In the Realm of the Senses: Ōshima's Art-House Provocation

In 1976 Nagisa Ōshima made a film in Japan that could not legally be shown in Japan, shipped the undeveloped negative to France to be processed, and premiered it at the Cannes Directors’ Fortnight, where it became the scandal of the festival. In the Realm of the Senses — Ai no korīda, literally “bullfight of love” — is the most notorious art film of the 1970s, and half a century on it remains the sharpest test case in cinema of where erotic seriousness ends and the law’s nerve fails. To write about it honestly you have to hold two things at once: that it contains unsimulated sexual content of a kind mainstream cinema had never carried, and that it is, in construction and intent, a rigorous piece of political filmmaking by one of Japan’s most intellectually combative directors.

Ōshima was the enfant terrible of the Japanese New Wave, a filmmaker who had spent the 1960s attacking the complacency of both the Japanese establishment and the Japanese left. He came to this material with a thesis, not a leer. The film was produced by Anatole Dauman’s Argos Films, the French outfit behind Resnais and Marker, as a Franco-Japanese co-production — an arrangement that existed largely so the physical film could be finished outside Japanese jurisdiction. That detail is not trivia. The censorship is woven into the object itself.

The real case, kept above the line

The story is drawn from a real and famous crime. In May 1936 a former sex worker named Sada Abe was arrested in Tokyo after killing her lover, Kichizō Ishida, in the course of an obsessive affair, and the case gripped the nation — partly for its lurid particulars, partly because it erupted at a moment of rising militarism and public anxiety. Abe became a folk figure, alternately demonised and romanticised, and her name carried a strange charge in Japanese culture for decades. Ōshima takes the outline of the affair — Ishida (Tatsuya Fuji), the married owner of an inn, and Sada (Eiko Matsuda), a worker there — and follows the pair as they withdraw from the world into a spiral of mutual obsession that shuts out everything else.

What happens in the affair is the whole plot, and it is a matter of public record, so I will simply say that the two lovers progressively detach from society, from work, from other people, and from any interest in survival, until the obsession consumes them entirely. Ōshima films this withdrawal as a kind of siege against the world outside. The couple barely leave their room. The war and the marching soldiers stay at the edges of the frame. Everything above this line is safe to read; the specifics of the ending, which is where the film’s argument lands, I keep below.

Why it works: the frame around the fever

The reason In the Realm of the Senses survives as art rather than curiosity is that Ōshima is a formalist, and the film is composed with unbroken control. He shoots the confined rooms of the inn with the clean geometry of classical Japanese cinema — sliding screens, tatami, a palette of reds and warm browns that recalls woodblock prints as much as it recalls anything modern. The camera is patient and frontal. There is no fevered editing, no attempt to whip the viewer up. The style is deliberately serene, and that serenity is what makes the content register as tragedy rather than titillation. Ōshima uses the calm to strand you inside the lovers’ shrinking world until their logic starts to feel inevitable.

The single most important formal decision is the placement of the historical backdrop. Ōshima sets the affair in 1936, the year of a failed military coup and a decisive step toward the war, and he includes one quietly devastating image: Ishida, walking against a column of soldiers marching off to their patriotic duty, moving in the opposite direction, toward private oblivion. In a nation organising itself for mass death, the film argues, this couple’s total refusal of the social order — their insistence on pleasure and obsession as the only reality worth having — reads as its own kind of resistance, and its own kind of doom. Ōshima the political filmmaker is present in every frame. The eroticism is his instrument, and the argument is about the individual body set against the machinery of the state.

Tatsuya Fuji and Eiko Matsuda commit to the material completely, and the performances hold the film’s balance. Fuji plays Ishida with a passive, drifting sensuality, a man who surrenders his will; Matsuda’s Sada is the engine, jealous, escalating, terrifying in her focus. The film belongs to her, and its refusal to condemn her — its insistence on taking her interior life as seriously as any tragic protagonist’s — is the humane centre of a picture that could easily have been merely sensational.

