The private life of a big time pornography writer, or Woody Allen if he was Japanese and a lot more interested in depicting bondage and writing dialogue in which characters describe, in detail, vaginal muscle contractions during sex.
This is a terrific comedy with as much going on in its brain as in its pants. We never find out if our writer here is any good or not, but it isn’t necessary. All we know for sure is that he’s successful and serious about his work. When he has his assistant bring willing girls into his office and tie them up so our writer can hear their delighted squeals, watch them writhe, get his face and fingers up close and check their oil (if you know what I mean), it’s purely for inspiration. It’s research. He neither sleeps with these girls nor jerks off to them (as best we can tell). He’s more moved by it as a writer than as a man. He doesn’t even hide it from his wife.
Meanwhile, she’s disgusted by him even though she cheats on the marriage and has exactly the kind of sex that’s in his books.
Director Ryuichi Hiroki keeps his camera at a distance, rarely going in close up, rarely urging us to take a side. He likes to stage comedy business like vaudeville, with an unmoving medium shot of characters simply talking. When he gets inside of our writer’s head, he does it by pulling the camera even further out, making him small on screen and showing the world around him, the world that informs his fiction. The climax is a creative one, rather than a sexual one. The novel is finally finished. The job is done. The demons are exorcised. In a final show of comic irony, Hiroki pulls back again and shows that it (the novel), too, is small and fairly meaningless. Another orgasm come and gone.