Kōji Wakamatsu: Alienation and the Womb

This essay intends to analyse four feature films from Japanese filmmaker Kōji Wakamatsu: The Embryo Hunts in Secret (1966), Violated Angels (1967), Go, Go Second Time Virgin (1969) and Violent Virgin (1969). Besides its narrative simplicity bordering on appalling eroticism, this informal tetralogy shares a particular design and spatial trademark: all four films are set in a single, tight, claustrophobic space. By resorting to Wakamatsu’s poetics of cruelty, political criticism and his use of sexuality as social commentary, I intend to inquire into the actual nature of his tetralogy’s use of filmic space in three particular dimensions: firstly, through an understanding of postwar Japan—especially the 1960s—, which contextualises Wakamatsu’s blossoming career in pink films during chaotic times; secondly, through individual analysis of each film, underscoring common denominators like their use of horrific sexual violence, themes of pseudo-revolution that degenerate in alienation, and Brechtian stylistic flourishes: all emerging from these films’ spatial dramatic unity, its chamber-like enclosure which recurrently resonates with metaphorical designs of the “womb;” and thirdly, by the tetralogy’s—and Wakamatsu’s other work from this period—ability to conceptually predict the ultimate paroxysm of its sociopolitical context, when revolution, sexuality, and death came together in Yukio Mishima’s bizarre suicide in 1970. Hence, Wakamatsu’s use of womb-like design of space in his informal tetralogy acts as a nihilistic, feverish cinematic rendering of all those major Japanese aff lictions that, climaxing in Mishima’s attempted coup, ultimately put an end to the social turmoil of 1960s Japan, and paved the way for the social transformation that steered the country in a mostly steady, conservative way from the mid-twentieth century onwards.