The censorship as text

You cannot separate this film from its legal history, and Ōshima never wanted you to. Japanese law forbade the depiction of genitalia and pubic hair, which is why the negative had to be developed in France. When Ōshima later published a book containing the screenplay and stills, he was prosecuted for obscenity in Japan — a trial he turned into a public argument about art, the state and the citizen’s right to look. He was acquitted. The film itself has almost never been shown in Japan without optical fogging or blurring imposed to satisfy the same law it was made to defy, so the version Japanese audiences can see is, to this day, a censored one. The uncensored film exists in the West.

This is the collector’s paradox worth sitting with. A film about two people who refuse every boundary society places on the body is, in its own home country, permanently bounded — blurred, fogged, held at arm’s length by the very apparatus it indicts. The censorship did not defeat the film; it completed it, turning In the Realm of the Senses into a living demonstration of its own thesis about power and the body. Ōshima, a lifelong provocateur, could hardly have designed a more perfect afterlife for his provocation.

The collector’s note

The essential companion piece is Luis Buñuel’s Belle de Jour, released a decade earlier, which takes the same raw subject — a woman’s overwhelming erotic interior life — and films it through total ellipsis and surrealist misdirection. Set the two side by side and you have the whole spectrum of how serious cinema has approached desire: Buñuel withholds everything and lets your imagination do the work, while Ōshima withholds nothing and dares you to keep watching. Neither is exploitation; both are arguments.

For the strand of transgressive European cinema that treated erotic extremity as a philosophical proposition, the natural next stop is The Story of O, another film whose controversy and craft are impossible to untangle. And for Ōshima’s own tradition, the confined-chamber intensity here rhymes with the pressure-cooker Japanese cinema of the same era — the demon-mask folklore of Onibaba shares this film’s sense of two figures sealed off from the world, driven by appetites that finally destroy them. Ōshima was working a different register, but the lineage of the sealed room and the consuming obsession runs straight through Japanese film.

The verdict, above the line

In the Realm of the Senses is a genuine and difficult work of art, and pretending otherwise in either direction — dismissing it as pornography or sanitising away what it actually contains — misses the point of it. It is rigorous, controlled, politically serious and emotionally devastating, and it is also frank to a degree that will always keep it out of the multiplex. Its greatness lies in the tension between those facts. Everything above this line is safe to read before watching. To account for the ending, which is where the film’s argument about obsession and death completes itself, I have to describe it, so the rest goes below.

Spoilers below

The affair follows the historical case to its conclusion. Sada and Ishida’s obsession escalates until the pursuit of sensation and the courting of danger become indistinguishable, and Sada, in the grip of a jealousy and devotion that has swallowed every other value, kills Ishida during their lovemaking — the real Sada Abe strangled Ishida, and the film follows the record. In the aftermath she mutilates his body, carrying a part of him with her, and this too is drawn from the notorious facts of the 1936 case that made Abe a national legend. Ōshima films the killing with the same calm as everything before it, presenting it as the logical terminus of the whole affair, the last boundary the lovers had left to cross.

What Ōshima does with this material is the reason the film is not merely a sensational retelling. He frames the death as the completion of the couple’s withdrawal from the world — the ultimate refusal of a society that, in 1936, was busy marshalling millions of bodies toward the state’s own appointment with mass death. The lovers choose a private annihilation over a public one. In a country marching to war, Ōshima suggests, their obsession is the only honest thing on screen, and its lethal end is both a tragedy and an indictment of the far larger deaths the nation is preparing. The intertitle that closes the film treats Sada with a startling tenderness, refusing the moral judgement the real case attracted.

That final tenderness is the key to the whole picture. Ōshima takes the most infamous crime of pre-war Japan, a woman turned into a monster by the popular press, and restores to her the full weight of a tragic subject. My verdict: this is one of the essential provocations of world cinema, a film whose reputation for explicitness has too often obscured how much thought and control and grief it contains. Watch it prepared for what it is, then chase it with Belle de Jour for the same subject rendered entirely in shadow. Ōshima made the film that forced everyone else to decide where they stood.