Since the rise of the Catholic Church during Constantine’s reign, decadence has always been associated in the western tradition with sexual deviation from the norm. Thus, since Topazu opens with a female bondage scene, followed by a long humiliation scene ending with an intense threesome, then a man who wants to re-enact the famous rape of a dead woman near Mt. Fuji, another threesome that features sexual strangulation, a dominatrix who also puts on a lesbian show — as well as enough cocaine (both as powder and crack), sniffed, smoked, swallowed, and injected to cover a season or so of The Wire — it is hardly a surprise that the movie was retitled for its European and American releases as Tokyo Decadence.
However, it is really the story of a young prostitute, ironically named Ai (the Japanese for love).* One of her customers asks her what she has learned in her life, to which she answers “That I have no talent.” She does have a talent, however, a true talent for being humiliated. This has led her into considerable success in the expensive end of the prostitution trade, working for a small agency that provides specialist services (in one scene, as she waits at the office, a man can be seen behind her putting on dark hose and a dress, then waiting on the sofa for an assignment as well). Her special skill is absolute subservience accompanied by a genuine shyness about it that adds an extra satisfaction for her customers. She always dresses demurely, in virginal white rather than the elegant dresses we associate with high-end “Pretty Woman” prostitutes, with her corset and cuffs and other equipment carried in a large purse, and we see none of the toughness or feigned agony or submission usually seen in sado-masochistic movies. Curiously, she is never physically harmed by her customers, never actually beaten or tied and assaulted in the Flower and Snake manner. Simple humiliation is her specialty.
The scene used in all the publicity posters is of her standing in the window of a skyscraper hotel for hours, embarrassed by the demand that she stand there with the curtains open. She is later seen slowly crawling around the same hotel room with a vibrator strapped inside her while the customer talks on the phone to his wife waiting in the lobby, who later appears in the room to have the actual sex with the man while she watches Ai and her vibrator. Though there is considerable nudity (and the vibrator scene), we never actually see Ai having sex, though she apparently often does before her sessions are over.
Perhaps the most surprising aspect of all this is the quietness. The noisiest scene in the movie comes when a customer takes Ai to dinner first and spends all his time bragging about how expensive the place is, how often he comes there, and the Mouton Rothschild wine he gives her, all so loudly that it draws disapproving glowers from other customers. Even the dominatrix speaks quietly to her male customer and to Ai, who is hired to provide a lesbian show to further humiliate the customer.
There is none of the screaming associated with her branch of the trade in western movies. Even when drugs are involved, no one turns on loud music and yells Let’s Party!.
The wealth on display is not gaudy; rather, it is expressed through that rarest of all Tokyo treasures – large, empty space. The hotel lobby is so vast it could be a cathedral, the rooms large enough for several families to live in. The women are so well paid that the dominatrix has her own limo and when she invites Ai home for dinner, her apartment is huge, with expensive minimalist furniture, and stocked with an apparently endless supply of drugs and expensive imported liquor.
The original title comes from a topaz ring that Ai buys after visiting a fortune teller, who says it will bring good luck. She loses it in the window session, and when she returns to find it stumbles in on the couple themselves being tortured by apparent yakuza. On a second try the wife, now sporting several bandages, gives her the ring, but it does not bring her any better luck, or at least not the luck she is hoping for.
The movie is actually based on several different stories with different characters by Ryu Murakami (who has no relation to Haruki and is often known to American readers as “the other Murakami”) which helps account for its episodic nature. The last episode takes us away from the prostitution world as it follows Ai in her search for an old lover who left her without saying goodby.
Unfortunately, she takes a pill given to her by the dominatrix to help her “be strong” and as a result staggers through her search unable to tell reality from fantasy, even when she thinks the lover has appeared. When last seen, she is once again in a pristine hotel restroom, checking her hair and her white blouse, then picking up her bag to go back to work.
The movie is available in a number of different versions. The apparent original was 135 minutes, My version is from a French restoration that is about 2 hours long, which cuts most of the yakuza scene when Ai goes back to get her ring and thus makes that incident more than a little confusing. Others are as short as 85 minutes and dubbed versions of various lengths have been released in English, French, and German that I know of, all aimed at the sexploitation video market. All of these have apparently been edited to keep the sex and nudity while speeding up the pace. To say that the movie takes its time would be an understatement. It is slooooow. but the slow pacing does not make it boring, just detailed, with each long scene indicating the depth of humiliation as well as the boredom of Ai’s work. It is an icy piece of film-making, even by Japanese standards.
Because the original stories were published in 1988 and the movie shot in 1991, it seemed at the time more socially significant to Japanese critics than merely a story of the life of a prostitute. The Japanese “bubble economy” began to burst in 1991-92, ending the phenomenal short-term growth in wealth that Japan saw in the eighties. Thus, Ai’s clients can be seen as portraits of the excesses of the nouveau riche who thought they could do anything as long as they had money. But, if so, they are still different from the American nouveau riche, utterly forsaking gaudiness. No one stiffs Ai’s fee, most even pay her extra, no one physically harms her, and she does not live in poverty herself as did Mizoguchi’s prostitutes. She is not “owned” by the madam, who seems to be the poorest of the people we see, and Ai is working off no debt. How she came to the business is never explained, but it all seems quite voluntary on her part.
The service sought seems to be something quite different from sex. As the dominatix tells Ai (through my subtitles), “Japan is a wealthy country, but we are embarrassed by that, and so the men want to be humiliated.” But this does not seem to be purely a matter of sudden, previously unimaginable wealth. Without wishing to make a new stereotype, humiliation has been a constant thread in the Japanese movies we have seen. Even the greatest samurai are at some point humiliated by their lords, and of course the common people constantly bow and scrape to the samurai, and all of this has continued into the daily humiliations of the salaryman life and the continued bowing and the all-round urge to apologize for anything and everything that we see in movie after movie. Thus, Ai can be seen as a representative of much of the cultural traditions of Japanese society. At the same time, the woman’s comment can not really be trusted, because the dominatrix also says she is happy with her life while continually shooting up at a table full of scotch and champagne bottles. We have come a long way from the world of Naruse and Mizoguchi.
Murakami was (and remains) an unusual modern writer, not only in his subject matter but also because he sometimes directed the movies based on his work, though his most famous work on film (Audition) was directed by someone else. He had close ties to the avant-garde performance and musical worlds and most of the cast comes from those worlds and appeared in only this movie. Only Miho Nikaido, who plays Ai, made several other movies, though they were often minor roles in independent films made by Americans or Europeans. But there is no sense of amateurs at play with no budget, such as we saw in movies made by young film-school directors during the early eighties. The play of light and shadow in the rooms is beautifully photographed and contrasts with the sterility of the evenly lighted bright lobby and streets, and though the scenes themselves seem longer than absolutely necessary, they are not the traditional long takes with characters in the middle or even far distance; we always know what is happening to whom, though not necessarily why.
* Though I may have missed it in the dialogue, since I only know my Japanese from movie soundtracks rather than real study, she does not ever seem to be called Aiko, the usual denotation added to female names, and only once or twice is she addressed as Ai-chan, one of the many versions of the -san honorific. It seems that Murakami seriously intended the allusions associated with the name Ai.
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