is perhaps the place she feels the most safe, though she faces her fair share of weird fares from drunk men trying to flirt to religious maniacs proselytising from the back seat. 

Now living alone in an apartment, her aloofness is both a personal preference and means of punishing herself. When her brother calls, he encourages her to come home but she says she can’t even though she wants to because she hasn’t yet dealt with her past or taken steps towards being able to forgive herself. She tells Kijima, who in truth behaves in an incredibly creepy way that suggests she’s right to avoid him, that she wonders if she isn’t the only one who can see the mysterious Land Cruiser, as if she were really imagining it. The Land Cruiser does indeed come to stand in for the buried past by which Kiriko is haunted and her eventual besting of it is a symbolic act that suggests she’s finally managed to overcome her guilt and shame to be able to leave the past behind.

As she told Kijima, this was something only she could do by her own hand or none. Akiyama’s dismissiveness of her reflects the fact that he couldn’t give her this absolution either, she needed to find it for herself. Kijima accused her of still being hung up on the guy that scammed her, but that wasn’t quite it. The resolution might hint at his being right when he told her that she needed to learn to trust people more in that it seems to lead to a greater willingness to open herself up to the world. Once again, her sunglasses get broken as a new truth becomes visible to her. A lonely little boy she meets who, like her, enjoys driving in circles and going nowhere, probes her lack of human connection by suggesting that she doesn’t know what it’s like to love someone which is why she can’t understand his obviously inappropriate love for her, though it’s a fact that Kiriko has to acknowledge is truth in interrogating the reality of her relationship with Akiyama.

Nevertheless, in the end, she saves herself and embraces her solitude and independence looking out at the peaceful bay in a city that no longer seems so threatening even if the unseen threat in this case did turn out to be random and have no rational explanation. Nagasaki never again worked in the realms of V-Cinema and his entry is fairly atypical in starring an older, established actress as an action lead while requiring no nudity or sexual content, instead quite literally allowing her to grab the wheel and take control of her life to claim freedom and independence rather than solely romantic fulfilment.

Woods Are Wet (女地獄　森は濡れた, Tatsumi Kumashiro, 1973)

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As long as people live honest lives, eventually good things will happen to them, according to the sinister mistress at the centre of Takumi Kumashiro’s Roman Porno Woods Are Wet (女地獄　森は濡れた, Onna Jigoku: Mori wa Nureta). Perversely, she may actually believe this to be true but only in the most ironic of senses as she and her “cruel” husband enjoy incredibly happy lives together having decided to “honestly” embrace their true desires, which include things like rape, murder, and eating grapes off the corpses of their victims.

Inspired by the Marquis de Sade’s Justine and set in the Taisho era, the film begins in true gothic style as Sachiko (Hiroko Isayama), a runaway maid in flight from an accusation of having murdered her mistress, encounters Yoko (Rie Nakagawa), an upper-class lady who unexpectedly comes to her rescue in a small town. Yoko takes her back to the Western-style mansion she shares with her husband Ryunosuke (Hatsuo Yamaya) whom she describes as being incredibly cruel. Explaining that she’s been desperately lonely since her marriage at 19, Yoko begs Sachiko to stay but as her companion rather than a servant, which is another act of class transgression for which there will presumably be a price. 

In any case, the atmosphere changes when Ryunosuke arrives and reveals he knows all about Sachiko’s predicament and blackmails her into helping with his schemes to rape and murder guests at the hotel he runs. He explains that he’s very wealthy and does this for kicks not out of financial necessity but nevertheless uses her to spice up his game by directly telling her to warn the guests that their lives are in danger. If she manages to get them to escape, he’ll let her go too, but of course it’s not as easy as she’d assumed it would be, especially as the first two guests she’s sent to brutally rape her. Even so, she vows to escape with them, only they are not quite clever enough to beat Ryunosuke’s game.

Out in the middle of nowhere, the mansion is a true gothic fantasy lit by candle light due to an absence of electricity because of the Depression. Ryunosuke has adapted it so that it contains a series of prison-like doors with iron bars and locks that allow him to trap Sachiko and others exactly where he wants them. He is vile and depraved, as is Yoko, though they later brand themselves as simply liberated and living “honestly” having embraced their true desires. Ryunosuke paints himself as a quiet revolutionary, asking why he should conform with rules and laws dictated by a distant authority to which he himself does not subscribe. He describes commonly held visions of morality as nothing more than a tool of social coercion designed to control the common man (which he is not), in which he may have a valid point despite the depravity of his apparently honest nature. 

This aspect of Ryunosuke as an anti-social force was apparently something very much intended by Kumashiro, who was himself rebelling against a moral panic which had seen Nikkatsu’s Roman Porno line condemned under public obscenity laws. To make a point, he inserts large black blocks and lines throughout the film to mimic those sometimes demanded by the censors, though enlarged to an absurd degree and often not actually covering what they would presumably be intended to or actually drawing attention to it. In any case, what the censors objected to in this case was not apparently the sex itself but the violence which accompanies it, notably in the scenes in which blood-soaked sex continues after Yoko has shot one of the male victims she effectively raped at gunpoint. 

The central part of the film is a lengthy orgy scene in which Ryunosuke has his maids whip the victims while he anally rapes them while they are forced to have sex with Yoko and Sachiko on the pretext of saving their lives. It only gets grimmer from there, though there’s a censoriousness about Sachiko’s insistence that happiness should come from correctness to counter the “happiness” that Yoko and Ryunosuke exude in their embrace of their baser desires that undercuts her role as the innocent heroine standing up to their depraved inhumanity amid the absurd interruption of a radio taiso broadcast signalling the arrival of the next unhappy guests to rock up for a less than pleasant stay at this decidedly unluxurious hotel.