Impossible Bullfight
Obsession, desire, and my love-hate relationship with In the Realm of the Senses (1976)
I recently and briefly wrote about In the Realm of the Senses (1976) in Friday Frivolity no. 5: 9 Unhinged Women in Film Who Shaped Me. This made me remember that about half year ago, I had actually written an essay on it, which I have since hesitated posting because of the film’s controversial subject matter. The film does have some disturbing scenes, and some of those details are discussed below. Consider yourself forewarned.
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“GROTESQUE MURDER IN OGU RED-LIGHT DISTRICT. BLOOD CHARACTERS CARVED IN MASTER’S CORPSE. BEAUTIFUL MAID DISAPPEARS FOLLOWING LOVE TRYST.” These were the headlines that appeared in the Tokyo Asahi shinbun in May 1936, promising a tale of thrilling violence, dark eroticism, sex and murder—alluring, sensational, transgressive. The “beautiful maid” was Sada Abe, the “master” was Kichizo Ishida, and the “grotesque murder” was Sada’s strangulation of Kichizo, erotic asphyxiation driven to its deadly finish. After the deed was done, Sada separated her lover’s penis and testicles from his body with a carving knife, left a message on him with the resulting blood, lay there a little by his side, then carried the organs, wrapped in a magazine cover, around with her for the three days she disappeared into the streets of Tokyo, evading both police and reporters, setting off a nationwide panic, as well as a large traffic jam in Ginza, until she was finally apprehended, near Shinagawa Station, before her planned suicide by hanging. “Sada and Kichi,” the blood characters read, “Together forever.”
It was a time of great social and political upheaval. The lure of this lurid little story was a welcome distraction from the heavier news items that surrounded it, and it slotted easily into the ero guro nansensu (“erotic-grotesque-nonsense”) trend that had gained traction over the decade. However, like Sada herself, the story refused to let go. A picture taken immediately after her arrest, published in several newspapers, shows her smiling, and it reinforced the idea of her in the popular imagination as the sexually dangerous woman, a femme fatale who would stop at nothing to gain total possession of her lover, leading him down the road to his inevitable destruction. And yet what captured the public most of all was the explanation she gave when asked why she had committed the crime: “Because I loved him.”
In the following decades, Sada’s story wormed its way into countless books, songs, poems, and films. The most enduring—and the one which has gained the most attention outside of Japan—is Nagisa Oshima’s In the Realm of the Senses, a 1976 French-Japanese coproduction that put its director on trial for obscenity. And it’s easy to see why: the film features scene after scene of unsimulated sex, sex that becomes increasingly weirder, more transgressive, more taboo, climaxing in a moment of violence that bursts through the screen with orgasmic fury.
Now, let me be the first to tell you that I am the kind of person who hates watching people so much as kiss in movies. It makes me incredibly uncomfortable. I usually end up looking at some corner of the screen, some irrelevant detail—a patch of sky or the texture of a sleeve or a small decorative item on the nightstand—while the kissing or sex goes on in my peripheral vision. I can’t tell you why this is, because on the other hand In the Realm of the Senses is one of my favorite movies, and I can watch its sex scenes without flinching. Maybe this is because Oshima himself refuses to flinch. He does not look away, he does not try to tone down, he does not explain or rationalize or psychoanalyze. Neither does he sexualize. There are no roving, sensual close-ups, set to a soundtrack of soft moans, that try to titillate the viewer. There is nothing gratuitous. The camera’s gaze is steady. Here is how Oshima describes the on-set experience of filming the sex scenes: “…the atmosphere was solemn…. It was not the gravity the comes from tension, but that which comes from liberation.”1
The gravity of liberation. How much freedom is it, really, that we crave? In the Realm of the Senses begins with Sada (Matsuda Eiko) sleeping next to another woman, who tries to make sexual advances towards her. Sada is not interested, and the woman takes her to go spy on their employer, Kichizo (Fuji Tatsuya), having sex with his wife. Watching, Sada’s half-open lips begin to tremble, and her gaze is transfixed, as though she feels the wife’s pleasure as her own. She next encounters Kichizo when a fight erupts between herself and a coworker; the coworker has insulted her for her past as a sex worker, and—in a moment of prescient foreshadowing—Sada tries to rush at her with a knife. Kichizo breaks it up, jerks her chin up to look at him, and asks her who she is. “You’ve got such pretty hands,” he tells her. “Why hold that knife when you could be holding something else?” This idea proves attractive to Sada, and her bashfulness around him soon wears off as they descend into, well, a realm of the senses.
Increasingly isolating themselves from society, they create a world of their own, a world where social mores lose their grip, where two people can make up the rules of their own game and then continually up the stakes. Everything narrows to the point where their two bodies are joined. In the urgency of their need for one another, nothing else matters. The first time they have sex, they stop before the geisha comes in, trying to present themselves with at least a pretense of propriety. Then they stop minding an audience. They go to a geisha house and, after a “wedding” ceremony, consummate the “marriage” in front of all the geisha. They do it outside, in front of an old woman; they do it in front of the women who come to serve them sake; they do it with abandon and without shame, relentlessly chasing—what?
