5 days ago
It was a film filled with unsimulated sex, based on a real murder. But even the nudity and graphic depiction of severed genitals paled in comparison to one infamous scene that shocked audiences
Public sex, voyeurism, adultery, foodplay, orgy, domination, death.
Nagisa Oshima's groundbreaking 1976 erotic drama In the Realm of the Senses was hugely controversial upon its release and left audiences speechless with an infamous scene, bizarre beyond imagination.
Based on the gruesome real-life 1936 murder of Kichizo Ishida by his lover Sada Abe, who strangled him and cut off his penis, the arthouse masterpiece is one of the most explicit to come out of Japan.
Upon its release, the adaptation of the Sada Abe murder was banned nationwide and its director Nags Oshima was called to a court of law on charges of obscenity and disturbance of society. And it's no wonder why.
Also known as Senses, the movie uses vulgarity and smut to drive the themes of devotion, taboo, sex and violence into the audience. From the infamous eating of a boiled egg out of a vagina, to witnessing bodies embroiled in an orgy during a wedding, this raw work of erotica leaves no fetish untouched.
Senses dabbled in hardcore pornography, testing the boundaries between desire and addiction, passion and obsession, and fantasy and reality.
Throughout the provocative piece, Oshima presented a power dynamic which was not common in Japanese media at the time - a woman who takes agency over her own sexual pleasure, and a man who offers up his life in an act of submission.
The haunting reality of this is expressed through the chilling words Ishida would speak before his brutal death: 'You'll put the cord around my neck and squeeze it again while I'm sleeping, won't you? If you start to strangle me, don't stop, because it's so painful afterwards'.
In the Realm of the Senses
At almost two hours long, Senses is a twisted and fictionalised retelling of the story of Sada Abe, whose affair with her master, Kichizo Ishida, turned obsessive and sadomasochistic.
In 1936 Tokyo, Abe is a former prostitute who now works as a maid in a hotel. She appears on screen quiet and timid until around five minutes in she is performing a sex act on a homeless man in ragged clothes and covered in dirt.
The hotel's married owner Ishida quickly initiates a torrid affair that consists of sexual experiments and a disturbing selection of self-indulgences.
In one of the first scenes seen in the film between Abe and Ishida, she can be seen cleaning the floor in a hotel room before Ishida lifts up her kimono and performs a sex act on her.
It is not long before the pair are having sex on screen, breaking through the barriers of critical inhibitions in a way cinema had never seen before.
The pair's genitalia are captured on camera in a scene similar to something one would expect to find on an adult video website.
Instead, Oshima works to depict the couple's growing obsession for one another and their insatiable appetite for sexual pleasure.
Ishida ultimately leaves his wife to pursue his affair with Abe who becomes increasingly possessive and jealous of him - leaving the married man only more eager to please her.
One scene captures Abe in heavy traditional geisha makeup using a bird-shaped sex toy, while another - and perhaps one of the most infamous - left audiences jaw-dropped.
As the pair sat together on the floor of a hotel room, Ishida picks up a boiled egg and places it inside Abe's vagina before eating it from her body.
During a wedding scene later on in the film, a man who had previously conducted the ceremony can be seen partaking in a celebratory dance.
But in true Sense style, the camera pans upward so that he and his dance are the focus of the shot. It settles there for a minute as he continues dancing, before the camera then pans down to his feet where an orgy is taking place among the entire wedding party.
Again, it is meant to shock and not titillate.
Abe and Ishida's mutual obsession spirals until Abe discovers she is most excited by strangling him during sex, and he is later killed in this manner.
During the harrowing scene, Ishida is seen on the floor with Abe straddling him, two ends of a pink sash in each hand as she pulls tighter around his neck.
With his hands bound, he embraces Abe who sobs into his chest before they begin to have sex for what would become the final time.
Wrapping the rope around his glistening neck once more, she closes her eyes and pulls on the two ends as Ishida's face becomes swollen and purple.
Following a dream-like cut scene of a naked Abe being surrounded by a group of people, the audience are thrown back into reality as the killer is shown sawing off her lover's penis and testicles with a large kitchen knife.
While she is depicted next to him naked in Senses, it is revealed she will walk around with his organ inside her for four days before being arrested, smiling.
Words written in his blood can be read on his chest: 'Sada Kichi, the two of us forever'.
A large majority of the film is made up of depraved scenes and disturbing imagery ranging from an elderly Geisha soiling herself after a particularly intense bout of lovemaking, to Ishida licking off menstrual blood from his fingers.
Even though the description of Senses may sound like a hardcore pornographic movie - and in a way, it is - the masterpiece was created by one of the greatest classical Japanese filmmakers alongside Akira Kurosawa and Yasujiro Ozu.
Reviews claim the piece, although dark and twisted, has an artistry that lessens the stimulation.
The videography, with close ups of lips parted in orgasm and breasts and buttocks on full display creates a sense of raw passion amid deluded sexual obsession.
Critics over the years have claimed: 'Oshima's film widens and deepens the sensual realm'.
Oshima, knowing Japan would never allow such a graphic movie to grace its screens, went through adventurous French producer Anatole Dauman to make the film, officially making Senses a French production and giving the director total creative freedom.
