What a viewThe Naked Director: Japan’s porn industry gets the Netflix treatment
- The streaming service tells the unlikely story of a downtrodden encyclopaedia salesman turned adult film director
- Based on a true story, it could only be made in Japan, with its singular sexual taboos, traditions and perversions
“It seems … I have peed my pants a bit. May I take them off?” An entirely understandable reaction, too, when you’re a meek, mild and downtrodden encyclopaedia salesman (aren’t they all?) being peppered with golf balls by a yakuza to whom you’re trying to sell said reference books.
It’s a tough proving ground, but Toru Muranishi graduates from it a new man, ready to revolutionise an industry a little different to that in which he’s been scraping by: porn.
The Naked Director, now playing on Netflix, couldn’t have come from anywhere but Japan, with its singular sexual taboos, traditions and perversions. Many were overthrown or put to good use when the cuckolded and humiliated Muranishi took up his clunky video camera in the 1980s, as this based-on-a-true-story, part-biography, part-social commentary, part-tragicomedy shows.
Going into business, in the first of eight episodes, with a peeping Tom who sells smutty audio tapes, Muranishi (Takayuki Yamada) proceeds via the top shelf of a seedy bookshop at first, but soon realises that the trailblazing VHS technology is the future. The more shocking the content – and some of it here, faithful to the facts, is explicit – the bigger the profits, but also the greater the attention paid by yakuza and the police. Sex equals money, never more so than when there’s a revolution in its consumption and enjoyment going on.
“I want to sell sexual desire,” Muranishi tells his lacklustre partner, forging ahead to create a commotion in Japan’s trousers. Marvel, as his encyclopaedia-sales training comes in handy after all.