Night of the Felines / Mesunekotachi no yoru (1972)

Normally I would not have bothered with Night of the Felines, but it was in Kinema Junpo’s 2009 list of Top Japanese Films of All Time.* Having seen it now, I’m still at a complete loss as to what to make of it. Most of the available plot summaries in critical commentaries are wrong, including the Weissers, but at the same time I couldn’t begin to be sure what the plot actually is. It seems to be a sex comedy that takes an unexpected detour, but even that is uncertain since the restraints of roman porno means it is not clear how many actual sexual couplings take place.

Masako works in a Turkish Bath where she and her compatriots provide careful attendance while in the nude, scrubbing men’s bodies, and giving massages (including body-to-body massages), but apparently no actual sex. As she tells one of her regulars, “One finger only.” That particular regular is obsessed with washing her back and comes up to Tokyo from Osaka often just to scrub her, a kink I don’t think I’ve seen anywhere else. When she gets home, she listens at the wall of her neighbor Honda, who apparently uses his hands only for masturbation as he watches some unusually randy neighbors out his window. He uses his feet to pick up things or plug in the fan and bites chunks from a cabbage suspended from the ceiling so he doesn’t have to touch it. Masako visits him, but he seems only to masturbate her, at least once using his toe.

Honda has a friend Makoto who may be a lover; we certainly first see him as a “boytoy” meeting his assignation in a restaurant. Makoto has fallen in love with a girl and is afraid he can’t consummate a heterosexual act. First he tries with Honda watching, but still can’t succeed. Honda then asks Masako to teach him how, and she agrees. Up until this point, it is all great fun — spritely music, eccentric characters, and the general light touch of a Danish sex romp from the seventies. There is even a strange yet somehow charming sequence as Masako, Makoto, and Honda spend the day around Tokyo, walking the streets, going to the zoo, etc,, all while Masako has at least one hand, often both, inside Makoto’s trousers, before she finally gets him in bed. However, on his second try with the girl he loves, Makoto puts on the same music that had been playing when he was with Masako (Gregorian chant plainsong – don’t ask because I can’t explain), and when the record runs out his penis collapses, the girl leaves, and Makoto jumps off the balcony.

From that point, the director Noburo Tanaka goes all poetic, with Makoto’s fall shown as an umbrella floating down. Honda is depressed, Masako tries to raise his spirits by having real sex, they wander the streets at dawn, Honda collapses and is sprayed by the street sweepers, they get back up as Tokyo comes to life with rising security screens on the front of shops and reflected sunlight from the skyscrapers, Honda falls to the sidewalk, and Masako skips off across the wet streets saying “See you later.”

If nothing else, Night of the Felines illustrates the limits of the soft-porn world. You can see a lot of skin, but you can’t see the key activity. Unless someone in the dialogue explains clearly what is happening, you don’t know if actual sex has occurred. Thus, most brief critical summaries of the movie say Masako is a prostitute but everything we see says she is not. She most definitely offers a sexual fillip to the Turkish bath experience and even allows the customers to touch her, but only within limits. We, however, aren’t told what those limits are. And the conveniently located piece of furniture or careful camera placement only confuses the issue further.

Obviously this was no problem for Japanese audiences at the time, or decades later, as we can see in the movie’s high critical esteem. But for outsiders like myself, it is a confusing mess. Like many Japanese movies, it changes tone toward the end, but this is not unusual and is a characteristic that makes Japanese movies in general so fascinating. Many of the comic moments are still funny. I just wish I knew what the personal relationships really were and what was actually going on in most of the “sex” scenes.

* A similar list has appeared on MUBI’s website, with only 192 movies. There are some movies included that are not found on other versions of the list, and some movies have dropped off, but I can find no films made in the last decade, so I can’t tell if this is the long-awaited 2019 list, or just another of MUBI’s fabled eccentricities. In either case, Night of the Felines is still on it and Sansho the Bailiff and Where the Chimneys Are Seen are not.