Sachiko (Nakagawa Mao), a young woman frustrated with her life of dull routine, and seeking stimulation outside the deadening monotony of housework and catering to her needy husband, befriends Kobayashi (Yûji Tajiri), a neighbor whose wife has been carrying on an affair right under his very nose. Learning of her unfaithfulness, Sachiko’s husband (Takeshi Ito, the ill-fated hero of Hisayasu Satō‘s Love-Zero=Infinity) seeks solace in the arms of prostitutes, while his wife decides to run off with her new lover. However, it isn’t long before the latter, feeling homesick, yearns to return to his wife, throwing Sachiko into despair. Graced with an outstanding script, suitably low-key performances, and an abundance of gentle humor, Empty Room is among the best titles in UK distributor Salvation’s catalogue, and an ideal entry point into the unjustly neglected world of Japanese pink film.
With their salacious titles, unabashedly lewd cover art virtually indistinguishable from hardcore direct-to-video porn, and bearing advisories such as, “contains scenes of sexual violence which will offend many viewers”, the marketing of pink films seems expressly calculated to ward off the very audience it should be courting. Which is a shame, because genre film lovers and cult film fans are missing out on some truly innovative and thought-provoking works. By the same token, anyone purchasing these titles out of sheer prurient interest is bound to be sorely disappointed. Meanwhile, the distributors of pinky violence and roman porno have been much more successful at garnering critical notice, and more importantly, not only at specialist websites devoted exclusively to Japanese, grindhouse and exploitation films.
My own initiation into Japanese sex films was Chusei Sone’s Red Classroom (1979), his second entry in the Angel Guts series, one of many roman porno films produced by Nikkatsu, and released on DVD by Arts Magic a few years back. The experience was shattering, compelling me to write a review, now buried in the forum archives, that has since gotten 8,000 hits, rather extraordinary for a 30-year-old emotionally taxing sexploitation film that has sharply divided critical opinion. This was followed by my first foray into pink film, Hisayasu Satō‘s (Caterpillar, 2005) poetically named but trashy Survey Map of a Paradise Lost (1988)—beside which even something as blatantly offensive as Assault! Jack the Ripper (a mildly diverting tale about a pastry chef who sexually mutilates and murders dozens of women) towers like a masterpiece of cinematic art—effectively killing my interest in the genre for the next few years.
During that time, I suffered through countless critically acclaimed but altogether mediocre Japanese dramas, romances, and comedies (Ping Pong, Su Ki Da, Strawberry Shortcakes, et al), when a chance encounter with the erotic thriller Freeze Me, by Takashi Ishii (scriptwriter of Angel Guts and director of the final installment of the series) re-awakened my interest in Japanese sex films, and in the brief space of a couple months, I feasted on a steady diet of roman porno, pinky violence and pink films—devouring no fewer than four dozen nunsploitation, S&M, yakuza, and girl gang films, erotic ghost stories, as well as ten titles from Salvation’s catalogue. Takahisa Zeze’s Raigyo (1997), based on an actual story about a woman who brutally murders a perfect stranger at a Love Motel, was the most gut-wrenchingly powerful film in my experience. And astonishingly, Hisayasu Satō‘s Love-Zero=Infinity (1994), part Alphaville and part urban vampire movie—though still preoccupied with the director’s pet themes of alienation, an obsession with contaminated bodily fluids, and a predilection for vinyl gloves and rubbing oil—turned out to be everything Survey Map of a Paradise Lost was not: a hugely satisfying multi-layered work that must rank as one of the finest examples of the genre. But of the all the films I watched, it was Toshiki Satō‘s Empty Room, scripted by Shinji Imaoka (assistant director on Love-Zero=Infinity) that had the best screenplay.