Pink film provocateur Tarō Araki turns a ferry suicide rescue into the weirdest meet-cute in Japanese cinema.
Fu-yan, also known as Fujikawa, runs a business producing underground videos that are secretly sold by electronics store owner Umeda and his wife Makiko. One day, he receives a request from Umeda to make a new video. The lecherous old man Kikuchi wants him to make an underground video with him as the main character. Lured by the high fee, Fu-yan boards a ferry with Makiko's stepdaughter, Megumi. On the ferry, Fu-yan saves a woman named Yumeko who is about to jump into the sea. Having failed in life and about to commit suicide, Fu-yan takes Yumeko to Kikuchi in order to make her the queen of underground videos. Filming begins according to the script written by Kikuchi, and with Fu-yan's calming, Yumeko completes the film to the end. Before long, a good relationship develops between Fu-yan and Yumeko, but...
Direction
Araki's signature blend of exploitation and unexpected tenderness.
Writing
Script-within-script structure blurs victimhood and performance.
Director
Tarō Araki
Trivia, insights & behind the scenes
Pink films (pinku eiga) flourished in 1960s-80s Japan as low-budget genre cinema; Araki was a notorious auteur who elevated the form with self-reflexive narratives about filmmaking itself.
The 60-minute runtime was industry standard for pink films—designed for triple-bills in specialized theaters, making this compact meditation on exploitation economically ironical.
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