Tag: Toru Ohe

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.

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.