The success of Flower and Snake suggests taking a brief look at what was happening in the more traditional pinku genre films being made in the earlier part of the century.
Like most pinku films from earlier years, The Japanese Wife Next Door is aimed at pure titillation but in what will be a more graphic manner. It lies in the realm of pinku comedies but is pushed to an extreme not usually found in the earlier pinku films I have seen. A young salaryman meets a young woman at a company mixer and shortly afterward they are married. He soon discovers that she is sexually insatiable, so insatiable in fact that his exhaustion encourages him to hide from her at work and avoid the bedroom. Since he is away, she begins sleeping with the other men of his family. Not only is the sex regular, but it often appears to be real. The fogging is not as dense as usually found in earlier pinku films and the viewer can see through it without much difficulty, so bouncing erections, oral sex, manual stimulation, and similar activity can be identified as genuine rather than simulated. The director for the most part has simply made a porno film and left it to the censors to make it acceptable for theatrical showing, a practice sometimes used in the earlier pinku films as well. There is also a phenomenal range of sexual activity, culminating in a double penetration scene (involving two men, not two mask dildos as in Flower and Snake) that I don’t recall seeing in the seventies and eighties pinku I have sampled. Much is also made of the ample breasts of Reiko Yamaguchi.
However, the woman is completely in charge and is enjoying herself at all times. At no point is there a hint of rape or force or bondage for the woman. The concept of the nymphomaniac is a fundamental part of mainstream pornography, of course. One of the oldest British jokes says the ideal wife is a mute nymphomaniac who also owns a pub. But here, though there are plenty of sex scenes, the nymphomania completely overwhelms the man. The husband in the final scene says he should have picked the other woman at the party and that choice is played out in a sequel with little or no comedy. The other woman herself turns out to be a sadist who eventually anally rapes him with a strap-on. Thus, Japanese Wife oddly fits into the general fear of the new “liberated” young woman that floats through so many mainstream Japanese movies of the turn of the century. The man gets what he wants in an ostensibly perfect wife, yet discovers that he really doesn’t want it, at least not on her terms. We’re a long way from the subservient oiran of the past, though we have seen a similar situation in the pre-pinku Love for an Idiot. No matter which woman he chooses, the man loses.
By contrast, Man, Woman, and the Wall also makes male fantasy its subject but in a very traditional manner. Despite having an actual Japanese porn star (Sora Aoi) as its lead, all the sex scenes are clearly simulated or so carefully staged as to block from view any possible erections or penetrations. Its kinkiness derives from the story itself.
Ryo moves into a new apartment but he can hear his female neighbor through the thin walls. Ryo wants to get to know her, but he is shy and begins to fantasize about her, go through her trash, and eventually try to bug her apartment. He learns that her apartment is already being bugged by someone else, and that she has a more dangerous stalker than Ryo, a stranger who makes dirty or threatening phone calls at night, as well as a regular boyfriend who has sex with her that Ryo listens in on. It will eventually be revealed that the man who has already bugged her apartment and the phone caller is the boyfriend himself, so there are several layers of kink in the situation, though not in the sex depicted. Both men are voyeurs, as are we in the audience.
One of the most interesting points is that the woman whom Ryo fantasizes is not at all the same as the woman who lives next door. He does not imagine scenes of kinky, wild debauchery like those of The Japanese Wife Next Door, much less those of Flower and Snake, to which he can masturbate. Instead he imagines a cute, pink, girly world for her (sometimes shown with a different actress as well) rather than the drab, ordinary apartment he breaks into that looks just like his own. He and she are just two of the thousands of lonely, alienated urban workers to be found all over Tokyo.
Writer/director Masashi Yamamoto was extremely independent, not known for working in the pinku genre. Most of his very occasional movies were quasi-documentaries about people on the edge of Japanese society, the hippie-like culture of Robinson’s Garden or the more sordid underbelly of Junk Food. The movie has a digital camera look, and many of the non-sexual scenes are shot in the long takes common to low-budget film-making as well as to the Japanese tradition. Despite the casting, the movie may well have been intended to be a non-pinku pink film, using the format only to get distribution for a film about society at large rather than about sex.
Frog Song is an attempt to use pinku to make a best buddies story about women. Akemi is in a fight with her boyfriend or possibly husband, we are never told for sure, and hits him with a vodka bottle. Taking refuge in a manga cafe, she first argues with Kyoko over a manga then walks home, only to find her husband in bed with another woman. She later runs into Kyoko again, working as a frog mascot for a store. But Kyoko also has another trade as a prostitute, while she works on drawing a manga of her own. For a while they move in together, then Akemi gets her own room. Eventually the husband talks Akemi into returning home. Kyoko goes back home, and a sudden cut takes us to Akemi with two young boys (but no husband). Kyoko appears in her frog suit, returned to Tokyo after her first manga was published and the whole cast appear on the sidewalk to join them in their frog dance.
This provides multiple possibilities for sex scenes, but they are mostly of the bare breast, oohing and aahing type. Kyoko also allows men to beat her, but this scene is done in bra and panties. All the men are essentially worthless, with one found in Kyoko’s bed willing to switch to Akemi instead because it doesn’t matter to him who he has sex with, the husband continuing his cheating, and yet another beating Akemi when she tries prostitution to augment her seamstress income. (He actually offers her a choice of the sex act or a beating, and she chooses the latter, depicted only with a single stomach punch and a quick cut to show her bruised face the next morning.)
Writer/director Shinji Imaoka mostly adheres to the one scene/one shot tradition, in part due to choice and in part to limited budget, and the most significant discussion between the two women is photographed from almost floor position with the two women so far away we are not always sure which one is speaking. Much of their growing relationship is implied rather than shown, again a combination of the time limits imposed on the genre and by long Japanese traditions of film-making, and the sudden jump to Akemi with her children is cut so that it seems to be simply the next day.
Friendship between two women has always been difficult for male film-makers to deal with, because there is always the assumption that their lives will be ultimately defined by the man and the family each woman ends up with. Most often in Euro/American movies, the friendship is broken when they both fall in love with the same man or the man of one suddenly switches his desires to the other. By the 21st century, another option is available of course, and as we watch the movie, we begin to await the moment when the two women go to bed together and become a couple themselves. However, when that happens, one is still in street clothes and the other in her frog suit and there is not even a kiss between them, so the lesbian lovers solution is not going to happen here either.
It shares a problem common to pinku throughout the decades. As a sex film, it is something of a disappointment because, although there are a number of sex scenes, none of them seem “real.” As a movie, it is a disappointment because the time and budget and nudity requirements short-change the relationships. And yet, the relationships seem far more genuine than the similar relationship in the comparatively big budget Nana, which is far glossier in presentation and more manipulative of audience emotions. But whatever their shortcomings, both Frog Song and Man, Woman, and the Wall are signs that the pinku format is still being used for something more than just sexual titillation.
Still, the economic question remains: in an era when the pornographic movie or just sequences of sex scenes are becoming omnipresent on both VHS, DVD, and the Internet, how could there be a market left for the pinku theatrical film, no matter how cheaply made? Nevertheless, the pink film seems to have maintained its presence and its variety into the 21st century.
Japanonfilm 