Immoral Indecent Relations Tatsumi Kumashiro Work Review
When we speak of immorality in cinema, we usually expect villains, cruelty, or punishment. Kumashiro subverts this. His characters—often drifters, gamblers, failed artists, or bar hostesses—exist on the margins of society. They cheat, they lie, and they engage in adultery or incestuous-coded dynamics.
However, Kumashiro does not judge them. Instead, he uses their "immorality" as a form of rebellion. immoral indecent relations tatsumi kumashiro work
Take his masterpiece, The World of Geisha (1973). On the surface, it is a story of a geisha and her lover. But beneath the period drama aesthetics lies a scathing critique of Japanese social structures. The characters are trapped by the rigid expectations of family and state. Their sexual transgressions are not acts of villainy, but acts of freedom. By engaging in "indecent" behavior, they reclaim agency over bodies that society views as commodities. When we speak of immorality in cinema, we
In Kumashiro’s world, the only true honesty is found in the bed of a lover who belongs to another. The "immoral" act becomes a moral necessity for survival. They cheat, they lie, and they engage in
The film is part of Kumashiro’s early Roman Porno (erotic) works at Nikkatsu, but he subverts the genre by focusing on social realism, gender politics, and dark comedy. It follows Zōsan, a lazy, cynical "kept man" (himo) who lives off women. The story revolves around his relationships with two very different women: a prostitute and a bourgeois housewife. Rather than pure titillation, Kumashiro examines power, economic dependency, and emotional manipulation in postwar Japan.
Perhaps his greatest achievement, The World of Geisha (Nippon jokyō den: iro zamurai), takes the keyword immoral indecent relations and turns it inside out. The film is set in the geisha districts of post-war Osaka, but these are not the refined geisha of Hollywood imagination. Kumashiro shows the economic reality: geisha houses as brothels of emotional labor, where women perform desire for men who can no longer perform intimacy.
One devastating scene involves an aging geisha who must service a young salaryman. He is impotent from stress. To arouse him, she recounts a childhood memory of watching her mother die during the war. His arousal returns—not from the erotic, but from the traumatic. Kumashiro frames this as neither perverse nor condoning, but simply factual. The immoral indecent relation here is between the nation’s memory and its present desires. Japan’s wartime trauma, he implies, has been sublimated into the very language of sexual trade.
