On 19 September 2008, Naoyuki Tomomatsu’s Japanese pink film Prison Girl opened in OP Eiga theaters. The Japanese title is 女囚アヤカ いたぶり牝調教. It is also called Female Prisoner Ayaka: Tormenting and Breaking in a Bitch. Gensō Haikyū-sha produced it. Like a lot of pink cinema, it builds softcore erotica on SM, captivity, and “training” fantasy. At the 2008 Pink Grand Prix it received an Honorable Mention for Best Film, and lead Asami Sugiura received one of the Best New Actress awards. For adult viewers who follow BDSM and fetish film, this is not a documentary of negotiated prison roleplay and it is not a how-to. It is softcore that uses a non-consent look as erotic theater.
Ayaka is a housewife stuck in a loveless, pointless marriage. The surface of her life is quiet. Her inner life is not. Since her teens she has had the same dream: she is a female prisoner, repeatedly molested by the guards and the warden. As the film goes on, the prison-training dream and the rotting marriage bleed into each other. Ayaka has trouble telling which torments are dream and which are her waking mind, and she develops a hunger for captive SM she cannot quite name. That shape is old pink-SM grammar. Institutional abuse is the erotic set, and a civilian woman wants to be “broken in” in a way her domestic role does not allow.
The casting stacks the same point. Asami Sugiura plays Ayaka Kaminuma. Hiroaki Yanagi plays her husband, Kenji Kaminuma. Hiroshi Fujita and Yukiharu Inoue play jail guards and also debt collectors 1 and 2. Fumiaki Kato plays a lawyer. Yoko Satomi plays Misa. Mari Yamaguchi plays a woman, Kyoko. Using the same actors for guards and debt collectors lays the dream prison over ordinary coercion. Money, marriage, and sexual power sit side by side as cages.
In fall 2014 the specialty distributor Pink Eiga, Inc. issued the film on DVD, alongside Milk the Maid and Educating Yuna, for overseas pink-film collectors. Notices ran at The Digital Fix (Kevin Gilvear), Twitch Film (Andrew Mack), and City on Fire (Paul Bramhall). Pink cinema has long exported “female prisoner” stories and mesu chōkyō — bitch-training, in the blunt sense of treating a woman as a bitch to be trained — into fetish viewing outside Japan. Prison Girl wraps that line in a housewife melodrama that also picked up a festival mention.
