Ferocious Pink-Film Debut From Hisayasu Sato

Hisayasu Sato's 1985 debut, released as GEKIAI! LOLITA POACHING from a script titled "Kurutta Shokkaku" and commonly referred to in English as DISTORTED SENSE OF TOUCH, already feels like the work of a filmmaker arriving with his obsessions intact - voyeurism, sexual violence, public exposure, and the camera itself as a predatory instrument. Sato came up through the pink-film system after making 8mm films and working as an assistant director at Shishi Productions. This first feature was produced by Shishi Productions, distributed by Toei Central Film, photographed by Yoichi Shiga, and driven by music from Michiro Endo / THE STALIN and JAGATARA.

The film centers on Masao (Taketoshi Watari), a loner who prowls Tokyo at night, abducts women, assaults them, photographs them with a Polaroid, and pins the images on his wall like trophies. His routine is disrupted when he encounters Mika (Kiyomi Ito), a shoplifting teenage runaway. The film's warped emotional core lies in the bond that forms between them. She is vulnerable but not passive, while he is repeatedly forced to confront the reality of his own violence without ever truly reaching moral recognition. Naomi Hagio, Shiro Shimomoto, and others fill out the film's grim urban margins, but Ito is the picture's emotional anchor. Though she was in her mid-20s, she convincingly plays a teenager, and her performance gives Mika both fragility and a faint, unsettling resilience. Most strikingly, at one point she removes her top in the middle of a busy, congested Tokyo street scene, an audacious shot of unexpected public nudity that lands as a classic Sato provocation. It's the kind of brazen public-exposure moment he would return to with other actors in later films.

What makes the film memorable is not polish but force. So many of Sato's later preoccupations are already here - voyeurism turned back against the viewer, cameras used as instruments of violation, women's bodies treated as contested images, and sex scenes staged less for arousal than for discomfort and accusation. The film's first half is its strongest, charged with punk momentum, visual invention, and a perverse kind of youthful daring. The middle stretch sags somewhat, losing shape in repetition and drawn-out scenes, but the film never becomes inert. Even at its messiest, it feels confrontational and alive. Sato shoots with a reckless, anarchic drive, and his outdoor scenes in crowded public spaces carry a special jolt, especially in a culture where public decorum is so pronounced. The result is a raw, ugly, transgressive work that is not fully disciplined but is never timid. The shocking and heart-rending ending, with its bloodied red heel and harsh, lingering final images, leaves behind exactly the impression Sato seems to want - not titillation, but contamination.

Its production and release history only deepen its interest. Sato made the film in 1985 as his first feature of his own, and it quickly established him as a major new voice in pink cinema. That same year he won the Zoom Up Film Festival New Director Award. The film later became extremely difficult to see and took on the aura of a near-lost underground work. It resurfaced in a Shinjuku retrospective in late 2023, where it was treated as the legendary feature debut that had stunned the industry when new. It finally received its first Japanese home-video release in July 2025 as a 35mm original-negative remaster. The DVD notes also acknowledge the compromises of revival - some music had to be replaced for rights reasons, and age-related damage remains in parts of the image and sound.

DISTORTED SENSE OF TOUCH now stands in two histories at once - as a brutal, formative Sato debut, and as a reclaimed cult object whose reputation has only grown harsher and stronger with time.

Japanese cinema is celebrated for its refined minimalist dramas and avant-garde experimentation; it also introduced popular genres like jidaigeki (samurai epics), kaiju, and anime. Across both high art and mass entertainment, it often explores morality, impermanence, and the pressures of modern life.

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