It is a quest that can only end in death, and everyone else who steps foot inside this realm where eros is king cannot escape the collateral damage of Sada and Kichizo’s lovemaking. One serving woman tells them a geisha won’t come in because of their reputation as “perverts”; Kichizo, laid back as ever, says, “Who cares what they say?” but Sada grabs the woman, pulls her down, accuses her of spreading rumors about them, and starts to hit her, even telling Kichizo to have sex with her. The woman gets away, but not the geisha, a 68-year-old woman whom Kichizo does have sex with at Sada’s behest, and it is difficult to tell whether the woman is in pleasure or pain. Even children get roped in—there is a very unsettling scene in which Sada, playing with a naked little boy and girl, grabs the boy’s penis and doesn’t let go, even as he complains that it hurts.
The sex between Sada and Kichizo becomes more and more transgressive, hurtling itself down the abyss with nary a backwards glance. Near the beginning of the film, Kichizo stops Sada from going to the bathroom, persuading her with the words, “They say it feels better with a full bladder.” Later, it is Sada who does the same, telling him that she can’t wait for sex, that he should urinate inside of her instead. When Sada goes to have sex with a former client, an elderly school principal, for money—one of the few concessions the couple must make to the outside world—she tells the man to hit her, then hit her harder, and then comes back to Kichizo and asks him to do the same. The power dynamics start to shift, as the more easygoing Kichizo allows himself to become a willing victim of Sada’s growing intensity and possessiveness. She asks him to choke her; he doesn’t enjoy being the perpetrator in this act, but it turns out she does, and in the final scene, as she chokes him, he tells her, “Don’t worry about me. Just enjoy yourself.” “Even if I kill you?” she asks. “All right. I’ll kill you…. It feels so good.”
The first time I watched the movie, my freshman or sophomore year of college, I found the ending very difficult to stomach. Part of me was repulsed, and yet part of me was also seduced by the film as a whole—by its lacquer-like surfaces, by the austereness of its color palette (those dark colors and flesh colors, punctuated here and there by deep plum, ghostly green, floral-embroidered buttercup-yellow, with red bleeding through in nearly every shot, vital and carnal and necessary), by the discipline of its static long shots, its formal restraint. Moreover, I felt I could relate to Sada's sheer intensity of yearning, to the desire of the two lovers to hide themselves away from the world’s prying eyes, to join with one another wholly and totally. “I can’t think of any greater happiness than to be with you all the time, without interruption, endlessly, even though I feel that here in this world there’s no undisturbed place for our love,” writes Franz Kafka in The Castle.
Whenever I love a film, I have a tendency to go back and rewatch all of my favorite scenes, again and again, year after year, carving them permanently into my personal canon. With In the Realm of the Senses, I was very careful to avoid anything really disturbing. Instead, I would revisit the tender and erotically charged scenes of the first half—Kichizo’s joke about being an “upstanding” man, the way he takes hold of Sada’s ankle as she comes down the stairs, the laughter they share during their lovemaking, his cavalier manner of lighting a cigarette while she blows him, the scene of them in the carriage, where she tells him she’s gotten her period, and he reaches down, tastes the blood, tells her he doesn’t mind, and she puts her head on his shoulder, smiling. I knew it was not a healthy expression of love that was being depicted—I knew what happened at the end—I felt a sense of repugnance when I watched the scene where Kichizo has Sada place a hardboiled egg inside her vagina, then “lay” it—and yet something in this film grabbed me by the ankle and pulled me closer.
The scene I revisited the most was that in which Sada and Kichi are walking together in the rain, sharing an umbrella, the dark lacquer of water illuminated by the moon, the scene itself illuminated by Minoru Miki’s haunting shamisen theme. They see a woman with a red umbrella coming towards them and decide to scare her, chasing her while shouting, “I’m the haunted parasol!” “Why don’t you make love to her?” Sada asks Kichi. “She’s not my type,” he replies. The night glistens with the rain and with the lovers’ laughter. They tryst on a bench, the umbrella abandoned, as she cries out, “Kichi, don’t ever leave me!”
In Plato’s Symposium, there is a famous speech by Aristophanes in which he gives us a myth for the origin of love. Long ago, human beings had two faces, four ears, four legs, and four arms. Rolling about, they were so powerful that they threatened the gods, and Zeus decided to cut them in half like sorb apples. Since then, we have been doomed to rove the earth in search of our matching halves. Under the parasol, moving together as one creature, Sada and Kichi become this primeval human being. We feel the beauty of their intimacy and the strength of their joined power, and yet there is a selfishness and a cruelty to it that lingers on the screen when the camera hovers for a few seconds on the woman hiding beneath her red parasol, afraid to come out after the lovers have traipsed off.
