The Sea is Watching / Umi wa miteita (2002)

Almost immediately after Akira Kurosawa's death, Japanese film-makers brought to the screen three of his still unproduced screenplays, all of which were based on stories by Shugoro Yamamoto. The Sea is Watching was the last of these and in many ways the most unexpected. Directed by Kei Kumai, it is so utterly different from what …

Love Bites Back / Woman Who Bites / Kamu onna (1988)

The Woman Who Bites takes us behind the scenes of Japan's new Adult Video industry that was essentially destroying the theatrical pinku film business while it simultaneously provides a complex plot and a sympathetic portrait of a marriage gone sour. Yuichi (Toshiyushi Nagashima) used to be an acclaimed screenwriter and director who now runs a …

Women Who Do Not Divorce / Rikon shinai onna (1986)

One of the highlights of the revival of the romantic melodrama in Japan during the eighties is Women Who Do Not Divorce, whose title is a bit misleading since both the principal women eventually do get divorces. Because it was directed by Tatsumi Kumashiro, I went into it expecting a pink film of higher quality …

Mr. Mrs. Miss Lonely / Misuta, Misesu, Misu Ronri (1980)

Roughly once a month or so, it seems, I come across a previously unknown Japanese movie and find that it is an experience that is almost impossible to describe. Just such a picture is Mr. Mrs. Miss Lonely, which from its title to its presentation simply defies coherent description or comment without also destroying the …

Kandagawa Pervert Wars / Kandagawa inran senso (1983)

Many Japanese directors in the seventies and eighties found their way into film through pinku productions, but no one used that experience to find such commercial and artistic success in other genres as did Kiyoshi Kurosawa (no relation). This gives Kandagawa Pervert Wars, his first "full-length" commercial movie, a greater significance than it probably deserves, …

Woman with Red Hair / Akai kami no onna (1979)

Woman with Red Hair is one of the most highly regarded of all pinku films, #4 on Kinema Junpo’s list in 1979. Why that is so is not particularly clear. Like In the Realm of the Senses, it chronicles an intense affair built almost completely around sex but without Oshima’s graphic sexual scenes or deadly …

Street of Joy / Akasen tamanoi: Nukeraremasu (1972)

I don’t think I have ever come across a movie with more sex yet less skin than Street of Joy. Set in a brothel in 1955, when the brothels were still openly legal, it is awash with constant sex. Yet there is only one flash of female nudity, so the movie is the polar opposite …

Black Rose Ascension / Kurobara shoten (1975)

What’s a poor porn film maker to do when his star gets pregnant and refuses to go on with his masterpiece? Find another woman, of course, but this is not as easy as you might think it would be, which Kumashiro’s Black Rose Ascension demonstrates. When Meiko (Meika Seri) decides she has had enough after …

Bitterness of Youth / Seishun no satetsu (1974)

Tatsumi Kumashiro was one of the kings of Nikkatsu soft-core porn in the seventies, so I was unprepared for his movie Bitterness of Youth, a detailed, complex, and realistic portrait of a college student’s search for meaning and his proper future that ends badly for all concerned. This is not to say that there is …

World of Geisha / A Man and a Woman Behind the Fusuma Screen / Yojohan fusuma no urabari (1973)

Tatsumi Kumashiro was one of the most critically respected specialists in pinku films, primarily because of his propensity for experimental techniques and ostensibly liberal politics. World of Geisha illustrates those propensities in what was (and remains) one of the most highly regarded films in the genre, along with his later Woman with Red Hair. Dealing …