'This was the first hardcore pornographic film (in Japan),' he said in a 1976 interview, a fact that the Japanese government was not overly excited about.
Upon its release, Senses was banned nationwide and Oshima was called to a court of law on charges of obscenity and disturbance of society.
As headstrong as ever, he made a case validating his feature, claiming that by tackling obscenity head-on he rendered the word meaningless.
He said: 'Nothing that is expressed is obscene; what is obscene is what is hidden. When we are free to see everything, both obscenity and taboo disappear'.
The film's ban wasn't totally lifted and has yet to be shown completely uncensored in Japan to this very day, but Oshima's point remains groundbreaking for its time.
The real-life murder of Kichizo Ishida by his lover Abe Sada
In the Realm of the Senses is a retelling of the May 18, 1936, murder of Kichizo Ishida by the Japanese geisha and prostitute Abe Sada.
The pair had first met in Tokyo on February 1, 1936, when she began working as an apprentice at the Yoshidaya restaurant, owned by 42-year-old Ishida.
Not long after Abe started her apprenticeship, Ishida began making sexual advancements towards her. She happily accepted his attention.
By mid-April, the pair had begun their affair that would end in fatality.
The week of the murder the following month was one filled with passion after the couple had been repeatedly meeting in secret behind the back of Ishida's wife, who was also Abe's boss.
Abe remembered in testimony the passion of their lovemaking in reflecting on one tryst at the Tagawa inn: 'We kept the bed out from the evening of the 27th to the morning of the 29th, and hardly slept at night doing every nasty deed possible.
'When I said I was tired Ishida would make love to me and even while sleeping he would massage my body very sweetly.
'It was the first time in my life that I had met a man who treated a woman so well and who made me so happy. I fell in love. I could never be separated from him'.
The pair had been experimenting sexually for three months before Abe killed her lover.
Following her arrest, she spoke in testimony about the sex play they engaged in prior to the murder in a revelation which stunned Japan.
'The evening of May 16 I got on top of Ishida and at first we had sex while I pressed his throat with my hands but that didn't do anything for me so I wrapped my kimono sash around Ishida's neck and I pulled it tight and then loosened it and so on while we were having sex, and while I was doing it I kept looking down there so I didn't realise that I'd squeezed too hard; Ishida let out a moan and suddenly his thing got small,' she said.
'I was shocked and released the sash but Ishida's face [and neck] had turned red and didn't return to normal so I tried cooling his face by bathing it with water'.
Panicked at how close he came to dying Ishida suggested he return home to his wife for a while and make Abe his mistress.
This deeply angered Abe, who seethed with jealousy at the thought of sharing Ishida with another woman, and on May 18, the lovers snuck off to the Masaki Inn, in what would become Ishida's final night on earth.
Following the pair's sexual play that evening, Ishida began to doze off, and according to Abe, told her: 'You'll put the cord around my neck and squeeze it again while I'm sleeping, won't you… If you start to strangle me, don't stop, because it is so painful afterwards'.
At around 2am, while Ishida slept, Abe wrapped the pink sash of her kimono around his neck, this time fatally asphyxiating him.
She then used a kitchen knife to sever his penis from his body and carved in his left thigh Sada Kichi futari - 'Sada and Kichi, the two of us.'
Abe left a similar sentiment on the bedding in his blood.
This concept had a history in the Tokugawa period when used by courtesans who promised their loyalty to patrons by offering a token of their affection which in extreme cases was purported to be their own finger.
Courtesans would even tattoo a sign of devotion on their upper arms. Abe reversed this practice of self-mutilation and inscribed Ishida's body with her love letter instead.
Abe eluded the police by wandering the streets of Tokyo and the murder took Japan by storm, triggering a frenzy that would quickly be referred to as 'Sada Abe panic' by the Japanese media.
As the hunt for the murderess became more frantic, reports from the public flooded in. There was an alleged Abe sighting in Tokyo, then Okinawa, then Kobe, with one false claim inciting a stampede in the Ginza district of Tokyo.
Abe was finally arrested three days after the incident on May 21, 1936.
The killer later told police: 'After I had killed Ishida I felt totally at ease, as though a heavy burden had been lifted from my shoulders, and I felt a sense of clarity.'
She had planned to take her life one week after the murder, and admitted to practicing necrophilia in the days leading up to her arrest.
'I felt attached to Ishida's penis and thought that only after taking leave from it quietly could I then die,' she said.
'I unwrapped the paper holding them and gazed at his penis and scrotum. I put his penis in my mouth and even tried to insert it inside me… It didn't work however though I kept trying and trying.
'Then, I decided that I would flee to Osaka, staying with Ishida's penis all the while. In the end, I would jump from a cliff on Mount Ikoma while holding on to his penis.'
Abe was convicted and sentenced to six years in prison on May 21, 1936. The sentence was commuted, however, in 1940.
The murderess disappeared from the public eye in 1970. When Senses was being planned in the mid-1970s, director Oshima reportedly sought out Abe and after a long search, found her, with her hair shorn, in a nunnery in Kansai, southern Japan.
