I am an SM writer

[Ono Seiko and Aaron Gerow]

I think one of the more interesting reversals in this interesting film is 
its reworking of the domestic space.  It begins with a picture perfect 
shot of a Taisho-era-like Japanese house, only to reveal that the main 
study is the location of this "perverted" demonstration of SM for the 
sake of the writer.  This invasion of the home is one of the things that 
the wife objects to, and she uses this domestic space in order to fight 
back: kicking him out of their room and sleeping alone.  (Here 
architecture becomes important because she stays in the Western part of 
the house while he is left sleeping on a futon on the tatami.  This, like 
some houses of the rich in the prewar, has both Western and Japanese 
sections.)  But what is interesting is that the reversal Eija spoke about 
is also reflected in the fact that the wife's strategy eventually renders 
him, the male, an almost permanent resident of the domestic sphere, 
worrying about the spouse's infidelity (a source of much female 
melodrama).  Apart from the club scene, he is never seen outside of the 
house, while she goes out all the time, especially to the beach, with 
which she has close associations.

This relates to the film's comments on literature, intellect, and the 
body.  The writer can seemingly only write if he sees the act or object 
before him: a classical statement of realism.  But he is not a 
shishosetsu writer: as one of his models notes, he can write about it, 
but not do it.  That, however, is a sign of his fakeness, of his distance 
and inability to cross from the world of the intellect and language to 
that of the body.  Again, he is confined to a walled, confined sphere and 
is unable to go out (the club scene shows his ultimate castration when he 
does).  His wife, however, has gone beyond reading SM to actually doing 
it, leaving the ideal behind for the practical.  Here, as with a lot of 
recent hard-boiled films, there seems to be a call to a return to the 
body.  But that does not mean she has succeeded in fully escaping it all. 
Like so many characters in recent films, she is rather associated with a 
liminal space between realms: the beach, where--in a new fashion--we 
again see her at the end.

Aaron Gerow
Yokohama National University
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