Miki Takakura (高倉 美貴), born Miki Koshizawa (越沢 美貴) on December 14, 1960, in Kanazawa, Ishikawa, is a Japanese gravure idol and pink-film actress. From 1983 to 1985 Nikkatsu promoted her as its SM Queen, SM no joō. After the actress Naomi Tani retired from Nikkatsu S&M films in 1979, the studio tested several replacements. Takakura came next in line after Nami Matsukawa, and she became a central face of the mid-1980s Roman Porno S&M cycle. She was not the first woman to hold the title. Her name stayed tied to scripts by the S&M author Oniroku Dan. The people on screen are adult actors.
Her Nikkatsu run opened in August 1983 with Beauty in Rope Hell (団鬼六 美女縄地獄), directed by Genji Nakamura, from an Oniroku Dan story. Viewers argued about her thin body. Many complained that rope left the deep marks they wanted only on a fuller figure. Pink-film critics Thomas Weisser and Yuko Weisser still ranked her among the best S&M actresses of the period. Her reign sat at the commercially weakened end of Nikkatsu. The studio would close within a few years, and the S&M films that had carried it were sliding into formula. She made five Roman Porno features with Oniroku Dan’s name on them, then left pink film. The last Nikkatsu title was January 1985’s Double Rope Torture (団鬼六 緊縛卍責め). The Weissers gave it one star and called it a stillborn project. The “queen” years were not the studio’s lively peak. For people who collect Japanese rope cinema, they are industrial history and a kink spectacle at the same time.
After Nikkatsu
After Nikkatsu she moved into film and television and became one of the few Roman Porno actresses, named alongside Terumi Azuma and Junko Asahina, to get real traction in the mainstream. In February 1985 she appeared in Capone Cries a Lot, a comedy directed by Seijun Suzuki, who had himself started at Nikkatsu in the years before Roman Porno. The same year she had a small part in Paul Schrader’s 1985 biographical drama Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters, as the second girl in the “Temple of the Golden Pavilion” segment. In 1987 she was in the second film of Toei’s long Gokudō no onna-tachi series. In December 1993 she published a 96-page nude photobook, South Fairy Tale, photographed by Kenji Ishiguro and issued by Scola. In June 1995 she played a novelist in the comedy Tenshi no wakemae. That same year she married the tarento Nobuo Harada.
The link to Oniroku Dan and the SM Queens also stayed in print. Four of his stories were first published in Japanese in 1997. In 2010 Vertical, Inc. issued them in English as Season of Infidelity. The last story, “Bewitching Bloom,” recounts Dan’s relationship with Naomi Tani and notes three later Nikkatsu queens, including Takakura, Izumi Shima, and Junko Mabuki. That puts Takakura in the authored line of studio SM stardom, not on an isolated credit list. For adult viewers she is the mid-1980s rope-hell face of a Roman Porno system about to end: five Dan-scripted bondage features, an argument about a thin body and rope marks, and a rare crossover into Suzuki, Schrader, and Toei.
