In the 1960s, the genre that would become known in Japan as pinku eiga had just taken shape. This was a genre that dealt explicitly about sex and had developed out of the need for consistent theater rentals and consistent ticket sales in a slumping Japanese economy, much like the economic logic of how B-movies came about in the United States. The preeminent leader of this developing genre was Koji Wakamatsu, who would pivot his early notoriety in the disreputable but profitable eroduction (the genre’s contemporary name) titles into making films for the experimental, mostly left-wing film collective called the Art Theater Group. Wakamatsu’s international fame among cinephiles made much of his work seem worthy of the headache of preservation, but even many of his earliest works are lost. The situation is even worse for other early pinku directors whose works were thought worthless after their first several weeks of ticket sales. But, a surviving copy of a film by one of Wakamatsu’s only real competitors, Hiroshi Mukai, gives us a better understanding of what this burgeoning scene was like.
People interested in pinku often have a hard time selling others on a genre and its offshoots whose typical titles include Molester and the Peeper: Gynecology Ward (1994), Entrails of a Beautiful Woman (1986), and Apartment Wife: Ass Slave (1985). Sex, and very often rape, take up most of these films’ runtime, often by contractual obligation from studios who’d approve nearly anything, so long as their sex scene quota was met. That said, that industrial expectation mirrors the very beginnings of cinema, the 1900s and ’10s, when major distributors (especially the behemoth Motion Picture Patents Company) gave directors and producers near-total freedom in how or what they filmed, so long as it could be appropriately marketed. Those forces gave rise to the experimentation of D. W. Griffith and later John Ford, Henry King, and Raoul Walsh. So, too, this laissez-faire attitude in the waning Japanese cinema market attracted artists considered too radical, either in style or politics, for standard feature production.
Mukai’s The Bite (1966) is certainly not the first pinku, but it is one of the earliest surviving examples proving that formal experimentation was certainly on the mind of the genre’s earliest directors. The film features a madam’s (Sanae Mitsuoka, a well-respected actress who had appeared in Kinuyo Tanaka’s 1953 Love Letter but also the previous year’s Perverse Relations, directed by none other than Koji Wakamatsu) peep show, where an unremarkable painting of flowers is removed to reveal a two-way mirror to an unfurnished bedroom. This structure allows the film to feature sex as a byproduct of these shows and thus happen as frequently as the director would like. The tension comes from the madam’s beloved but wayward gigolo Koichi (Senjo Ichiriki), whose independent streak and dying mother has frustrated the controlling madam. She gets back at him through some manipulative sex partnering; he gets back at her through rape and is subsequently shot. Nobody wins.
This sort of dour ending would become commonplace in the genre, especially in its pinky violence variant, but the tone throughout the film shifts dramatically. None of the sex scenes are titillating; instead of the mild funk or smooth jazz that would accompany later pornography, a bizarre electronic echo accompanies each masturbatory moan or thrust-induced grunts, all while a score reminiscent of early Yoko Ono builds in the background. The rape, an act that Koichi commits when he feels like his life is over and could be considered suicide-by-madam, is accompanied by a soft rollicking guitar. Nearly every sequence includes such sonic dissonance — a quality found in jazz, edgy independent cinema, and other modernist art the world over.
But it’s not just these music cues that give the film its poetic bona fides. In the peep show sequences, Mukai’s DP Shiro Suzuki covers the onlookers’ necks in a deep penumbra while overexposing their faces, as if they’re merely floating heads. The camera is hyper-mobile, whipping around these spectating specters during the rape sequence and jumping around the nightclub to imitate the youthful energy. Similarly, the film’s editing is oftentimes erratic. During a lesbian sex sequence, as the terrifying electronic noises build, the frame jumps from body to body to face to face at an accelerating frequency, as if a hellish rise to climax. And, even in the standard sex scenes, the frame pushes in enough to reduce the two bodies to their curves and lines, making these bodies resemble the works of Brancusi or Modigliani rather than, say, Bettie Page. Perhaps the only shot that could be seen as arousing is a standard medium shot of a man lying with a woman as he rubs her ribcage — not exactly an erogenous zone. Sex scenes for The Bite are just excuses for Mukai’s team to experiment with ever-more-portable cameras, ever-more-affordable lighting setups, and the stranger developments in sound design. Since this is cinema, it’s just better if the subjects are moving.
In Jasper Sharp’s Behind the Pink Curtain, the English-language Bible of Japanese sex cinema, he notes that international distribution of pinku was surprisingly contemporaneous to the films’ domestic runs. Popular imagination holds that urban grindhouses and moribund drive-ins played American sexploitation and European softcore titles in the 1970s, but Sharp points out that these theaters, as well as nearly every European country, imported plenty of pinku titles — likely seen as companions to domestic roughies, the nudie-cuties of Doris Wishman, and the gorefests of Herschell Gordon Lewis — a full decade earlier, usually dubbed into the local language. This is how we have The Bite at all, as an English dub print was found and preserved in 2008. The title here is the American one (it went by The Bait, a more literal translation of the original Esa, in the UK) and credits a “Kan Mukai” as director, which inevitably stuck as the name for the director in English sources. That the film survives this way is a testament to how popular the pinku genre had become internationally, even if it was not quite being celebrated for its artistic merits here just yet.
As an American, what has often fascinated me about pinku is its rhyming history with the more experimental eras of Hollywood. I’ve mentioned here the freedom (and quotas) that parallel the pre-studio era of the 1910s; the lack of interest in properly archiving what was seen as fleeting entertainment up through the late 1920s; and the development of cheap, quota-based (and often simpler and seedier) B-movies in the 1930s and ’40s. But there’s an even stronger parallel between what makes these cheap American movies and pinku eiga interesting: the ability to attract avant-garde derelicts and outsiders. For Hollywood, this meant artistic- or business-minded immigrants who didn’t mind slumming it in a nascent entertainment industry and even managed to help build it into a respectable art; so too, these first pinku directors such as Wakamatsu and Mukai helped build up an independent Japanese film industry during a time it was thought dead. Contrary to popular belief, many Japanese cinephiles appreciated the modernist approach these directors were taking, and several joined the industry under these pretenses of artistic freedom and political involvement, which would help form the Japanese New Wave. But even this contemporary acclaim was too little too late. Of Hiroshi Mukai’s over 200 films, only a handful remain in circulation today.
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