She has to go make some money to support them by returning to her job as a prostitute. And indeed, the best thing about the movie, is the shot of her enjoyment of everything he does to her. “Isn’t it natural for a woman to love the soex of the man she loves.” She goes to the doctor, who tells her that she is not sick, just hypersensitive, sexually. They make love in public places and frighten the servants, who complain that their room is filthy (they never leave so it is never cleaned) and that they are “perverts” because she can’t stop sucking him. And once Sada is so reluctant to see him go pee that she asks him to pee in her. At one point he complains that it is only when he goes to have a pee that his penis gets a rest. Even when they go out she keeps hold of it. She doesn’t even sleep, but stays awake all night holding and sucking on his penis. They both are always ready for sex, it seems, though she more than he. They take up residence in a room and neglect everything else to the exclusion of each other. Kichizo moves out of his home, and he and Sada undertake a mock “marriage” ceremony. The two become totally obsessed with each other. Quickly, however, this affair goes way beyond a sexual adventure. A middle-class married man called Kichizo (Tatsuya Fuji), who has the relaxed attitude towards sex of his sex and time, takes a shine to a servant girl called Sada (Eiko Matsuda).
The reason for its seeming so shocking twenty years ago has to do with its unusual plot, which is supposedly based on a true story from Japan of 1936. A steady diet of fantasy and postmodern irony has so far detached the cinema, or our expectations of it, from reality that even a film like this hardly seems worth getting upset about. No one cares enough about anything he sees in the movies to be shocked by it. What innocent times they seem! Nowadays we aren’t so much more depraved than people were 20 years ago, we are just more blasé. At the time it was considered shocking even by the relaxed standards of the day and it was seized by U.S. In the Realm of the Senses is a Japanese film made twenty years ago by Nagisa Oshima. Ai No Corrida (In the Realm of the Senses)