In the Realm of the Senses (1976): legendary arthouse shocker returns, its power undimmed (Review)

2022’s home releases get off to a dynamite start with Criterion UK’s Blu-Ray of this legendary arthouse shocker by Nagisa Oshima, alternatively known as Ai no Corrida but not – despite the persistent mistake – known as In the Realm of the Senses. (The misunderstanding stems from the opening credits, which begin by naming the lead actors, then giving the title – so it’s “Tatsuya Fuji and Eiko Matsuda, in: The Realm of the Senses“) Whatever you call it, it’s a film that’s lost none of its steely-eyed intensity over the last forty-five years.

There’s a tendency among film critics to declare every once-controversial film to be tame and quaint these days, perhaps as a defence mechanism against acknowledging that these controversies could happen again right now. This is not something that has ever been said about The Realm of the Senses, whose equation between unsimulated sex and violent death would cause headaches if it landed on the BBFC’s desk for the first time today. It is based on the case of Sada Abe, a geisha who, in 1936, strangled her lover and cut off the corpse’s penis, then went on the run with the organ as a keepsake. (To answer your next question: yes, she tried, but it was too soft) During her brief time as a fugitive, her story became a national obsession, and hundreds of Japanese citizens reported sightings of her. None of this is in Oshima’s film, which focuses single-mindedly on the increasingly possessive, obsessed relationship Sada Abe shares with her lover and victim Kichizo Ishida.

Considered purely as a psychological chamber piece, The Realm of the Senses is a triumph. The script, by Oshima and an uncredited Koji Wakamatsu, makes the apparently incomprehensible actions of his protagonists chillingly clear. The shifting power dynamics are magnificently drawn; Abe first becomes fixated on Ishida because he’s an older, more experienced man, but his position of authority weakens as he becomes more obsessed with her. He loves the idea of his lover being a geisha, a pure fantasy figure who wants to do nothing other than have sex with him, but as soon as they need money he can’t handle the reality of her seeing other clients. She also feels guilty, asking a schoolteacher who hires her to slap her as punishment for infidelity. He, meanwhile, finds his anger spilling outwards, raping an older brothel madam who has given them board. This scene is mercifully less explicit than the rest of the film, but the one moment of nudity it contains – Ishida flipping the woman’s kimono up over her back – stands out because it replicates an earlier angle of him initiating sex with Sada Abe. The woman he loves and the woman he rapes are both indistinguishable to him, both objects.

The logic of this scene – what is revealed, what is concealed – proves to be key to the whole film. Abe’s first sight of the man who will define her future is a voyeuristic one, as she spies on him with another woman. Once they’re together, Abe and Ishida have sex everywhere, in front of everyone, allowing nothing to distract them from each other. The people who witness this display a range of reactions – shock, nervous amusement, admiration for their unrestrained passion – at the exact points when the audience will be feeling the same emotion. For all the film’s explicitness, though, it becomes increasingly obvious that this claustrophobic setting is concealing more than it displays. This theme crystallises at the start of the third act, when – in a moment Fuji says persuaded him sign up for the project – Ishida briefly leaves his lodgings and walks past a battalion of soldiers. They might be marching off to serve in the occupation of Manchuria, or to take part in a coup attempt, or to place Tokyo under martial law. All of this happened in Japan in the first half of 1936. What matters is that, lost in his own sensual empire, Ishida doesn’t even raise his head to acknowledge his own country’s imperialism.

This backdrop of turmoil is one of the reasons why Sada Abe became a folk hero. In the middle of all this militarism, her single-minded obsession became almost admirable as a more individual form of madness. Looking back at the incident, Oshima is able to draw a connection between this and the European avant-garde that was struggling under fascism at the same time. The film’s second most infamous scene (it involves an egg) is not based on the facts of the Abe case, but is actually a dramatisation of an episode from Story of the Eye, an explicit novella by Georges Bataille. The Surrealists were great believers in the nobility of amour fou, and they loved Bataille’s work for this reason. Had the Japanese media been more accessible to Westerners at the time, they would surely have loved Sada Abe, too.

A lot of people, when they read about a film containing unsimulated sex, will ask the same question: was this really necessary to tell the story? And in a rigidly literal sense, it isn’t. This story has been told in more conventional softcore films, some of which, like Noboru Tanaka’s A Woman Called Sada Abe, are well-regarded. But you couldn’t tell this version of the story without the unsimulated scenes, because they are the key to understanding what Oshima sees in the Abe case. Before Abe meets Ishida, we’ve seen her brusquely handling the genitals of an old drunk, and her lack of sentimentality in that scene makes her later fixation on Ishida even more uncanny and mysterious. The fact that the sex is real, and each viewer must decide how they feel about that, is a central part of the film’s power to challenge and provoke. The graphic content is sometimes shocking, sometimes tantalising, sometimes disturbing and sometimes numbing. The only constant is that Oshima is fully in charge of when and why these reactions are provoked.

That old drunk, by the way, is played by Taiji Tonoyama, who worked with Ozu, Shindo and Imamura. Part of the reason why The Realm of the Senses soars while other art-shockers bore is simple: even the most explicit roles are played by real actors capable of conveying real emotion. Fuji had notched up a hundred or so screen credits before he made this, and it shows in his performance. Ishida’s death scene bears comparison to Steve McQueen’s Hunger as one of the few screen deaths that genuinely conveys a horrible, inescapable sense of a body slowly shutting down. Matsuda was less experienced, and retired from acting after being typecast, a depressingly familiar fate for the female stars of sexually explicit films. But she wasn’t a naif who Oshima exploited: in a 20-minute interview in the disc’s extras, Fuji remembers his late co-star as a member of an avant-garde theatre troupe who was fully on board with the film’s challenges and provocations from the start. This, too, is palpable: for all the graphic gore of the ending, it’s the close-ups on Matsuda’s face that give the final scene its true intensity.

The other extras include an audio commentary by Tony Rayns, deleted scenes and a Belgian TV interview from the time of the film’s release with Matsuda, Fuji and Oshima. Oshima, whose long dark curly hair and loud checked jackets make him look like a Japanese Chris Morris, holds forth on the state of Japanese cinema and the pinku eiga (mostly boring, according to Oshima) but cedes all questions about the experience of acting in the film to his cast. Notably, he happily describes his own film as “pornographic” – the description he rejected was “obscenity”, arguing in a contemporary essay that “when we feel that everything has been revealed, ‘obscenity’ disappears and there is a certain liberation”. Whether that’s true of Sada Abe and Kichizo Ishida will be a matter for individual viewers to decide, but it is certainly true of The Realm of the Senses, a film that is as free and uncompromising as it was in 1976.

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THANK YOU FOR READING GRAHAM’S REVIEW OF IN THE REALM OF THE SENSES