I found it strange to rewatch the film all the way through, from beginning to end, instead of in the repetitive, selective, and fixated way I had grown used to. What stayed with me this time was not the shock of violence or lust or passion or ambivalence about the film’s central relationship but a feeling of profound sadness. During the scene of Sada and Kichi’s first intimate encounter, Kichi pulls Sada towards him and kisses her, pouring sake into her mouth from his own. Alcohol is something you can drink and drink, and yet your thirst will never be slaked, only deepened.
All obsession is inherently tragic. One reaches for something that promises to complete oneself, that plugs a hole and makes one whole, that satiates, but only enough to keep one craving. Desire’s fundamental desire is to perpetuate desire, to keep on desiring. To want is both a painful pleasure and a pleasurable pain: it is painful not to have what one wants but a pleasure to imagine its possession. It is a pleasure to finally have what one wants but painful to no longer be wanting.
“Dream of total union: everyone says this dream is impossible, and yet it persists. I do not abandon it,” writes Roland Barthes in A Lover’s Discourse. Sada and Kichi choose instead to abandon “everyone”—much has been made of the scene in which Kichi, utterly absorbed in a world of his own, walks down the street in the opposite direction of an army battalion, who are being cheered on by an endless stream of flag-wavers. The directions are opposing, yet ironically the destination is the same: death. In a society that marches blindly towards war, Oshima asks, is it any more crazy to abandon oneself to the furthest point of violence that love, in its striving towards this “dream of total union,” seems to necessitate?
And yet Oshima’s film calls into question this view that the ideal telos of love is the destruction of the self in the interest of fusing with the other. We want to move outside of ourselves, to connect, to be a part of something greater, larger, more beautiful and more powerful, hoping that “soon / We may touch, love, explain,” as John Ashbery puts it.2 But this destruction of the self for another—and the hope that the other will do the same for us—that impels eros towards thanatos never takes us there. Death and violence are certainly seductive, perhaps natural, impulses, but the warmth of blood that spills from them, severed from the life it powered, soon grows cold. Transgression becomes an instrument of transcendence, but it is a temporary transcendence—we rise, we climax, we unite, briefly, and then we fall back down into the separate beings that we are. Is the goal, then, really to abandon those separate beings?
Connection is meaningful only insofar as there are boundaries between the self and the other. Otherwise, what is there to connect in the first place? Life means the individual, the preservation of the individual’s material integrity, and to be an individual means to be sometimes lonely, sometimes singular, sometimes misunderstood. In “Theory of Experimental Pornographic Film,” Oshima describes an experience at the Venice Film Festival in which an interviewer asks him a question that deeply annoys him, “‘Why do you make films?’” Oshima’s first impulse is to just say anything, but then he replies, “extremely affectedly, ‘To find out what kind of person I am.’” In the text, he continues, “Finding out the kind of person you are is something you do by finding out about your desires.”
Indeed, this seems to be the mission that Sada is animated by throughout the whole wild ride of her relationship with Kichizo. She wants it deeper, harder, more and more and more, and then the penis is not so much a filling up of something missing as it is a shovel that digs out this void further and further into herself, a solipsistic search for what one is either unable or unwilling to give oneself. It is not the task of other people to find out for us. When Sada must leave Kichi in order to meet the principal, she takes his kimono with her and gives him her own in return. Wearing it, he runs after her train; lost in her own thoughts, she looks sadly out of the window. Then she makes her way to another compartment, takes his kimono out, puts it around herself, buries her nose in the scent of it, and cries. At most, what we can demand of those we love is that they give us something to carry on life’s journey—a hand, a smile, the liberation of non-judgement, pleasure or affection, a memory, a beautiful dream.
Right after killing Kichizo, Sada has a strange fantasy in which he, she, and a young girl are alone in a stadium. Sada lies on a platform, her eyes closed, as Kichizo and the girl run around, playing a game. Except for the fact that Sada is half-naked, it could almost be a touching family scene. The sun warms her body. For the briefest of times, she can divest herself of her loneliness. And then she opens her eyes, and she is alone again.
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Dear Readers, happy Sunday! Please let me know what you thought of this one by leaving a comment! And as always, if you enjoyed, please like this post and subscribe to Soul-Making!
Are there any movies (or works of art) you love aesthetically but have trouble stomaching in other ways?
Nagisa Oshima, “Theory of Experimental Pornographic Film,” Cinema, Censorship, and the State: The Writings of Nagisa Oshima, 1956-1978, translated by Dawn Lawson, edited by Annette Michelson.
Nice review and reflection!
Ramya, what a powerful writing!. I liked your words - "But this destruction of the self for another—and the hope that the other will do the same for us—that impels eros towards thanatos never takes us there". I totally agree with you.
Equally thought provoking is "At most, what we can demand of those we love is that they give us something to carry on life’s journey—a hand, a smile, the liberation of non-judgement, pleasure or affection, a memory, a beautiful dream".
In following all your work so far, your writing not only captures the reader's attention, it brings in a beautiful perspectives and leaves the reader with a nice positive note.
I also admire not only your writing style, but also captivate audience with a wide variety of subjects. I look forward to your thoughts and writings business and philosophy. Thank you