Uncensored and Eager:

Miso Horny

Original online essay, 12/16/98

My Fair Masseuse (Kitty Media)

1996 (U.S. release 1998), dir. Naruo Kuzukawa/Akita Shoten

Japan, as many of you know, is a society with plenty of sexual hangups and contradictions–much like America’s, but with just enough differences to seem exotic. The country of floor-length, figure-hiding kimonos is also the country of delicate, yet often extremely explicit, “floating world” prints. Japan’s animated films, TV shows, and direct-to-video productions have expressed these contradictions at least as well as any of the country’s other contemporary art forms.

By legal censorship restrictions, and by a system of genre formulae pretty much set in stone by the early ’80s, anime works could display explicit violence (the louder and more explosive the better), but had to depict sex only without showing male genitalia or female pubic hair. This meant lower-hairless damsels could be grotesquely raped by the squid-like tentacles of outer-space monsters or underground demon creatures (the subgenre containing these scenes is known among fans as “Hentai” (perversions), but could only engage in loving relations with other humans via discreet “camera angles.”

One less-violent anime sub-genre has traditionally managed to make up for what little it couldn’t show by applying exaggerated cartoon techniques to the time-honored tradition of sex farce. Young adults (and some apparent teens) engage in somewhat exaggerated versions of typical sex and relationship problems (somewhat complicated when some of the females are disguised angels eager for a taste of earthly pleasures, and some of the males develop instant pants-bulges bigger than their skulls). Semi-realistically drawn faces morph into hyper-cartoony caricatures when confronted with lust, embarrassment, or any mixture of the two.

But with My Fair Masseuse (which apparently isn’t the first video to show it all, just the first I’d learned about), these visual elements are accompanied by delicately drawn lower organs engaged in full-motion versions of sex acts not unlike those depicted in those old-time Japanese prints.

The gender-depiction issues in the video, perhaps to some of your dismay, are similar to some of those in the prints, which often involved noblemen cavorting with courtesans. Here, our heroine Moko is a former nurse who’s decided she’d rather carry out a “life of service” as a high-class prostitute, who strips out of something as close as copyright allows to an old Playboy Club bunny costume.

The plot’s paean to modern gender mores comes in Moko’s repeated assertions that she’s nobody’s victim, but rather an assertive career woman who loves her work (even with fat, old clients). In the last of the video’s three episode segments, she tries learning to role-play with her clients as a demure, innocent waif, only to find neither she nor they really like it that way–so she returns to energetically jumping atop her man-of-the-hour and draining all the yang right out of him.

Of course, this could be seen as a pivotal distinction between old and new favored attitudes toward work in many professions, in many parts of the world. It’s certainly a distinction Japan’s facing in its forced transition from its paternalistic, quasi-feudal old business culture to today’s go-go global entrepreneurial culture. Submissively acquiescing to your job like an old-time courtesan (i.e., quietly admitting you’d rather be doing something else) is the new taboo of Global Business. Rather, more and more of us are expected to eagerly, passionately, put everything we’ve got into–well, you know…