Nami Matsukawa: Nikkatsu’s Fourth SM Queen, Briefly

Nami Matsukawa (松川ナミ) is a name that sits in a gap in 1980s Japanese pink film. She acted, and she also worked as a bondage and fetish model. What people remember is the stretch when she was called the fourth SM Queen. That title was a station Nikkatsu built inside its Roman Porno star system, between Izumi Shima (泉志摩) and Miki Takakura (高倉美貴). In the line of SM stars she comes after Naomi Tani, Junko Mabuki, and Izumi Shima. The reign was short. The people on screen are adults in adult films.

By 1980 she was already doing the work, not just the poster. At the SM club Blue Chateau in Akasaka, Tokyo, she worked as a sex worker under the name Emi. That dungeon job came before the studio put her name on a marquee. In 1982 director Masaru Konuma debuted her in Slave Contract (奴隷契約書). Publicity then named her the fourth SMの女王.

The same year, nawashi Hiroshi Urado shot her for the Nikkatsu Video series SMの妖精・松川ナミ. Audiences liked the girl-next-door quality. SM author Oniroku Dan did not rate her highly for his own films. He said she was not fleshy enough to take rope marks the way Naomi Tani did, so as a bondage subject in his pictures she did not pull him. The studio wanted the Queen title to keep going. Dan wanted a fuller body that would hold the marks. He wrote. He did not direct this film.

Her run as SM Queen ends with Rope and Breasts. Miki Takakura took the place after her. Emi at Blue Chateau, a lead for Konuma, the “fairy” in Urado’s video, then the queen who stands just before Takakura: the title was a studio job with a body attached. Thomas and Yuko Mihara Weisser record her in Japanese Cinema Encyclopedia: The Sex Films (1998) as that early-1980s bridge, a different build and a different temper for rope films and sacrifice plots.