You Love to See It: Tokyo Decadence

Tokyo Decadence, Ryū Murakami’s 1992 pink film, opens with submissive prostitute Ai strapped into a modified OBGYN’s chair as her sadist client waxes poetic about her status as the savior of Japanese womanhood, her sole qualification for which appears to be that he has sexual access to her. The boilerplate misogyny he tries to pass off as his personal philosophy on feminine worth seems to echo through the rest of the film as we encounter a succession of cringing, whining men without spine or character, tasteless and abrasive no matter which end of the whip they’re on. It makes a strong argument that far and away the most common form of sexual interaction of which men are capable is not actually intimacy but a kind of parasitic solipsism, a solitary fantasy in which women are little more than mannequins.

The film’s women are no more functional or healthy, but the world they inhabit and the forms of intimacy they share are markedly richer, the lies they tell themselves more hedonistic than nihilistic. The heroin-shooting dominatrix who takes Ai home after a shared scene with a wearisome client is nothing like the typical Western image of the addict, numb and bestial, humanity eroded by her monstrous habit. Instead she is completely and vulnerably human, scenes of her shooting up interspersed with her dancing for Ai, her tenderly guiding the other woman through her own drug use, and other glimpses of their night together. If the dream she offers AI is poisonous, it’s also deeply textured with longing and joy, as when Ai gently wipes away the blood that trickles from the crook of her arm before sucking a heroin-infused drop from her fingertip.

The film’s explorations of gender are far from reductive or essentialist. Instead they seem to proceed from the idea that men and women, while not inherently different, live sexually in different worlds in an almost literal sense, meeting only in the demimonde of sex work to transact for necessities. On the one hand is the world of men where fantasy determines reality, wet dreams forcing bodies and circumstances into predetermined configurations. On the other is the world of women where dreams themselves have substance, can be shared from skin to skin, mouth to mouth. A world that slips into the cracks between reality and prizes its repressive bulk apart like trembling thighs, that tastes and bites but never finishes the hunt. The mentally ill vocalist who claims Ai as her friend when the younger woman, out of her mind on a designer drug, is accosted by police, is not so much “wrong” as sensing something deeper than mere acquaintance and intercourse — the unique vibration of a traveler from her own world.